with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives
along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in
sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of
the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the
truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have
opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for
their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us
those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became
apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water
which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as
environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still
with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were
slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming
child--as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the
crowd--that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose
that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in
all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which
strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the
dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no
echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by
the current, and formed only to burst--my exaltation of mind has borne
them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these
successive years, while all around them the one-trodden ways have
vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of
those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead. Sometimes the fragment
of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in
such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my
mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from
what place, from what time--perhaps, quite simply, from which of my
dreams--it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my
mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard
the Méséglise and Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I used to think of
certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that
the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone,
I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith
which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape
in the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the
first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Méséglise way'
with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its
apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its
water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time
the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my
only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat,
see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among
the cornfields--as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden--an old church,
monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers,
the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to
encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on
the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart. And
yet, because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am
seized with a desire to see again the 'Guermantes way,' it would not
be satisfied were I led to the banks of a river in which were lilies
as fair, or even fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my
return home in the evening, at the hour when there awakened in me that
anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of
love, and may even become its inseparable companion, I should have
wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me,
though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No:
just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented (in that
untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able
to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes
in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her
kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation,
unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it should be my
mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which
there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish,
and which I loved as much as all the rest--so what I want to see again
is the 'Guermantes way' as I knew it, with the farm that stood a little
apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together, at the
entrance to the oak avenue; those meadows upon whose surface, when it
is polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are outlined
the leaves of the apple-trees; that whole landscape whose individuality
sometimes, at night, in my dreams, binds me with a power that is almost
fantastic, of which I can discover no trace when I awake.
No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in
me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had
made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Méséglise
and Guermantes 'ways' left me exposed, in later life, to much
disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to
see a person again without realising that it was simply because that
person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been
led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an aftermath of
affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by
the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions,
to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two 'ways' give to
those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the
rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for
me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a
tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the
'Méséglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling,
through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent
lilac-trees.
And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at
Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there; of other days
besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the
taste--by what would have been called at Combray the 'perfume'---of a
cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many
years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love
affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that
accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are
studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when
we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an
accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible
to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance
by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories,
following one after another, were condensed into a single substance,
but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the
three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others,
inspired more recently by a taste or 'perfume,' and those which were
actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at
second hand--no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least
those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain
marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.
It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the
brief uncertainty of my waking dream, I would know in what room I
was actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in
the darkness, and--fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the
assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed
the curtains and the window--would have reconstructed it complete and
with its furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working
upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have
replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed
site. But scarcely had daylight itself--and no longer the gleam from
a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for
daylight--traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across
a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with
its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had
erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table,
which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would
hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and
sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would
be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had
lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the
darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I
had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight
by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted
forefinger of day.
SWANN IN LOVE
To admit you to the 'little nucleus,' the 'little group,' the 'little
clan' at the Verdurins', one condition sufficed, but that one was
indispensable; you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose
articles was that the young pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under
her patronage that year, and of whom she said "Really, it oughtn't to
be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!" left both Planté
and Rubinstein 'sitting'; while Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant
diagnostician than Potain. Each 'new recruit' whom the Verdurins failed
to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in other houses
than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished
forthwith. Women being in this respect more rebellious than men, more
reluctant to lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out
for themselves whether other drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as
entertaining, and the Verdurins feeling, moreover, that this critical
spirit and this demon of frivolity might, by their contagion, prove
fatal to the orthodoxy of the little church, they had been obliged to
expel, one after another, all those of the 'faithful' who were of the
female sex.
Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively
that season (for all that Mme. Verdurin herself was a thoroughly 'good'
woman, and came of a respectable middle-class family, excessively rich
and wholly undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her own
accord severed all connection) to a young woman almost of a 'certain
class,' a Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her Christian
name, Odette, and pronounced a 'love,' and to the pianist's aunt, who
looked as though she had, at one period, 'answered the bell': ladies
quite ignorant of the world, who in their social simplicity were so
easily led to believe that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse
de Guermantes were obliged to pay large sums of money to other poor
wretches, in order to have anyone at their dinner-parties, that if
somebody had offered to procure them an invitation to the house of
either of those great dames, the old doorkeeper and the woman of 'easy
virtue' would have contemptuously declined.
The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid'
there. There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment.
The young pianist would play, but only if he felt inclined, for no one
was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: "We're all
friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!"
If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the
Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was
displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an
impression. "Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know
quite well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm
in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up--nothing doing!" If he was not
going to play they talked, and one of the friends--usually the painter
who was in favour there that year--would "spin," as M. Verdurin put
it, "a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter," and
especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom--so strong was her habit of taking
literally the figurative accounts of her emotions--Dr. Cottard, who was
then just starting in general practice, would "really have to come one
day and set her jaw, which she had dislocated with laughing too much."
Evening dress was barred, because you were all 'good pals,' and didn't
want to look like the 'boring people' who were to be avoided like the
plague, and only asked to the big evenings, which were given as seldom
as possible, and then only if it would amuse the painter or make the
musician better known. The rest of the time you were quite happy playing
charades and having supper in fancy dress, and there was no need to
mingle any strange element with the little 'clan.'
But just as the 'good pals' came to take a more and more prominent place
in Mme. Verdurin's life, so the 'bores,' the 'nuisances' grew to include
everybody and everything that kept her friends away from her, that made
them sometimes plead 'previous engagements,' the mother of one, the
professional duties of another, the 'little place in the country' of a
third. If Dr. Cottard felt bound to say good night as soon as they rose
from table, so as to go back to some patient who was seriously ill; "I
don't know," Mme. Verdurin would say, "I'm sure it will do him far more
good if you don't go disturbing him again this evening; he will have a
good night without you; to-morrow morning you can go round early and you
will find him cured." From the beginning of December it would make her
quite ill to think that the 'faithful' might fail her on Christmas and
New Year's Days. The pianist's aunt insisted that he must accompany her,
on the latter, to a family dinner at her mother's.
"You don't suppose she'll die, your mother," exclaimed Mme. Verdurin
bitterly, "if you don't have dinner with her on New Year's Day, like
people in the _provinces_!"
Her uneasiness was kindled again in Holy Week: "Now you, Doctor, you're
a sensible, broad-minded man; you'll come, of course, on Good Friday,
just like any other day?" she said to Cottard in the first year of the
little 'nucleus,' in a loud and confident voice, as though there could
be no doubt of his answer. But she trembled as she waited for it, for if
he did not come she might find herself condemned to dine alone.
"I shall come on Good Friday--to say good-bye to you, for we are going
to spend the holidays in Auvergne."
"In Auvergne? To be eaten by fleas and all sorts of creatures! A fine
lot of good that will do you!" And after a solemn pause: "If you had
only told us, we would have tried to get up a party, and all gone there
together, comfortably."
And so, too, if one of the 'faithful' had a friend, or one of the ladies
a young man, who was liable, now and then, to make them miss an evening,
the Verdurins, who were not in the least afraid of a woman's having a
lover, provided that she had him in their company, loved him in their
company and did not prefer him to their company, would say: "Very well,
then, bring your friend along." And he would be put to the test, to see
whether he was willing to have no secrets from Mme. Verdurin, whether he
was susceptible of being enrolled in the 'little clan.' If he failed
to pass, the faithful one who had introduced him would be taken on one
side, and would be tactfully assisted to quarrel with the friend or
mistress. But if the test proved satisfactory, the newcomer would in
turn be numbered among the 'faithful.' And so when, in the course of
this same year, the courtesan told M. Verdurin that she had made the
acquaintance of such a charming gentleman, M. Swann, and hinted that
he would very much like to be allowed to come, M. Verdurin carried the
request at once to his wife. He never formed an opinion on any subject
until she had formed hers, his special duty being to carry out her
wishes and those of the 'faithful' generally, which he did with
boundless ingenuity.
"My dear, Mme. de Crécy has something to say to you. She would like to
bring one of her friends here, a M. Swann. What do you say?"
"Why, as if anybody could refuse anything to a little piece of
perfection like that. Be quiet; no one asked your opinion. I tell you
that you are a piece of perfection."
"Just as you like," replied Odette, in an affected tone, and then went
on: "You know I'm not fishing for compliments."
"Very well; bring your friend, if he's nice."
Now there was no connection whatsoever between the 'little nucleus' and
the society which Swann frequented, and a purely worldly man would
have thought it hardly worth his while, when occupying so exceptional
a position in the world, to seek an introduction to the Verdurins. But
Swann was so ardent a lover that, once he had got to know almost all the
women of the aristocracy, once they had taught him all that there was
to learn, he had ceased to regard those naturalisation papers, almost a
patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon
him, save as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no
intrinsic value, which allowed him to improvise a status for himself in
some little hole in the country, or in some obscure quarter of Paris,
where the good-looking daughter of a local squire or solicitor had taken
his fancy. For at such times desire, or love itself, would revive in
him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday
life, although it was, no doubt, the same feeling which had originally
prompted him towards that career as a man of fashion in which he had
squandered his intellectual gifts upon frivolous amusements, and had
made use of his erudition in matters of art only to advise society
ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses; and this
vanity it was which made him eager to shine, in the sight of any fair
unknown who had captivated him for the moment, with a brilliance which
the name of Swann by itself did not emit. And he was most eager when the
fair unknown was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by other
men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought
a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders'
that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated.
Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social
falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people
whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at
inferiors. And Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when
with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would
instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace's maid.
Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a
resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur
to remain moored like houseboats to a certain point on the bank of the
stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them
above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will
remain fixed until the day of their death, and are content, in the
end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre
distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there
with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the
women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom
he had already found to be beautiful and charming. And these were, as
often as not, women whose beauty was of a distinctly 'common' type, for
the physical qualities which attracted him instinctively, and without
reason, were the direct opposite of those that he admired in the women
painted or sculptured by his favourite masters. Depth of character, or
a melancholy expression on a woman's face would freeze his senses, which
would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy
human flesh.
If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct
for him to make no attempt to know, but among whom a woman caught his
eye, adorned with a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his
'high horse' and to cheat the desire that she had kindled in him, to
substitute a pleasure different from that which he might have tasted in
her company by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come
and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication in the
face of life, as stupid a renunciation of a new form of happiness as if,
instead of visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in
his own rooms and looked at 'views' of Paris. He did not immure himself
in the solid structure of his social relations, but had made of them, so
as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations wherever a woman
might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers
carry about with them. Any part of it which was not portable or could
not be adapted to some fresh pleasure he would discard as valueless,
however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit
with a duchess, built up of the yearly accumulation of her desire to
do him some favour for which she had never found an opportunity, been
squandered in a moment by his calling upon her, in an indiscreetly
worded message, for a recommendation by telegraph which would put him
in touch at once with one of her agents whose daughter he had noticed in
the country, just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust
of bread. Indeed, when it was too late, he would laugh at himself for
it, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare refinements, an
element of clownishness. Then he belonged to that class of intelligent
men who have led a life of idleness, and who seek consolation and,
perhaps, an excuse in the idea, which their idleness offers to their
intelligence, of objects as worthy of their interest as any that could
be attained by art or learning, the idea that 'Life' contains situations
more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
So, at least, he would assure and had no difficulty in persuading the
more subtle among his friends in the fashionable world, notably the
Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to amuse with stories of the startling
adventures that had befallen him, such as when he had met a woman in the
train, and had taken her home with him, before discovering that she was
the sister of a reigning monarch, in whose hands were gathered, at that
moment, all the threads of European politics, of which he found himself
kept informed in the most delightful fashion, or when, in the complexity
of circumstances, it depended upon the choice which the Conclave
was about to make whether he might or might not become the lover of
somebody's cook.
It was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals
and academicians, to whom he was bound by such close ties, that Swann
compelled with so much cynicism to serve him as panders. All his friends
were accustomed to receive, from time to time, letters which called on
them for a word of recommendation or introduction, with a diplomatic
adroitness which, persisting throughout all his successive 'affairs'
and using different pretexts, revealed more glaringly than the clumsiest
indiscretion, a permanent trait in his character and an unvarying quest.
I used often to recall to myself when, many years later, I began to
take an interest in his character because of the similarities which, in
wholly different respects, it offered to my own, how, when he used to
write to my grandfather (though not at the time we are now considering,
for it was about the date of my own birth that Swann's great 'affair'
began, and made a long interruption in his amatory practices) the
latter, recognising his friend's handwriting on the envelope, would
exclaim: "Here is Swann asking for something; on guard!" And, either
from distrust or from the unconscious spirit of devilry which urges us
to offer a thing only to those who do not want it, my grandparents would
meet with an obstinate refusal the most easily satisfied of his prayers,
as when he begged them for an introduction to a girl who dined with us
every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, whenever Swann mentioned her,
to pretend that they no longer saw, although they would be wondering,
all through the week, whom they could invite to meet her, and often
failed, in the end, to find anyone, sooner than make a sign to him who
would so gladly have accepted.
Occasionally a couple of my grandparents' acquaintance, who had been
complaining for some time that they never saw Swann now, would announce
with satisfaction, and perhaps with a slight inclination to make my
grandparents envious of them, that he had suddenly become as charming as
he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My grandfather
would not care to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look at my
grandmother, as he hummed the air of:
What is this mystery?
I cannot understand it;
or of:
Vision fugitive...;
In matters such as this
'Tis best to close one's eyes.