cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have
to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary
clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the
background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to
find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of
art were very different--at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had
attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies--from those in
which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have
recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine,
some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the
sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and
as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it
enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one
ought to set before children, and that children shewed their own innate
good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would
continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt
they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded
vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their
equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's
heart.
It was along the 'Méséglise way,' at Montjouvain, a house built on the
edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that
M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her
dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never
saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than
herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end
installed herself permanently, one day, at Montjouvain. People said:
"That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by love not to see what everyone
is talking about, and to let his daughter--a man who is horrified if you
use a word in the wrong sense--bring a woman like that to live under his
roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold,
and that she would have shewn extraordinary musical talent if she had
only been trained. He may be sure it is not music that she is teaching
his daughter." But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed
it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of their
normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom they are in
physical intercourse. Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly
decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them
of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine
resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. Dr. Percepied, whose loud
voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's content the
part of 'double-dealer,' a part to which he was not, otherwise, adapted,
without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite
unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make
the Curé and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh
voice: "What d'ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with
her friend, Mlle. Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? Oh, I know
nothing, nothing at all. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about
it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that
girl. I should never dream of thwarting the artistic vocation of a
child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too,
with his daughter's friend. Why, gracious heavens, it must be a regular
musical box, that house out there! What are you laughing at? I say
they've been playing too much music, those people. I met Papa Vinteuil
the other day, by the cemetery. It was all he could do to keep on his
feet."
Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil, about this time,
avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught
sight of them, changed in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a
sea of sorrows, incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting
his daughter's happiness, spending whole days beside his wife's grave,
could hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dying of a
broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he paid no attention to
the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed,
what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid
his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of
circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which
he himself has been most outspoken in condemning, without at first
recognising it beneath the disguise which it assumes on entering his
presence, so as to wound him and to make him suffer; the odd words, the
unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand
reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must
have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have
to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed
to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there
needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a
vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by
no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might
blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil
may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his
adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to
the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that
engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they
can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without
weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not
make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of
its physician. But when M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself
from the point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when he
attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied
in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give
judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely
the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his
daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in 'low,' in the
very 'lowest water,' inextricably stranded; and his manners had of late
been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked
above him and to whom he must now look up (however far beneath him they
might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of
rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any
human misfortune.
One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of
Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so
suddenly face to face with us all that he had not time to escape; and
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who,
amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's
shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence, the
outward signs of which serve to enhance and gratify the self-esteem of
the bestower because he feels that they are all the more precious to him
upon whom they are bestowed, conversed at great length with M. Vinteuil,
with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and
invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over, one day,
to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier,
would have enraged M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much
gratitude that he felt himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion
of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to
be in itself so honourable, so precious a support for his cause that he
felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so as to have the
wholly Platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve.
"What a charming man!" he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the
same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of the
middle classes fall victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a
duchess, even though she be ugly and a fool. "What a charming man! What
a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!"
And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most
sincere of men, who cast off, while they are talking to anyone, the
opinion they actually hold of him and will express when he is no longer
there, my family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann's marriage,
invoking principles and conventions which (all the more because they
invoked them in common with him, as though we were all thorough good
fellows of the same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way
infringed at Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit
Swann, an omission which Swann was the first to regret. For constantly,
after meeting M. Vinteuil, he would remember that he had been meaning
for a long time to ask him about some one of the same name as himself,
one of his relatives, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he determined
that he would not forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil
should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.
Since the 'Méséglise way' was the shorter of the two that we used to
take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for
days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Méséglise
shewed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the
fringe of Roussainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for
shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves.
Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its
roundness, but whose edge the sun gilded in return. The brightness,
though not the light of day, would then be shut off from a landscape
in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village
of Roussainville carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its
gables, with a startling precision of detail. A gust of wind blew from
its perch a rook, which floated away and settled in the distance, while
beneath a paling sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of
blue, as though they were painted in one of those cameos which you still
find decorating the walls of old houses.
But on other days would begin to fall the rain, of which we had had due
warning from the little barometer-figure which the spectacle-maker hung
out in his doorway. Its drops, like migrating birds which fly off in a
body at a given moment, would come down out of the sky in close marching
order. They would never drift apart, would make no movement at random in
their rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place, would draw
after it the drop which was following, and the sky would be as greatly
darkened as by the swallows flying south. We would take refuge among the
trees. And when it seemed that their flight was accomplished, a few last
drops, feebler and slower than the rest, would still come down. But we
would emerge from our shelter, for the rain was playing a game, now,
among the branches, and, even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a
stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and
hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly it splashed plump
upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree.
Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its stony
saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs. How
typically French that church was! Over its door the saints, the kings
of chivalry with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals
were carved as they might have been in the mind of Françoise. The
sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil,
precisely as Françoise in her kitchen would break into speech about
Saint Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to
depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered
less 'righteous.' One could see that the ideas which the mediaeval
artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in
the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history,
ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were
derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct,
unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray
person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic
sculptures of Saint-André-des-Champs was young Théodore, the assistant
in Camus's shop. And, indeed, Françoise herself was well aware that she
had in him a countryman and contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill
for Françoise to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed or to carry
her to her chair, rather than let the kitchen-maid come upstairs
and, perhaps, 'make an impression' on my aunt, she would send out for
Théodore. And this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town
as a 'bad character,' was so abounding in that spirit which had served
to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, and particularly in the
feelings of respect due, in Françoise eyes, to all 'poor invalids,' and,
above all, to her own 'poor mistress,' that he had, when he bent down
to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, the same air of préraphaélite
simplicity and zeal which the little angels in the bas-reliefs wear, who
throng, with tapers in their hands, about the deathbed of Our Lady, as
though those carved faces of stone, naked and grey like trees in winter,
were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower
again in countless plebeian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of
Théodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
There, too, not fastened to the wall like the little angels, but
detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her
pedestal as upon a footstool, which had been placed there to save her
feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full
cheeks, the firm breasts which swelled out inside her draperies like
a cluster of ripe grapes inside a bag, the narrow forehead, short and
stubborn nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-skinned, courageous
expression of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which
imparted to the statue itself a kindliness that I had not looked to
find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from
the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose
presence there--as when the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up
beside leaves carved in stone--seemed intended by fate to allow us, by
confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate
of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a
promised or an accursed land, Roussainville, within whose walls I had
never penetrated, Roussainville was now, when the rain had ceased for
us, still being chastised, like a village in the Old Testament, by
all the innumerable spears and arrows of the storm, which beat down
obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already
received the forgiveness of the Almighty, Who had restored to it the
light of His sun, which fell upon it in rays of uneven length, like the
rays of a monstrance upon an altar.
Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go
home and to remain shut up indoors. Here and there, in the distance, in
a landscape which, what with the failing light and saturated atmosphere,
resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower
slopes of a hill whose heights were buried in a cloudy darkness shone
out like little boats which had folded their sails and would ride at
anchor, all night, upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm?
In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial
ill-temper expressed by the permanent, underlying fine weather; a very
different thing from the fluid and unstable 'fine weather' of winter,
its very opposite, in fact; for has it not (firmly established in the
soil, on which it has taken solid form in dense masses of foliage over
which the rain may pour in torrents without weakening the resistance
offered by their real and lasting happiness) hoisted, to keep them
flying throughout the season, in the village streets, on the walls of
the houses and in their gardens, its silken banners, violet and white.
Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner
with a book, I might hear the water dripping from our chestnut-trees,
but I would know that the shower would only glaze and brighten the
greenness of their thick, crumpled leaves, and that they themselves
had undertaken to remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the
rainy night, to assure me of the fine weather's continuing; it might
rain as it pleased, but to-morrow, over the white fence of Tansonville,
there would surge and flow, numerous as ever, a sea of little
heart-shaped leaves; and without the least anxiety I could watch the
poplar in the Rue des Perchamps praying for mercy, bowing in desperation
before the storm; without the least anxiety I could hear, at the far end
of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among our lilac-trees.
If the weather was bad all morning, my family would abandon the idea of
a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit
of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards
Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray
to settle the division of my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at
last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in the
fact of her demise--those who had insisted that her mode of life was
enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had
always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary,
but organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would
be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it;
causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that
one a grief savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my
aunt's last illness Françoise never went out of her room for an instant,
never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my
aunt, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave.
Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise
had lived of my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had
developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which
was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it
had been impossible to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been
so hard to escape, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take
advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no
more. Compared with such a mistress we counted for very little. The
time had long passed when, on our first coming to spend our holidays
at Combray, we had been of equal importance, in Françoise eyes, with my
aunt.
During that autumn my parents, finding the days so fully occupied with
the legal formalities that had to be gone through, and discussions with
solicitors and farmers, that they had little time for walks which, as it
happened, the weather made precarious, began to let me go, without them,
along the 'Méséglise way,' wrapped up in a huge Highland plaid which
protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to throw
over my shoulders because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy tartan
scandalised Françoise, whom it was impossible to convince that the
colour of one's clothes had nothing whatever to do with one's mourning
for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn on my aunt's
death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the
neighbours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone
when we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I
am sure that in a book--and to that extent my feelings were closely akin
to those of Françoise--such a conception of mourning, in the manner
of the _Chanson de Roland_ and of the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs,
would have seemed most attractive. But the moment that Françoise herself
approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry,
and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I
regretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of
her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that
she might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her
death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a
book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.
And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused
reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to
plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to
_espress_ myself"--I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal
common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same
she was a _geological_ relation; there is always the respect due to your
_geology_," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good
of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot
speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise,
the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most
contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too
prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage
of life.
My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used
to take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of
reading, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid
across my shoulders and set out; my body, which in a long spell of
enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was
now obliged, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend this in
every direction. The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees
of Roussainville wood, the bushes against which Montjouvain leaned its
back, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must
hear my shouts of happiness, blows and shouts being indeed no more than
expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not
being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the
light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course
of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an
immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the
emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us
of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in
an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.
When I attempt to reckon up all that I owe to the 'Méséglise way,' all
the humble discoveries of which it was either the accidental setting or
the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same
autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy precipice which guarded
Montjouvain from the rear, that I was struck for the first time by
this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of
expression. After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had put up a
brisk fight, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, and reached
a little hut, roofed with tiles, in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept
his tools, the sun shone out again, and its golden rays, washed clean
by the shower, blazed once more in the sky, on the trees, on the wall
of the hut, and on the still wet tiles of the roof, which had a chicken
perching upon its ridge. The wind pulled out sideways the wild grass
that grew in the wall, and the chicken's downy feathers, both of which
things let themselves float upon the wind's breath to their full extent,
with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless matter. The
tiled roof cast upon the pond, whose reflections were now clear again
in the sunlight, a square of pink marble, the like of which I had never
observed before. And, seeing upon the water, where it reflected the
wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my
enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn!"
But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content
myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more
clearly into the sources of my enjoyment.