to the houses of people whom one did not know, it should be necessary to
cling to one's independence, nor how that could give one the appearance
of a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was this, that
Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only
for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very
great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and would be so much
afraid, when in their company, of incurring their displeasure that he
would never dare to let them see that he numbered, as well, among
his friends middle-class people, the families of solicitors and
stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must be known, that it should
be revealed in his absence, when he was out of earshot, that judgment
should go against him (if so it must) by default: in a word, he was a
snob. Of course he would never have admitted all or any of this in the
poetical language which my family and I so much admired. And if I asked
him, "Do you know the Guermantes family?" Legrandin the talker would
reply, "No, I have never cared to know them." But unfortunately the
talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully
hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because
this other could tell stories about our own Legrandin and about his
snobbishness which would have ruined his reputation for ever; and this
other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that
stiffened smile, the undue gravity of his tone in uttering those
few words, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had
instantaneously been stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of
snobbery:
"Oh, how you hurt me! No, I do not know the Guermantes family. Do not
remind me of the great sorrow of my life." And since this other,
this irrepressible, dominant, despotic Legrandin, if he lacked our
Legrandin's charming vocabulary, shewed an infinitely greater promptness
in expressing himself, by means of what are called 'reflexes,' it
followed that, when Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he
would already have spoken, and it would be useless for our friend to
deplore the bad impression which the revelations of his _alter ego_ must
have caused, since he could do no more now than endeavour to mitigate
them.
This was not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he
inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least)
be aware that he was one also, since it is only with the passions of
others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out
about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us. Upon
ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which
substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives,
less stark and therefore more decent. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness
impelled him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it
would set his imagination to make that duchess appear, in Legrandin's
eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would be drawn towards the
duchess, assuring himself the while that he was yielding to the
attractions of her mind, and her other virtues, which the vile race of
snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was
of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the
intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition
the social activities of Legrandin and their primary cause.
At home, meanwhile, we had no longer any illusions as to M. Legrandin,
and our relations with him had become much more distant. Mamma would be
greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, which
he continued to call the unpardonable sin, of snobbery. As for my
father, he found it difficult to take Legrandin's airs in so light, in
so detached a spirit; and when there was some talk, one year, of sending
me to spend the long summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother,
he said: "I must, most certainly, tell Legrandin that you are going to
Balbec, to see whether he will offer you an introduction to his sister.
He probably doesn't remember telling us that she lived within a mile of
the place."
My grandmother, who held that, when one went to the seaside, one ought
to be on the beach from morning to night, to taste the salt breezes, and
that one should not know anyone in the place, because calls and parties
and excursions were so much time stolen from what belonged, by rights,
to the sea-air, begged him on no account to speak to Legrandin of our
plans; for already, in her mind's eye, she could see his sister, Mme. de
Cambremer, alighting from her carriage at the door of our hotel just
as we were on the point of going out fishing, and obliging us to remain
indoors all afternoon to entertain her. But Mamma laughed her fears to
scorn, for she herself felt that the danger was not so threatening, and
that Legrandin would shew no undue anxiety to make us acquainted with
his sister. And, as it happened, there was no need for any of us to
introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who,
without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of
visiting those parts, walked into the trap uninvited one evening, when
we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.
"There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which
are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?" he said to my father.
"Especially a blue which is far more floral than atmospheric, a
cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that
little pink cloud there, has it not just the tint of some flower, a
carnation or hydrangea? Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the
English Channel, where Normandy merges into Brittany, have I been able
to find such copious examples of what you might call a vegetable kingdom
in the clouds. Down there, close to Balbec, among all those places which
are still so uncivilised, there is a little bay, charmingly quiet, where
the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which,
all the same, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and
insignificant; for in that moist and gentle atmosphere these heavenly
flower-beds will break into blossom, in a few moments, in the evenings,
incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade.
Others shed their leaves at once, and then it is more beautiful still
to see the sky strewn with the scattering of their innumerable petals,
sulphurous yellow and rosy red. In that bay, which they call the Opal
Bay, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened,
like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast,
to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every
winter many a brave vessel falls a victim to the perils of the sea.
Balbec! the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our
soil, the true Armor, the sea, the land's end, the accursed region
which Anatole France--an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to
read--has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were
indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes, they
are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and
charming soil, which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is,
down there, to be able to step out at once into regions so primitive and
so entrancing."
"Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?" inquired my father. "This
young man is just going to spend a couple of months there with his
grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps."
Legrandin, taken unawares by the question at a moment when he was
looking directly at my father, was unable to turn aside his gaze, and so
concentrated it with steadily increasing intensity--smiling mournfully
the while--upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness
and frankness and of not being afraid to look him in the face, until he
seemed to have penetrated my father's skull, as it had been a ball of
glass, and to be seeing, at the moment, a long way beyond and behind it,
a brightly coloured cloud, which provided him with a mental alibi, and
would enable him to establish the theory that, just when he was
being asked whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking
of something else, and so had not heard the question. As a rule these
tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, "Why, what are you thinking
about?" But my father, inquisitive, annoyed, and cruel, repeated: "Have
you friends, then, in that neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?"
In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled
to the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and
distraction; then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left for it
now but to answer, he said to us: "I have friends all the world over,
wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated,
which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic
obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them."
"That is not quite what I meant," interrupted my father, obstinate as
a tree and merciless as the sky. "I asked you, in case anything should
happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that she was not all
alone down there, at the ends of the earth, whether you knew any of the
people."
"There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one," replied
Legrandin, who was by no means ready yet to surrender; "places I know
well, people very slightly. But, down there, the places themselves seem
to me just like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality
which would have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life. Perhaps
it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge; standing there
by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before
an evening sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing;
while the fishing-boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of
the Channel, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours.
Or perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if
anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some
imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which
knows not truth," he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, "that land
of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy; and is certainly
not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is
already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart already predisposed
to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous secrets and
futile regrets may agree with an old and disillusioned man like myself;
but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which is still
unformed. Believe me," he went on with emphasis, "the waters of that
bay--more Breton than Norman--may exert a sedative influence, though
even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no
longer unbroken, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything
to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are
contra-indicated.... Good night to you, neighbours," he added, moving
away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed;
and then, turning towards us, with a physicianly finger raised in
warning, he resumed the consultation: "No Balbec before you are fifty!"
he called out to me, "and even then it must depend on the state of the
heart."
My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured
him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly
swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth
of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would
have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative--but an honourable
occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have
constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower
Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own
sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged
to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never
have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain--as,
from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to
have been certain--that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have
dreamed of making use of it.
* * *
We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie
a visit before dinner. In the first weeks of our Combray holidays, when
the days ended early, we would still be able to see, as we turned
into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, a reflection of the western sky from the
windows of the house and a band of purple at the foot of the Calvary,
which was mirrored further on in the pond; a fiery glow which,
accompanied often by a cold that burned and stung, would associate
itself in my mind with the glow of the fire over which, at that very
moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the
poetic pleasure I had found in my walk, with the sensual pleasures of
good feeding, warmth and rest. But in summer, when we came back to the
house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our
visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along
her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner
curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and
scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay
with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers,
illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting,
shadowed beams that fall among the boles of forest trees. But on some
days, though very rarely, the chest-of-drawers would long since have
shed its momentary adornments, there would no longer, as we turned into
the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky burning
along the line of window-panes; the pond beneath the Calvary would
have lost its fiery glow, sometimes indeed had changed already to an
opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken
and broadened by every ripple upon the water's surface, would be lying
across it, from end to end. Then, as we drew near the house, we would
make out a figure standing upon the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me:
"Good heavens! There is Françoise looking out for us; your aunt must be
anxious; that means we are late."
And without wasting time by stopping to take off our 'things' we would
fly upstairs to my aunt Léonie's room to reassure her, to prove to her
by our bodily presence that all her gloomy imaginings were false, that,
on the contrary, nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the
'Guermantes way,' and, good lord, when one took that walk, my aunt knew
well enough that one could never say at what time one would be home.
"There, Françoise," my aunt would say, "didn't I tell you that they must
have gone the Guermantes way? Good gracious! They must be hungry! And
your nice leg of mutton will be quite dried up now, after all the hours
it's been waiting. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the
Guermantes way?"
"But, Leonie, I supposed you knew," Mamma would answer. "I thought
that Françoise had seen us go out by the little gate, through the
kitchen-garden."
For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to
take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually
leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen:
the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's
way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M.
Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.' Of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, to
tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the way there, and
the strange people who would come over on Sundays to take the air in
Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would
'know at all,' and whom we would therefore assume to be 'people who must
have come over from Méséglise.' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well
enough one day, but that day had still to come; and, during the whole
of my boyhood, if Méséglise was to me something as inaccessible as the
horizon, which remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the
folds of a country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the
country round Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than
the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a
sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator.
And so to 'take the Guermantes way' in order to get to Méséglise, or
vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to
turn to the east in order to reach the west. Since my father used always
to speak of the 'Méséglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain
that he knew anywhere, and of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river
scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as
two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs
only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of
them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special
excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first
stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the
other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they
were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal scenery of a
river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen
playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may
happen to run past the walls of a theatre. But, above all, I set between
them, far more distinctly than the mere distance in miles and yards and
inches which separated one from the other, the distance that there was
between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one
of those distances of the mind which time serves only to lengthen, which
separate things irremediably from one another, keeping them for ever
upon different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more
absolute because the habit we had of never going both ways on the same
day, or in the course of the same walk, but the 'Méséglise way' one time
and the 'Guermantes way' another, shut them up, so to speak, far apart
and unaware of each other's existence, in the sealed vessels--between
which there could be no communication--of separate afternoons.
When we had decided to go the 'Méséglise way' we would start (without
undue haste, and even if the sky were clouded over, since the walk was
not very long, and did not take us too far from home), as though we were
not going anywhere in particular, by the front-door of my aunt's house,
which opened on to the Rue du Saint-Esprit. We would be greeted by
the gunsmith, we would drop our letters into the box, we would tell
Théodore, from Françoise, as we passed, that she had run out of oil
or coffee, and we would leave the town by the road which ran along the
white fence of M. Swann's park. Before reaching it we would be met on
our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers.
Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised
inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple
blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which
they had been bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little
tiled house, called the Archers' Lodge, in which Swann's keeper lived,
overtopped its gothic gable with their rosy minaret. The nymphs of
spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these
young houris, who retained, in this French garden, the pure and vivid
colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms
about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks
that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without
stopping, for my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's
marriage, and, so as not to appear to be looking into his park, we
would, instead of taking the road which ran beside its boundary and then
climbed straight up to the open fields, choose another way, which led in
the same direction, but circuitously, and brought us out rather too far
from home.
One day my grandfather said to my 'father: "Don't you remember Swann's
telling us yesterday that his wife and daughter had gone off to Rheims
and that he was taking the opportunity of spending a day or two in
Paris? We might go along by the park, since the ladies are not at home;
that will make it a little shorter."
We stopped for a moment by the fence. Lilac-time was nearly over; some
of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall purple chandeliers, their tiny
balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only
a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam,
these were now spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry
and scentless. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects
the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had
altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann, on the day
of his wife's death; and he seized the opportunity to tell us, once
again, the story of that walk.
In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums rose in the full glare
of the sun towards the house. But to our right the park stretched away
into the distance, on level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which
stood close around it, an 'ornamental water' had been constructed by
Swann's parents but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is
the material upon which man has to work; certain spots will persist in
remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty,
and will raise their immemorial standards among all the 'laid-out'
scenery of a park, just as they would have done far from any human
interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf
them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position, and
superimposing itself upon the work of man's hands. And so it was that,
at the foot of the path which led down to this artificial lake, there
might be seen, in its two tiers woven of trailing forget-me-nots below
and of periwinkle flowers above, the natural, delicate, blue garland
which binds the luminous, shadowed brows of water-nymphs; while the
iris, its swords sweeping every way in regal profusion, stretched out
over agrimony and water-growing king-cups the lilied sceptres, tattered
glories of yellow and purple, of the kingdom of the lake.