apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly
received my umbrella in his face, and who replied without any cordiality
to my "Fine day, what! good to be out walking!"--that I learned
that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men
simultaneously, by a pre-established order. Later on I discovered that,
whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the
friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment
have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and
wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had been
thinking with affection of my parents, and forming the most sensible and
proper plans for giving them pleasure, they would have been using
the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already
forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely, just as I flung myself
upon them with a kiss.
Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be
added an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to
which I should give the casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire
to see rise up before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my
arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving me time to trace it accurately
to its source among so many ideas of a very different kind, the pleasure
which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior to what was
given me by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit in everything
that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled
roof, the wild grass in the wall, the village of Roussainville into
which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the
steeple of its church, created in them by this fresh emotion which made
them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that
had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly
towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, unknown, and
propitious breeze. But if this desire that a woman should appear added
for me something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their
turn enlarged what I might, in the woman's charm, have found too much
restricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers
also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of
Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her
kiss which would make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing
strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding
through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any
bounds. Moreover--just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature,
the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas
of things set on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the
originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may
happen to be--the passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be
not any one example of the general type of 'woman,' but a necessary and
natural product of the soil. For at that time everything which was not
myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious,
more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear
to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made
no distinction. I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Méséglise or
Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for
Balbec and Méséglise. The pleasure which those girls were empowered to
give me would have seemed less genuine, I should have had no faith in
it any longer, if I had been at liberty to modify its conditions as I
chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from
Méséglise would have been like receiving the present of a shell which
I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found
among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure which she was
about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my
imagination had enwrapped her. But to wander thus among the woods of
Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods
and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty.
That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their
leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the
rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely
than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had
sprung. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that
the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses were
themselves of a particular kind, yielding a pleasure which I could
never derive from any but herself) since I was still, and must for long
remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact
of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has
tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one
regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that
is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and
formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one
seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in
anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself,
but only how to escape from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent and
concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it
makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender
glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more
than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of
heart of our companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves,
which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon
us.
Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville,
that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village,
appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my
earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from
the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen
nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window,
while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for
unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of
self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of
my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to
my death, even--until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among
the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window,
tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I
compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with
an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I
might go alone as far as the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did
I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with
my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation. I would fix
my eyes, without limit of time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from
behind which she must appear and spring towards me; my closest scrutiny
left the horizon barren as before; night was falling; without any hope
now would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out of it
the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale
and outworn land; and it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with
sullen anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from
among which no more living creatures made their appearance than if they
had been trees painted on the stretched canvas background of a panorama,
when, unable to resign myself to having to return home without having
held in my arms the woman I so greatly desired, I was yet obliged to
retrace my steps towards Combray, and to admit to myself that the chance
of her appearing in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had
appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have
regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came
to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others,
or as having any existence apart from myself. They seemed nothing more
now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my
temperament. They were in no way connected now with nature, with the
world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and
significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional
framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway
carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.
And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at
Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at that time was
without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that
cruel side of human passion called 'sadism.' We shall see, in due
course, that for quite another reason the memory of this impression was
to play an important part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot
weather; my parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day,
had told me that I might stay out as late as I pleased; and having
gone as far as the Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the
reflection of the tiled roof of the hut, I had lain down in the shade
and gone to sleep among the bushes on the steep slope that rose up
behind the house, just where I had waited for my parents, years before,
one day when they had gone to call on M. Vinteuil. It was almost dark
when I awoke, and I wished to rise and go away, but I saw Mlle. Vinteuil
(or thought, at least, that I recognised her, for I had not seen her
often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, whereas
she was now growing into a young woman), who probably had just come in,
standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from me, in that room
in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made
into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly open; the
lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her being
able to see me; but, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling sound
among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought that I
had been hiding there in order to spy upon her.
She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had
not gone to see her; my mother had not cared to go, on account of that
virtue which alone in her fixed any bounds to her benevolence--namely,
modesty; but she pitied the girl from the depths of her heart. My
mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete
absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his
daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him; she
could see the tortured expression which was never absent from the old
man's face in those terrible last years; she knew that he had definitely
abandoned the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later
work, the poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-master, a
retired village organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value
in themselves, though we did not despise them, because they were of such
great value to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he
sacrificed them to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even
written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were
scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain
unknown for ever; my mother thought, also, of that other and still more
cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing
the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future; when
she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come
upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and
shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness,
which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having
virtually killed her father. "Poor M. Vinteuil," my mother would say,
"he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting
his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only
come to him from her."
At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil's sitting-room, on the mantelpiece,
stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch,
just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside,
then flung herself down on a sofa and drew close beside her a little
table on which she placed the photograph, just as, long ago, M. Vinteuil
had 'placed' beside him the piece of music which he would have liked
to play over to my parents. And then her friend came in. Mlle. Vinteuil
greeted her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head, and
drew her body to one side of the sofa, as though to 'make room.' But no
sooner had she done this than she appeared to feel that she was perhaps
suggesting a particular position to her friend, with an emphasis which
might well be regarded as importunate. She thought that her friend would
prefer, no doubt, to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair;
she felt that she had been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright;
stretching herself out again over the whole of the sofa, she closed her
eyes and began to yawn, so as to indicate that it was a desire to sleep,
and that alone, which had made her lie down there. Despite the rude
and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion I could
recognise in her the obsequious and reticent advances, the abrupt
scruples and restraints which had characterised her father. Presently
she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to
close the shutters and not succeeding.
"Leave them open," said her friend. "I am hot."
"But it's too dreadful! People will see us," Mlle. Vinteuil answered.
And then she guessed, probably, that her friend would think that she had
uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other
words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from
prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak. And so, although
I could not see her face clearly enough, I am sure that the expression
must have appeared on it which my grandmother had once found so
delightful, when she hastily went on: "When I say 'see us' I mean, of
course, see us reading. It's so dreadful to think that in every trivial
little thing you do some one may be overlooking you."
With the instinctive generosity of her nature, a courtesy beyond her
control, she refrained from uttering the studied words which, she had
felt, were indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And
perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden
would kneel before that other element, the old campaigner, battered but
triumphant, would intercede with him and oblige him to retire.
"Oh, yes, it is so extremely likely that people are looking at us at
this time of night in this densely populated district!" said her friend,
with bitter irony. "And what if they are?" she went on, feeling bound
to annotate with a malicious yet affectionate wink these words which
she was repeating, out of good nature, like a lesson prepared beforehand
which, she knew, it would please Mlle. Vinteuil to hear. "And what if
they are? All the better that they should see us."
Mlle. Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. In her sensitive
and scrupulous heart she was ignorant what words ought to flow,
spontaneously, from her lips, so as to produce the scene for which her
eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the
limitations of her true character to find the language appropriate to
a vicious young woman such as she longed to be thought, but the
words which, she imagined, such a young woman might have uttered with
sincerity sounded unreal in her own mouth. And what little she allowed
herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained
timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech; while
she kept on interrupting herself with: "You're sure you aren't cold? You
aren't too hot? You don't want to sit and read by yourself?...
"Your ladyship's thoughts seem to be rather 'warm' this evening," she
concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used, on
some earlier occasion, by her friend.
In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the
sting of her friend's sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and
ran away; and then they began to chase one another about the room,
scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like
wings, clucking and crowing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle.
Vinteuil fell down exhausted upon the sofa, where she was screened from
me by the stooping body of her friend. But the latter now had her back
turned to the little table on which the old music-master's portrait had
been arranged. Mlle. Vinteuil realised that her friend would not see
it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she
herself had just noticed it for the first time: "Oh! there's my father's
picture looking at us; I can't think who can have put it there; I'm sure
I've told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it."
I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in
apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was, of
course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to
daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently
a liturgical response: "Let him stay there. He can't trouble us any
longer. D'you think he'd start whining, d'you think he'd pack you out
of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old
monkey?"
To which Mlle. Vinteuil replied, "Oh, please!"--a gentle reproach
which testified to the genuine goodness of her nature, not that it
was prompted by any resentment at hearing her father spoken of in this
fashion (for that was evidently a feeling which she had trained herself,
by a long course of sophistries, to keep in close subjection at such
moments), but rather because it was the bridle which, so as to avoid all
appearance of egotism, she herself used to curb the gratification which
her friend was attempting to procure for her. It may well have been,
too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these
blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her
frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form
of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to
adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with
affection by a woman who had just shewn herself so implacable towards
the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held
out a chaste brow to be kissed; precisely as a daughter would have done
to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they would thus, between
them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty, in robbing M.
Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred
rights of fatherhood. Her friend took the girl's head in her hands and
placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection
she had for Mlle. Vinteuil, as well as by the desire to bring what
distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.
"Do you know what I should like to do to that old horror?" she said,
taking up the photograph. She murmured in Mlle. Vinteuil's ear something
that I could not distinguish.
"Oh! You would never dare."
"Not dare to spit on it? On that?" shouted the friend with deliberate
brutality.
I heard no more, for Mlle. Vinteuil, who now seemed weary, awkward,
preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad, came back to the window and drew
the shutters close; but I knew now what was the reward that M. Vinteuil,
in return for all the suffering that he had endured in his lifetime, on
account of his daughter, had received from her after his death.
And yet I have since reflected that if M. Vinteuil had been able to be
present at this scene, he might still, and in spite of everything, have
continued to believe in his daughter's soundness of heart, and that he
might even, in so doing, have been not altogether wrong. It was true
that in all Mlle. Vinteuil's actions the appearance of evil was so
strong and so consistent that it would have been hard to find it
exhibited in such completeness save in what is nowadays called a
'sadist'; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under
the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a
girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has
lived and died for nothing and no one but herself; and when we find in
real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally the 'sadic'
instinct that is responsible for it. It is possible that, without being
in the least inclined towards 'sadism,' a girl might have shewn the
same outrageous cruelty as Mlle. Vinteuil in desecrating the memory and
defying the wishes of her dead father, but she would not have given them
deliberate expression in an act so crude in its symbolism, so lacking
in subtlety; the criminal element in her behaviour would have been less
evident to other people, and even to herself, since she would not have
admitted to herself that she was doing wrong. But, appearances apart, in
Mlle. Vinteuil's soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element
was probably not unmixed. A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil,
which a wholly wicked person could not be, for in that case the evil
would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her,
and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; and as for
virtue, respect for the dead, filial obedience, since she would never
have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious
delight in their profanation. 'Sadists' of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are
creatures so purely sentimental, so virtuous by nature, that even
sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved
for the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it
they endeavour to impersonate, to assume all the outward appearance of
wicked people, for themselves and their partners in guilt, so as to gain
the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own
gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. And
I could understand how she must have longed for such an escape when I
realised that it was impossible for her to effect it. At the moment when
she wished to be thought the very antithesis of her father, what she at
once suggested to me were the mannerisms, in thought and speech, of
the poor old music-master. Indeed, his photograph was nothing; what she
really desecrated, what she corrupted into ministering to her pleasures,
but what remained between them and her and prevented her from any
direct enjoyment of them, was the likeness between her face and his, his
mother's blue eyes which he had handed down to her, like some trinket to
be kept in the family, those little friendly movements and inclinations
which set up between the viciousness of Mlle. Vinteuil and herself a
phraseology, a mentality not designed for vice, which made her regard it
as not in any way different from the numberless little social duties and
courtesies to which she must devote herself every day. It was not evil
that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it
was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, every time that she
indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as,
ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to
see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil.
Perhaps Mlle. Vinteuil felt that at heart her friend was not altogether
bad, not really sincere when she gave vent to those blasphemous
utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving those kisses
on her brow, those smiles, those glances; all feigned, perhaps, but akin
in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would have
been discernible on the face of a creature formed not out of kindness
and long-suffering, but out of self-indulgence and cruelty. She was
able to delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed
amusing herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an accomplice, a
girl might amuse herself who really did experience that savage antipathy
towards her father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of
wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was
so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself,
as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings
which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one
true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.