self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she
had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something
or other) made Françoise tell me, in so many words "There is no
answer"--words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in
'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to
some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing?
It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well,
I shall wait a little longer." And just as she invariably protests that
she does not need the extra gas which the porter offers to light for
her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an occasional
remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger
whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put some
customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Françoise's offer to
make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the
servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the
voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden.
But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line to Mamma,
by approaching--at the risk of making her angry--so near to her that I
felt I could reach out and grasp the moment in which I should see her
again, I had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep
until I actually had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more
painfully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm
and to acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided,
a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong
medicine begins to take effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a
resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma,
and had decided to kiss her at all costs, even with the certainty of
being in disgrace with her for long afterwards, when she herself came
up to bed. The tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely
alert, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear
of danger.
Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed;
hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things
outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the
moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its
substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer,
like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.
What had to move--a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance--moved. But
its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with
utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene,
and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon
this surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most
distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end
of the town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish' that the
impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their
'pianissimo' execution, like those movements on muted strings so well
performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does
not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being
played somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all
the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had
given them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught
the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded
the corner of the Rue de Trévise.
I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which
none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my
parents' hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would
have imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only
some really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they
had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of
other children, and I had been taught to place at the head of the list
(doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which
I needed to be more carefully protected) those in which I can now
distinguish the common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to
a nervous impulse. But such words as these last had never been uttered
in my hearing; no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way
which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my
giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable of holding out
against them. Yet I could easily recognise this class of transgressions
by the anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour of the
punishment which followed them; and I knew that what I had just done was
in the same category as certain other sins for which I had been severely
chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to
meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw that I
had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage,
I should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should be
packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had
I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window,
I should still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was
Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road
which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my
steps.
I could hear my parents' footsteps as they went with Swann; and, when
the rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone, I crept to
the window. Mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster
good, and whether M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio ice.
"I thought it rather so-so," she was saying; "next time we shall have to
try another flavour."
"I can't tell you," said my great-aunt, "what a change I find in Swann.
He is quite antiquated!" She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann
always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to
find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him.
And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal,
excessive, scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of
that class for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow
must be longer than for other men, since for such a one it is void of
promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any
subsequent partition among his offspring.
"I fancy he has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his, who
'lives' with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It's
the talk of the town."
My mother observed that, in spite of this, he had looked much less
unhappy of late. "And he doesn't nearly so often do that trick of his,
so like his father, of wiping his eyes and passing his hand across his
forehead. I think myself that in his heart of hearts he doesn't love his
wife any more."
"Why, of course he doesn't," answered my grandfather. "He wrote me a
letter about it, ages ago, to which I took care to pay no attention, but
it left no doubt as to his feelings, let alone his love for his wife.
Hullo! you two; you never thanked him for the Asti!" he went on, turning
to his sisters-in-law.
"What! we never thanked him? I think, between you and me, that I put it
to him quite neatly," replied my aunt Flora.
"Yes, you managed it very well; I admired you for it," said my aunt
Céline.
"But you did it very prettily, too."
"Yes; I liked my expression about 'nice neighbours.'"
"What! Do you call that thanking him?" shouted my grandfather. "I heard
that all right, but devil take me if I guessed it was meant for Swann.
You may be quite sure he never noticed it."
"Come, come; Swann is not a fool. I am positive he appreciated the
compliment. You didn't expect me to tell him the number of bottles, or
to guess what he paid for them."
My father and mother were left alone and sat down for a moment; then my
father said: "Well, shall we go up to bed?"
"As you wish, dear, though I don't feel in the least like sleeping. I
don't know why; it can't be the coffee-ice--it wasn't strong enough to
keep me awake like this. But I see a light in the servants' hall: poor
Françoise has been sitting up for me, so I will get her to unhook me
while you go and undress."
My mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the
staircase. Presently I heard her coming upstairs to close her window. I
went quietly into the passage; my heart was beating so violently that I
could hardly move, but at least it was throbbing no longer with anxiety,
but with terror and with joy. I saw in the well of the stair a light
coming upwards, from Mamma's candle. Then I saw Mamma herself: I threw
myself upon her. For an instant she looked at me in astonishment, not
realising what could have happened. Then her face assumed an expression
of anger. She said not a single word to me; and, for that matter, I used
to go for days on end without being spoken to, for far less offences
than this. A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that
further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility,
and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still, as
indicating that, with such a punishment as was in store for me, mere
silence, and even anger, were relatively puerile.
A word from her then would have implied the false calm in which one
converses with a servant to whom one has just decided to give notice;
the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off to enlist, which
would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being
angry with him for a few days. But she heard my father coming from the
dressing-room, where he had gone to take off his clothes, and, to avoid
the 'scene' which he would make if he saw me, she said, in a voice
half-stifled by her anger: "Run away at once. Don't let your father see
you standing there like a crazy jane!"
But I begged her again to "Come and say good night to me!" terrified as
I saw the light from my father's candle already creeping up the wall,
but also making use of his approach as a means of blackmail, in the hope
that my mother, not wishing him to find me there, as find me he must
if she continued to hold out, would give in to me, and say: "Go back to
your room. I will come."
Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively I murmured, though no one
heard me, "I am done for!"
I was not, however. My father used constantly to refuse to let me do
things which were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters
granted me by my mother and grandmother, because he paid no heed to
'Principles,' and because in his sight there were no such things as
'Rights of Man.' For some quite irrelevant reason, or for no reason at
all, he would at the last moment prevent me from taking some particular
walk, one so regular and so consecrated to my use that to deprive me of
it was a clear breach of faith; or again, as he had done this evening,
long before the appointed hour he would snap out: "Run along up to
bed now; no excuses!" But then again, simply because he was devoid
of principles (in my grandmother's sense), so he could not, properly
speaking, be called inexorable. He looked at me for a moment with an air
of annoyance and surprise, and then when Mamma had told him, not without
some embarrassment, what had happened, said to her: "Go along with him,
then; you said just now that you didn't feel like sleep, so stay in his
room for a little. I don't need anything."
"But dear," my mother answered timidly, "whether or not I feel like
sleep is not the point; we must not make the child accustomed..."
"There's no question of making him accustomed," said my father, with
a shrug of the shoulders; "you can see quite well that the child is
unhappy. After all, we aren't gaolers. You'll end by making him ill,
and a lot of good that will do. There are two beds in his room; tell
Françoise to make up the big one for you, and stay beside him for the
rest of the night. I'm off to bed, anyhow; I'm not nervous like you.
Good night."
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my
sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring
to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white
nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere
in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up
his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli
which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself
away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of
the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually
climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have
perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have
arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days
I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of
comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able
to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be
possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if
I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to
control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found
myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is
only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that
I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively
drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would
suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again
through the silent evening air.
Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so
deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents
gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the
reward of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in
this crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat
arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him
and due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance
expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps even what
I called his strictness, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that
title less, really, than my mother's or grandmother's attitude, for his
nature, which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own,
had probably prevented him from guessing, until then, how wretched I was
every evening, a thing which my mother and grandmother knew well; but
they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering,
which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous
sensibility and to strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection
for me was of another kind, I doubt if he would have shewn so much
courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he
had said to my mother: "Go and comfort him." Mamma stayed all night in
my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination
those hours, so different from anything that I had had a right to
expect; for when Françoise (who guessed that something extraordinary
must have happened when she saw Mamma sitting by my side, holding my
hand and letting me cry unchecked) said to her: "But, Madame, what is
little Master crying for?" she replied: "Why, Françoise, he doesn't know
himself: it is his nerves. Make up the big bed for me quickly and then
go off to your own." And thus for the first time my unhappiness was
regarded no longer as a fault for which I must be punished, but as
an involuntary evil which had been officially recognised a nervous
condition for which I was in no way responsible: I had the consolation
that I need no longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness
of my tears; I could weep henceforward without sin. I felt no small
degree of pride, either, in Françoise's presence at this return to humane
conditions which, not an hour after Mamma had refused to come up to my
room and had sent the snubbing message that I was to go to sleep, raised
me to the dignity of a grown-up person, brought me of a sudden to a sort
of puberty of sorrow, to emancipation from tears. I ought then to have
been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first
concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step
down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time
she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck
me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her; that I had
succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in
relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening opened
a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar. And if I had dared
now, I should have said to Mamma: "No, I don't want you; you mustn't
sleep here." But I was conscious of the practical wisdom, of what
would be called nowadays the realism with which she tempered the ardent
idealism of my grandmother's nature, and I knew that now the mischief
was done she would prefer to let me enjoy the soothing pleasure of
her company, and not to disturb my father again. Certainly my mother's
beautiful features seemed to shine again with youth that evening, as she
sat gently holding my hands and trying to check my tears; but, just for
that reason, it seemed to me that this should not have happened; her
anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness
which my childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and
secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first
white hair shew upon her head. This thought redoubled my sobs, and then
I saw that Mamma, who had never allowed herself to go to any length
of tenderness with me, was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to
struggle to keep back her own. Then, as she saw that I had noticed
this, she said to me, with a smile: "Why, my little buttercup, my little
canary-boy, he's going to make Mamma as silly as himself if this goes
on. Look, since you can't sleep, and Mamma can't either, we mustn't
go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I'll get one of your
books." But I had none there. "Would you like me to get out the books
now that your grandmother is going to give you for your birthday? Just
think it over first, and don't be disappointed if there is nothing new
for you then."
I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to find a parcel of books
in which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which it was
wrapped, any more than its squareness and size, but which, even at this
first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already
the paint-box of last New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year
before. It contained _La Mare au Diable_, _François le Champi_, _La
Petite Fadette_, and _Les Maîtres Sonneurs_. My grandmother, as I
learned afterwards, had at first chosen Mussel's poems, a volume of
Rousseau, and _Indiana_; for while she considered light reading as
unwholesome as sweets and cakes, she did not reflect that the strong
breath of genius must have upon the very soul of a child an influence
at once more dangerous and less quickening than those of fresh air and
country breezes upon his body. But when my father had seemed almost to
regard her as insane on learning the names of the books she proposed
to give me, she had journeyed back by herself to Jouy-le-Vicomte to
the bookseller's, so that there should be no fear of my not having my
present in time (it was a burning hot day, and she had come home so
unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again
to tire herself in that way), and had there fallen back upon the four
pastoral novels of George Sand.
"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the
child anything that was not well written."
The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything
from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all,
that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our
pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called
'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or
a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long
desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted
them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than
to serve the common requirements of our own. She would have liked me to
have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places.
But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the
picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity
and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical
nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a
subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality,
at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was
art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of
art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains
of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some
great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me
photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of
Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, which
were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer
had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the
beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he
resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's
interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity,
my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still
further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved,
preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of
association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a
masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as
Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled
by restoration. It must be admitted that the results of this method of
interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. The idea
which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to
have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than
what I have since derived from ordinary photographs. We could no
longer keep count in the family (when my great-aunt tried to frame an
indictment of my grandmother) of all the armchairs she had presented
to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down
upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient.
But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too
closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still
be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past. And
even what in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a
manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as
one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a
metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our
modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George
Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms
of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use
and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.
And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as
she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or
some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on
the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys
through the realms of time.