turning to my father, "was somewhat beset with thorns (which is, after
all, only another way of saying that it was not lacking in points).
Bergotte--some years ago, now--paid a visit to Vienna while I was
Ambassador there; he was presented to me by the Princess Metternich,
came and wrote his name, and expected to be asked to the Embassy. Now,
being in a foreign country as the Representative of France, to which he
has after all done some honour by his writings, to a certain extent (let
us say, to be quite accurate, to a very slight extent), I was prepared
to set aside the unfavourable opinion that I hold of his private life.
But he was not travelling alone, and he actually let it be understood
that he was not to be invited without his companion. I trust that I am
no more of a prude than most men, and, being a bachelor, I was perhaps
in a position to throw open the doors of the Embassy a little wider than
if I had been married and the father of a family. Nevertheless, I must
admit that there are depths of degradation to which I should hesitate to
descend, while these are rendered more repulsive still by the tone, not
moral, merely--let us be quite frank and say moralising,--that Bergotte
takes up in his books, where one finds nothing but perpetual and,
between ourselves, somewhat wearisome analyses, torturing scruples,
morbid remorse, and all for the merest peccadilloes, the most trivial
naughtinesses (as one knows from one's own experience), while all the
time he is shewing such an utter lack of conscience and so much cynicism
in his private life. To cut a long story short, I evaded the
responsibility, the Princess returned to the charge, but without
success. So that I do not suppose that I appear exactly in the odour of
sanctity to the gentleman, and I am not sure how far he appreciated
Swann's kindness in inviting him and myself on the same evening. Unless
of course it was he who asked for the invitation. One can never tell,
for really he is not normal. Indeed that is his sole excuse."
"And was Mme. Swann's daughter at the dinner?" I asked M. de Norpois,
taking advantage, to put this question, of a moment in which, as we all
moved towards the drawing-room, I could more easily conceal my emotion
than would have been possible at table, where I was held fast in the
glare of the lamplight.
M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember: then,
"Yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, of course, I
remember now that she was introduced to me before dinner as the daughter
of our Amphitryon. I may tell you that I saw but little of her; she
retired to bed early. Or else she went out to see a friend--I forget.
But I can see that you are very intimate with the Swann household."
"I play with Mlle. Swann in the Champs-Elysées, and she is delightful."
"Oh! so that is it, is it? But I assure you, I thought her charming. I
must confess to you, however, that I do not believe that she will ever
be anything like her mother, if I may say as much without wounding you
in a vital spot."
"I prefer Mlle. Swann's face, but I admire her mother, too, enormously;
I go for walks in the Bois simply in the hope of seeing her pass."
"Ah! But I must tell them that; they will be highly flattered."
While he was uttering these words, and for a few seconds after he had
uttered them, M. de Norpois was still in the same position as anyone
else who, hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his family
as respectable stockbrokers, of his house as a fine house, imagined that
I would speak just as readily of another man equally intelligent, of
other stockbrokers equally respectable, of another house equally fine;
it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has
not yet perceived that his companion is mad. M. de Norpois knew that
there was nothing unnatural in the pleasure which one derived from
looking at pretty women, that it was a social convention, when anyone
spoke to you of a pretty woman with any fervour, to pretend to think
that he was in love with her, and to promise to further his designs. But
in saying that he would speak of me to Gilberte and her mother (which
would enable me, like an Olympian deity who has taken on the fluidity of
a breath of wind, or rather the aspect of the old greybeard whose form
Minerva borrows, to penetrate, myself, unseen, into Mme. Swann's
drawing-room, to attract her attention, to occupy her thoughts, to
arouse her gratitude for my admiration, to appear before her as the
friend of an important person, to seem to her worthy to be invited by
her in the future and to enter into the intimate life of her family),
this important person who was going to make use, in my interests, of the
great influence which he must have with Mme. Swann inspired in me
suddenly an affection so compelling that I had difficulty in restraining
myself from kissing his gentle hands, white and crumpled, which looked
as though they had been left lying too long in water. I even sketched in
the air an outline of that impulsive movement, but this I supposed that
I alone had observed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate
exactly on what scale his words or his gestures are apparent to others.
Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also
because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the
impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are
obliged to extend, we imagine that the accessories of our speech and
attitudes scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the
memory of those with whom we converse. It is, we may suppose, to a
prompting of this sort that criminals yield when they "touch up" the
wording of a statement already made, thinking that the new variant
cannot be confronted with any existing version. But it is quite possible
that, even in what concerns the millennial existence of the human race,
the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is
destined to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which
would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in
which the moralist of the "Paris column" says to us of an event, of a
work of art, all the more forcibly of a singer who has enjoyed her
"crowded hour": "Who will remember this in ten years' time?" overleaf
does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions speak often of a
fact, in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which
dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is now known again in its
entirety? Is it not, perhaps, just the same in our brief life on earth?
And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was
also calling there, had seemed to me the most solid support that I could
hope to find, because he was the friend of my father, indulgent,
inclined to wish us all well, and besides, by his profession and
upbringing, trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador had gone,
I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had seen
the moment in which I was just going to kiss his hands, not only did I
colour up to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how
different from all that I had believed were not only the manner in which
M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the constituents of his memory: this
tittle-tattle enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of
absence and presence of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness which go
to form the human intelligence; and I was as marvellously surprised as
on the day on which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero's
books, that we had an exact list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used
to invite to his hunts, a thousand years before the Birth of Christ.
"Oh, sir," I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would inform
Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, "if you would do that,
if you would speak of me to Mme. Swann, my whole life would not be long
enough for me to prove my gratitude, and that life would be all at your
service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do not know Mme.
Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her."
I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as not
to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not possess. But
while I was uttering them I felt that they were already superfluous, for
from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its chilling ardour, I
had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of
hesitation and dissatisfaction, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow,
slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the
receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to
the invisible audience whom one has within oneself at the moment when
one is saying something that one's other audience, the person whom one
has been addressing--myself, in this instance--is not meant to hear. I
realised in a flash that these phrases which I had pronounced, which,
feeble as they were when measured against the flood of gratitude that
was coursing through me, had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois
and to confirm his decision upon an intervention which would have given
him so little trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those
that could have been chosen, with diabolical malice, by persons anxious
to do me harm) the only ones that could result in making him abandon his
intention. Indeed, when he heard me speak, just as at the moment when a
stranger with whom we have been exchanging--quite pleasantly--our
impressions, which we might suppose to be similar to his, of the
passers-by, whom we have agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly
the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly, as
he runs his hand over his pocket: "What a pity, I haven't got my
revolver here; I could have picked off the lot!" M. de Norpois, who knew
that nothing was less costly or more easy than to be commended to Mme.
Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such
favours bore so high a price and were consequently, no doubt, of great
difficulty, thought that the desire, apparently normal, which I had
expressed must cloak some different thought, some suspect intention,
some pre-existent fault, on account of which, in the certainty of
displeasing Mme. Swann, no one hitherto had been willing to undertake
the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I
understood that this office was one which he would never discharge, that
he might see Mme. Swann daily, for years to come, without ever
mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few days later, for some
information which I required, and charged my father to convey it to me.
But he had not thought it his duty to tell her at whose instance he was
inquiring. So she would never discover that I knew M. de Norpois and
that I hoped so greatly to be asked to her house; and this was perhaps a
less misfortune than I supposed. For the second of these discoveries
would probably not have added much to the efficacy, in any event
uncertain, of the first. In Odette the idea of her own life and of her
home awakened no mysterious disturbance; a person who knew her, who came
to see her, did not seem to her a fabulous creature such as he seemed to
me who would have flung a stone through Swann's windows if I could have
written upon it that I knew M. de Norpois; I was convinced that such a
message, even when transmitted in so brutal a fashion, would have done
far more to exalt me in the eyes of the lady of the house than it would
have prejudiced her against me. But even if I had been capable of
understanding that the mission which M. de Norpois did not perform must
have remained futile, nay, more than that, might even have damaged my
credit with the Swanns, I should not have had the courage, had he shewn
himself consenting, to release the Ambassador from it, and to renounce
the pleasure--however fatal its consequences might prove--of feeling
that my name and my person were thus brought for a moment into
Gilberte's presence, in her unknown life and home.
After M. de Norpois had gone my father cast an eye over the evening
paper; I dreamed once more of Berma. The pleasure which I had found in
listening to her required to be made complete, all the more because it
had fallen far short of what I had promised myself; and so it at once
assimilated everything that was capable of giving it nourishment, those
merits, for instance, which M. de Norpois had admitted that Berma
possessed, and which my mind had absorbed at one draught, like a dry
lawn when water is poured on it. Then my father handed me the newspaper,
pointing me out a paragraph which ran more or less as follows:--
The performance of _Phèdre_, given this afternoon before an
enthusiastic audience, which included the foremost representatives of
society and the arts, as well as the principal critics, was for Mme.
Berma, who played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as
any that she has known in the course of her phenomenal career. We shall
discuss more fully in a later issue this performance, which is indeed an
event in the history of the stage; for the present we need only add that
the best qualified judges are unanimous in the pronouncement that such
an interpretation sheds an entirely new light on the part of Phèdre,
which is one of the finest and most studied of Racine's creations, and
that it constitutes the purest and most exalted manifestation of
dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to
witness.
Immediately my mind had conceived this new idea of "the purest and most
exalted manifestation of dramatic art", it, the idea, sped to join the
imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, added to it a little
of what was lacking, and their combination formed something so exalting
that I cried out within myself: "What a great artist!" It may doubtless
be argued that I was not absolutely sincere. But let us bear in mind,
rather, the numberless writers who, dissatisfied with the page which
they have just written, if they read some eulogy of the genius of
Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they
aspire to be, by humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of
Beethoven, the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been
trying to express in prose, are so filled with that idea of genius that
they add it to their own productions, when they think of them once
again, see them no longer in the light in which at first they appeared,
and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to
themselves: "After all!" without taking into account that, into the
total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced
the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to
their own, but of which, in cold fact, they are not the authors; let us
bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress on
the evidence only of her betrayals; all those, too, who are sustained by
the alternative hopes, either of an incomprehensible survival of death,
when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost
but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which
they may thus enjoy; or else the hope of complete extinction which
comforts them when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise
they must his own meditation, which do not appear to him to be of great
value since he does not separate them from himself, oblige a publisher
to choose a kind of paper, to employ a fount of type finer, perhaps,
than they deserve, I asked myself whether my desire to write was of
sufficient importance to justify my father in dispensing so much
generosity. But apart from that, when he spoke of my inclinations as no
longer liable to change, he awakened in me two terrible suspicions. The
first was that (at a time when, every day, I regarded myself as standing
upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter
upon its course until the following morning) my existence was already
begun, and that, furthermore, what was yet to follow would not differ to
any extent from what had already elapsed. The second suspicion, which
was nothing more, really, than a variant of the first, was that I was
not situated somewhere outside the realm of Time, but was subject to its
laws, just like the people in novels who, for that reason, used to
plunge me in such depression when I read of their lives, down at
Combray, in the fastness of my wicker sentry-box. In theory one is aware
that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the
ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live
undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. And to make its flight
perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of
the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten,
or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a
lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed
old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about
the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him,
oblivious of the past. In saying of me, "He is no longer a child", "His
tastes will not change now", and so forth, my father had suddenly made
me apparent to myself in my position in Time, and caused me the same
kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old
pensioner, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of
indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a
book: "He very seldom comes up now from the country. He has finally
decided to end his days there."
Meanwhile my father, so as to forestall any criticism that we might feel
tempted to make of our guest, said to my mother: "Upon my word, old
Norpois was rather 'typical', as you call it, this evening, wasn't he?
When he said that it would not have been 'seemly' to ask the Comte de
Paris a question, I was quite afraid you would burst out laughing."
"Not at all!" answered my mother. "I was delighted to see a man of his
standing, and age too, keep that sort of simplicity, which is really a
sign of straightforwardness and good-breeding."
"I should think so, indeed! That does not prevent his having a shrewd
and discerning mind; I know him well, I see him at the Commission,
remember, where he is very different from what he was here," exclaimed
my father, who was glad to see that Mamma appreciated M. de Norpois, and
anxious to persuade her that he was even superior to what she supposed,
because a cordial nature exaggerates a friend's qualities with as much
pleasure as a mischievous one finds in depreciating them. "What was it
that he said, again--'With Princes one never does know.' . . .?"
"Yes, that was it. I noticed it at the time; it was very neat. You can
see that he has a vast experience of life."
"The astonishing thing is that he should have been dining with the
Swanns, and that he seems to have found quite respectable people there,
officials even. How on earth can Mme. Swann have managed to catch them?"
"Did you notice the malicious way he said: 'It is a house which is
especially attractive to gentlemen!'?"
And each of them attempted to reproduce the manner in which M. de
Norpois had uttered these words, as they might have attempted to capture
some intonation of Bressant's voice or of Thiron's in _L'Aventurière_
or in the _Gendre de M. Poirier._ But of all his sayings there was none
so keenly relished as one was by Françoise, who, years afterwards,
even, could not "keep a straight face" if we reminded her that she had
been qualified by the Ambassador as "a chef of the first order", a
compliment which my mother had gone in person to transmit to her, as a
War Minister publishes the congratulations addressed to him by a
visiting Sovereign after the grand review. I, as it happened, had
preceded my mother to the kitchen. For I had extorted from Françoise,
who though opposed to war was cruel, that she would cause no undue
suffering to the rabbit which she had to kill, and I had had no report
yet of its death. Françoise assured me that it had passed away as
peacefully as could be desired, and very swiftly. "I have never seen a
beast like it; it died without uttering a word; you would have thought
it was dumb." Being but little versed in the language of beasts I
suggested that the rabbit had not, perhaps, a cry like the chicken's.
"Just wait till you see," said Françoise, filled with contempt for my
ignorance, "if rabbits don't cry every bit as much as chickens. Why,
they are far noisier." She received the compliments of M. de Norpois
with the proud simplicity, the joyful and (if but for the moment)
intelligent expression of an artist when someone speaks to him of his
art. My mother had sent her when she first came to us to several of the
big restaurants to see how the cooking there was done. I had the same
pleasure, that evening, in hearing her dismiss the most famous of them
as mere cookshops that I had had long ago, when I learned with regard to
theatrical artists that the hierarchy of their merits did not at all
correspond to that of their reputations. "The Ambassador," my mother
told her, "assured me that he knows no place where he can get cold beef
and _soufflés_ as good as yours." Françoise, with an air of modesty
and of paying just homage to the truth, agreed, but seemed not at all
impressed by the title "Ambassador"; she said of M. de Norpois, with the
friendliness due to a man who had taken her for a chef: "He's a good old
soul, like me." She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he
arrived, but knowing that Mamma hated their standing about behind doors
and in windows, and thinking that Mamma would get to know from the other
servants or from the porter that she had been keeping watch (for
Françoise saw everywhere nothing but "jealousies" and "tale-bearings",
which played the same grim and unending part in her imagination as do
for others of us the intrigues of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had
contented herself with a peep from the kitchen window, "so as not to
have words with Madame," and beneath the momentary aspect of M. de
Norpois had "thought it was Monsieur Legrand," because of what she
called his "agelity" and in spite of their having not a single point in
common. "Well," inquired my mother, "and how do you explain that nobody
else can make a jelly as well as you--when you choose?" "I really
couldn't say how that becomes about," replied Françoise, who had
established no very clear line of demarcation between the verb "to
come", in certain of its meanings at least, and the verb "to become".
She was speaking the truth, if not the whole truth, being scarcely more
capable--or desirous--of revealing the mystery which ensured the
superiority of her jellies or her creams than a leader of fashion the
secrets of her toilet or a great singer those of her song. Their
explanations tell us little; it was the same with the recipes furnished
by our cook. "They do it in too much of a hurry," she went on, alluding
to the great restaurants, "and then it's not all done together. You want
the beef to become like a sponge, then it will drink up all the juice to
the last drop. Still, there was one of those Cafés where I thought they
did know a little bit about cooking. I don't say it was altogether my
jelly, but it was very nicely done, and the _soufflés_ had plenty of
cream." "Do you mean Henry's?" asked my father (who had now joined us),
for he greatly enjoyed that restaurant in the Place Gaillon where he
went regularly to club dinners. "Oh, dear no!" said Françoise, with a
mildness which cloaked her profound contempt. "I meant a little
restaurant. At that Henry's it's all very good, sure enough, but it's
not a restaurant, it's more like a--soup-kitchen." "Weber's, then?" "Oh,
no, sir, I meant a good restaurant. Weber's, that's in the Rue Royale;
that's not a restaurant, it's a drinking-shop. I don't know that the
food they give you there is even served. I think they don't have' any
table-cloths; they just shove it down in front of you like that, with a
take it or leave it." "Ciro's?" "Oh! there I should say they have the
cooking done by ladies of the world." ("World" meant for Françoise the
under-world.) "Lord! They need that to fetch the boys in." We could see
that, with all her air of simplicity, Françoise was for the celebrities
of her profession a more disastrous "comrade" than the most jealous, the
most infatuated of actresses. We felt, all the same, that she had a
proper feeling for her art and a respect for tradition; for she went on:
"No, I mean a restaurant where they looked as if they kept a very good
little family table. It's a place of some consequence, too. Plenty of
custom there. Oh, they raked in the coppers there, all right."
Françoise, being an economist, reckoned in coppers, where your plunger
would reckon in gold. "Madame knows the place well enough, down there to
the right along the main boulevards, a little way back." The restaurant
of which she spoke with this blend of pride and good-humoured tolerance
was, it turned out, the Café Anglais.
When New Year's Day came, I first of all paid a round of family visits
with Mamma who, so as not to tire me, had planned them beforehand (with
the aid of an itinerary drawn up by my father) according to districts
rather than to degrees of kinship. But no sooner had we entered the
drawing-room of the distant cousin whose claim to being visited first
was that her house was at no distance from ours, than my mother was
horrified to see standing there, his present of _marrons glacés_ or
_déguisés_ in his hand, the bosom friend of the most sensitive of all
my uncles, to whom he would at once go and report that we had not begun
our round with him. And this uncle would certainly be hurt; he would
have thought it quite natural that we should go from the Madeleine to
the Jardin des Plantes, where he lived, before stopping at
Saint-Augustin, on our way to the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine.
Our visits ended (my grandmother had dispensed us from the duty of
calling on her, since we were to dine there that evening), I ran all the
way to the Champs-Elysées to give to our own special stall-keeper, with
instructions to hand it over to the person who came to her several times
a week from the Swanns to buy gingerbread, the letter which, on the day
when my friend had caused me so much anxiety, I had decided to send her
at the New Year, and in which I told her that our old friendship was
vanishing with the old year, that I would forget, now, my old sorrows
and disappointments, and that, from this first day of January, it was a
new friendship that we were going to cement, one so solid that nothing
could destroy it, so wonderful that I hoped that Gilberte would go out
of her way to preserve it in all its beauty, and to warn me in time, as
I promised to warn her, should either of us detect the least sign of a
peril that might endanger it. On our way home Françoise made me stop at
the corner of the Rue Royale, before an open air stall from which she
selected for her own stock of presents photographs of Pius IX and
Raspail, while for myself I purchased one of Berma. The innumerable
admiration which that artist excited gave an air almost of poverty to
this one face that she had to respond with, unalterable and precarious
as are the garments of people who have not a "change", this face on
which she must continually expose to view only the tiny dimple upon her
upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, a few other physical peculiarities
always the same, which, when it came to that, were at the mercy of a
burn or a blow. This face, moreover, could not in itself have seemed to
me beautiful, but it gave me the idea, and consequently the desire to
kiss it by reason of all the kisses that it must have received, for
which, from its page in the album, it seemed still to be appealing with
that coquettishly tender gaze, that artificially ingenuous smile. For
our Berma must indeed have felt for many young men those longings which
she confessed under cover of the personality of Phaedra, longings of
which everything, even the glamour of her name which enhanced her beauty
and prolonged her youth, must render the gratification so easy to her.
Night was falling; I stopped before a column of playbills, on which was
posted that of the piece in which she was to appear on January I. A
moist and gentle breeze was blowing. It was a time of day and year that
I knew; I suddenly felt a presentiment that New Year's Day was not a day
different from the rest, that it was not the first day of a new world,
in which I might, by a chance that had never yet occurred, that was
still intact, make Gilberte's acquaintance afresh, as at the Creation of
the World, as though the past had no longer any existence, as though
there had been obliterated, with the indications which I might have
preserved for my future guidance, the disappointments which she had
sometimes brought me; a new world in which nothing should subsist from
the old--save one thing, my desire that Gilberte should love me. I
realised that if my heart hoped for such a reconstruction, round about
it, of a universe that had not satisfied it before, it was because my
heart had not altered, and I told myself that there was no reason why
Gilberte's should have altered either; I felt that this new friendship
was the same, just as there is no boundary ditch between their
fore-runners and those new years which our desire for them, without
being able to reach and so to modify them, invests, unknown to
themselves, with distinctive names. I might dedicate this new year, if I
chose, to Gilberte, and as one bases a religious system upon the blind
laws of nature, endeavour to stamp New Year's Day with the particular
image that I had formed of it; but in vain, I felt that it was not aware
that people called it New Year's Day, that it was passing in a wintry
dusk in a manner that was not novel to me; in the gentle breeze that
floated about the column of playbills I had recognised, I had felt
reappear the eternal, the universal substance, the familiar moisture,
the unheeding fluidity of the old days and years.
I returned to the house. I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who
differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to
give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in
the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which
alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte. I was young
still, none the less, since I had been able to write her one, by means
of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and
longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have
grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters,
the futility of which their experience has shewn.
After I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged upon this
festive evening, kept me awake. I thought of all the people who were
ending the night in pleasure, of the lover, the troop, it might be, of
debauchees who would be going to meet Berma at the stage-door after the
play that I had seen announced for this evening. I was not even able, so
as to calm the agitation which that idea engendered in me during my
sleepless night, to assure myself that Berma was not, perhaps, thinking
about love, since the lines that she was reciting, which she had long
and carefully rehearsed, reminded her at every moment that love is an
exquisite thing, as of course she already knew, and knew so well that
she displayed its familiar pangs--only enriched with a new violence and
an unsuspected sweetness--to her astonished audience; and yet each of
them had felt those pangs himself. I lighted my candle again, to look
once more upon her face. At the thought that it was, no doubt, at that
very moment being caressed by those men whom I could not prevent from
giving to Berma and receiving from her joys superhuman but vague, I felt
an emotion more cruel than voluptuous, a longing that was aggravated
presently by the sound of a horn, as one hears it on the nights of the
Lenten carnival and often of other public holidays, which, because it
then lacks all poetry, is more saddening, coming from a toy squeaker,
than "at evening, in the depth of the woods." At that moment, a message
from Gilberte would perhaps not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut
across one another's paths, and in this confused existence it is but
rarely that a piece of good fortune coincides with the desire that
clamoured for it.
I continued to go to the Champs-Elysées on fine days, along streets
whose stylish pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of
water-colours were then at the height of fashion) in a lightly floating
atmosphere. It would be untrue to say that in those days the palaces of
Gabriel struck me as being of greater beauty, or even of another epoch
than the adjoining houses. I found more style, and should have supposed
more antiquity if not in the Palais de l'Industrie at any rate in the
Trocadéro. Plunged in a restless sleep, my adolescence embodied in one
uniform vision the whole of the quarter through which it might be
strolling, and I had never dreamed that there could be an eighteenth
century building in the Rue Royale, just as I should have been
astonished to learn that the Porte-Saint-Martin and the
Porte-Saint-Denis, those glories of the age of Louis XIV, were not
contemporary with the most recently built tenements in the sordid
regions that bore their names. Once only one of Gabriel's palaces made
me stop for more than a moment; that was because, night having fallen,
its columns, dematerialised by the moonlight, had the appearance of
having been cut out in pasteboard, and by recalling to me a scene in the
operetta _Orphée aux Enfers_ gave me for the first time an impression
of beauty.
Meanwhile Gilberte never came to the Champs-Elysées. And yet it was
imperative that I should see her, for I could not so much as remember
what she was like. The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of
looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which shall
give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and,
until that word is uttered, our alternative if not simultaneous
imaginings of joy and of despair, all these make our observation, in the
beloved object's presence, too tremulous to be able to carry away a dear
impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at
once which endeavours to learn from the visible aspect alone what lies
behind it is over-indulgent to the thousand forms, to the changing
fragrance, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we
are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent position. Whereas
the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her
are always blurred. I did not rightly know how Gilberte's features were
composed, save in the heavenly moments when she disclosed them to me; I
could remember nothing but her smile. And not being able to see again
that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture
it, I would be disgusted to find, outlined in my memory with a maddening
precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the man with the
wooden horses and of the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost
a dear friend whom they never see even while they are asleep, are
exasperated at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of
insupportable creatures whom it is quite enough to have known in the
waking world. In their inability to form any image of the object of
their grief they are almost led to assert that they feel no grief. And I
was not far from believing that, since I could not recall the features
of Gilberte, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her.
At length she returned to play there almost every day, setting before me
fresh pleasures to desire, to demand of her for the morrow, indeed
making my love for her every day, in this sense, a new love. But an
incident was to change once again, and abruptly, the manner in which, at
about two o'clock every afternoon, the problem of my love confronted me.
Had M. Swann intercepted the letter that I had written to his daughter,
or was Gilberte merely confessing to me long after the event, and so
that I should be more prudent in future, a state of things already long
established? As I was telling her how greatly I admired her father and
mother, she assumed that vague air, full of reticence and kept secrets,
which she invariably wore when anyone spoke to her of what she was going
to do, her walks, drives, visits--then suddenly expressed it with: "You
know, they can't abide you!" and, slipping from me like the Undine that
she was, burst out laughing. Often her laughter, out of harmony with her
words, seemed, as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on
another plane. M. and Mme. Swann did not require Gilberte to give up
playing with me, but they would have been just as well pleased, she
thought, if we had never begun. They did not look upon our relations
with a kindly eye; they believed me to be a young person of low moral
standard and imagined that my influence over their daughter must be
evil. This type of unscrupulous young man whom the Swanns thought that I
resembled, I pictured him to myself as detesting the parents of the girl
he loved, flattering them to their faces but, when he was alone with
her, making fun of them, urging her on to disobey them and, when once he
had completed his conquest, not allowing them even to set eyes on her
again. With these characteristics (though they are never those under
which the basest of scoundrels recognises himself) how vehemently did my
heart contrast the sentiments that did indeed animate it with regard to
Swann, so passionate, on the contrary, that I never doubted that, were
he to have the least suspicion of them, he must repent of his
condemnation of me as of a judicial error. All that I felt about him I
made bold to express to him in a long letter which I entrusted to
Gilberte, with the request that she would deliver it. She consented.
Alas! so he saw in me an even greater impostor than I had feared; those
sentiments which I had supposed myself to be portraying, in sixteen
pages, with such amplitude of truth, so he had suspected them; in short,
the letter that I had written him, as ardent and as sincere as the words
that I had uttered to M. de Norpois, met with no more success. Gilberte
told me next day, after taking me aside behind a clump of laurels, along
a little path by which we sat down on a couple of chairs, that as he
read my letter, which she had now brought back to me, her father had
shrugged his shoulders, with: "All this means nothing; it only goes to
prove how right I was." I, who knew the purity of my intentions, the
goodness of my soul, was furious that my words should not even have
impinged upon the surface of Swann's ridiculous error. For it was an
error; of that I had then no doubt. I felt that I had described with
such accuracy certain irrefutable characteristics of my generous
sentiments that, if Swann had not at once reconstructed these from my
indications, had not come to ask my forgiveness and to admit that he had
been mistaken, it must be because these noble sentiments he had never
himself experienced, which would make him incapable of understanding the
existence of them in other people.
Well, perhaps it was simply that Swann knew that generosity is often no
more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we
have not yet named and classified them. Perhaps he had recognised in the
sympathy that I expressed for him simply an effect--and the strongest
possible proof--of my love for Gilberte, by which, and not by any
subordinate veneration of himself, my subsequent actions would be
irresistibly controlled. I was unable to share his point of view, since
I had not succeeded in abstracting my love from myself, in forcing it
back into the common experience of humanity, and thus suffering,
experimentally, its consequences; I was in despair. I was obliged to
leave Gilberte for a moment; Françoise had called me. I must accompany
her into a little pavilion covered in a green trellis, not unlike one of
the disused toll-houses of old Paris, in which had recently been
installed what in England they call a lavatory but in France, by an
ill-informed piece of anglomania, "water-closets". The old, damp walls
at the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, emitted a chill
and fusty smell which, relieving me at once of the anxieties that
Swann's words, as reported by Gilberte, had just awakened in me,
pervaded me with a pleasure not at all of the same character as other
pleasures, which leave one more unstable than before, incapable of
retaining them, of possessing them, but, on the contrary, with a
consistent pleasure on which I could lean for support, delicious,
soothing, rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and certain.
I should have liked, as long ago in my walks along the Guermantes way,
to endeavour to penetrate the charm of this impression which had seized
hold of me, and, remaining there motionless, to interrogate this
antiquated emanation which invited me not to enjoy the pleasure which it
was offering me only as an "extra", but to descend into the underlying
reality which it had not yet disclosed to me. But the tenant of the
establishment, an elderly dame with painted cheeks and an auburn wig,
was speaking to me. Françoise thought her "very well-to-do indeed." Her
"missy" had married what Françoise called "a young man of family,"
which meant that he differed more, in her eyes, from a workman than, in
Saint-Simon's, a duke did from a man "risen from the dregs of the
people." No doubt the tenant, before entering upon her tenancy, had met
with reverses. But Françoise was positive that she was a "marquise",
and belonged to the Saint-Ferréol family. This "marquise" warned me not
to stand outside in the cold, and even opened one of her doors for me,
saying: "Won't you go inside for a minute? Look, here's a nice, clean
one, and I shan't charge you anything." Perhaps she just made this offer
in the spirit in which the young ladies at Gouache's, when we went in
there to order something, used to offer me one of the sweets which they
kept on the counter under glass bells, and which, alas, Mamma would
never allow me to take; perhaps with less innocence, like an old florist
whom Mamma used to have in to replenish her flower-stands, who rolled
languishing eyes at me as she handed me a rose. In any event, if the
"marquise" had a weakness for little boys, when she threw open to them
the hypogean doors of those cubicles of stone in which men crouch like
sphinxes, she must have been moved to that generosity less by the hope
of corrupting them than by the pleasure which all of us feel in
displaying a needless prodigality to those whom we love, for I have
never seen her with any other visitor except an old park-keeper.
A moment later I said good-bye to the "marquise", and went out
accompanied by Françoise, whom I left to return to Gilberte. I caught
sight of her at once, on a chair, behind the clump of laurels. She was
there so as not to be seen by her friends: they were playing at
hide-and-seek. I went and sat down by her side. She had on a flat cap
which drooped forwards over her eyes, giving her the same "underhand",
brooding, crafty look which I had remarked in her that first time at
Combray. I asked her if there was not some way for me to have it out
with her father, face to face. Gilberte said that she had suggested that
to him, but that he had not thought it of any use. "Look," she went on,
"don't go away without your letter; I must run along to the others, as
they haven't caught me."
Had Swann appeared on the scene then before I had recovered it, this
letter, by the sincerity of which I felt that he had been so
unreasonable in not letting himself be convinced, perhaps he would have
seen that it was he who had been in the right. For as I approached
Gilberte, who, leaning back in her chair, told me to take the letter but
did not hold it out to me, I felt myself so irresistibly attracted by
her body that I said to her:
"Look! You try to stop me from getting it; we'll see which is the
stronger."
She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the
plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders, either because she was
still of an age for that or because her mother chose to make her look a
child for a little longer so that she herself might still seem young;
and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, she
resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as
two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her
gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb;
and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath
with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, as it were
a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express
itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse;
immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon Gilberte said,
good-naturedly:
"You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little."
Perhaps she was dimly conscious that my game had had another object than
that which I had avowed, but too dimly to have been able to see that I
had attained it. And I, who was afraid that she had seen (and a slight
recoil, as though of offended modesty which she made and checked a
moment later made me think that my fear had not been unfounded), agreed
to go on wrestling, lest she should suppose that I had indeed no other
object than that, after which I wished only to sit quietly by her side.
On my way home I perceived, I suddenly recollected the impression,
concealed from me until then, towards which, without letting me
distinguish or recognise it, the cold, almost sooty smell of the
trellised pavilion had borne me. It was that of my uncle Adolphe's
little sitting-room at Combray, which had indeed exhaled the same odour
of humidity. But I could not understand, and I postponed the attempt to
discover why the recollection of so trivial an impression had given me
so keen a happiness. It struck me, however, that I did indeed deserve
the contempt of M. de Norpois; I had preferred, hitherto, to all other
writers, one whom he styled a mere "flute-player" and a positive rapture
had been conveyed to me, not by any important idea, but by a mouldy
smell.
For some time past, in certain households, the name of the
Champs-Elysées, if a visitor mentioned it, would be greeted by the
mother of the family with that air of contempt which mothers keep for a
physician of established reputation whom they have (or so they make out)
seen make too many false diagnoses to have any faith left in him; people
insisted that these gardens were not good for children, that they knew
of more than one sore throat, more than one case of measles and any
number of feverish chills for which the Champs must be held responsible.
Without venturing openly to doubt the maternal affection of Mamma, who
continued to let me play there, several of her friends deplored her
inability to see what was as plain as daylight.
Neurotic subjects are perhaps less addicted than any, despite the
time-honoured phrase, to "listening to their insides": they can hear so
many things going on inside themselves, by which they realise later that
they did wrong to let themselves be alarmed, that they end by paying no
attention to any of them. Their nervous systems have so often cried out
to them for help, as though from some serious malady, when it was merely
because snow was coming, or because they had to change their rooms, that
they have acquired the habit of paying no more heed to these warnings
than a soldier who in the heat of battle perceives them so little that
he is capable, although dying, of carrying on for some days still the
life of a man in perfect health. One morning, bearing arranged within me
all my regular disabilities, from whose constant, internal circulation I
kept my mind turned as resolutely away as from the circulation of my
blood, I had come running into the dining-room where my parents were
already at table, and--having assured myself, as usual, that to feel
cold may mean not that one ought to warm oneself but that, for instance,
one has received a scolding, and not to feel hungry that it is going to
rain, and not that one ought not to eat anything--had taken my place
between them when, in the act of swallowing the first mouthful of a
particularly tempting cutlet, a nausea, a giddiness stopped me, the
feverish reaction of a malady that had already begun, the symptoms of
which had been masked, retarded by the ice of my indifference, but which
obstinately refused the nourishment that I was not in a fit state to
absorb. Then, at the same moment, the thought that they would stop me
from going out if they saw that I was unwell gave me, as the instinct of
self-preservation gives a wounded man, the strength to crawl to my own
room, where I found that I had a temperature of 104, and then to get
ready to go to the Champs-Elysées. Through the languid and vulnerable
shell which encased them, my eager thoughts were urging me towards, were
clamouring for the soothing delight of a game of prisoner's base with
Gilberte, and an hour later, barely able to keep on my feet, but happy
in being by her side, I had still the strength to enjoy it.
Françoise, on our return, declared that I had been "taken bad", that I
must have caught a "hot and cold", while the doctor, who was called in
at once, declared that he "preferred" the "severity", the "virulence" of
the rush of fever which accompanied my congestion of the lungs, and
would be no more than "a fire of straw", to other forms, more
"insidious" and "septic". For some time now I had been liable to choking
fits, and our doctor, braving the disapproval of my grandmother, who
could see me already dying a drunkard's death, had recommended me to
take, as well as the caffeine which had been prescribed to help me to
breathe, beer, champagne or brandy when I felt an attack coming. These
attacks would subside, he told me, in the "euphoria" brought about by
the alcohol. I was often obliged, so that my grandmother should allow
them to give it to me, instead of dissembling, almost to make a display
of my state of suffocation. On the other hand, as soon as I felt an
attack coming, never being quite certain what proportions it would
assume, I would grow distressed at the thought of my grandmother's
anxiety, of which I was far more afraid than of my own sufferings. But
at the same time my body, either because it was too weak to keep those
sufferings secret, or because it feared lest, in their ignorance of the
imminent disaster, people might demand of me some exertion which it
would have found impossible or dangerous, gave me the need to warn my
grandmother of my attacks with a punctiliousness into which I finally
put a sort of physiological scruple. Did I perceive in myself a
disturbing symptom which I had not previously observed, my body was in
distress so long as I had not communicated it to my grandmother. Did she
pretend to pay no attention, it made me insist. Sometimes I went too
far; and that dear face, which was no longer able always to control its
emotion as in the past, would allow an expression of pity to appear, a
painful contraction. Then my heart was wrung by the sight of her grief;
as if my kisses had had power to expel that grief, as if my affection
could give my grandmother as much joy as my recovery, I flung myself
into her arms. And its scruples being at the same time calmed by the
certainty that she now knew the discomfort that I felt, my body offered
no opposition to my reassuring her. I protested that this discomfort had
been nothing, that I was in no sense to be pitied, that she might be
quite sure that I was now happy; my body had wished to secure exactly
the amount of pity that it deserved, and, provided that someone knew
that it 'had a pain' in its right side, it could see no harm in my
declaring that this pain was of no consequence and was not an obstacle
to my happiness; for my body did not pride itself on its philosophy;
that was outside its province. Almost every day during my convalescence
I passed through these crises of suffocation. One evening, after my
grandmother had left me comparatively well, she returned to my room very
late and, seeing me struggling for breath, "Oh, my poor boy," she
exclaimed, her face quivering with sympathy, "you are in dreadful pain."
She left me at once; I heard the outer gate open, and in a little while
she came back with some brandy which she had gone out to buy, since
there was none in the house. Presently I began to feel better. My
grandmother, who was rather flushed, seemed "put out" about something,
and her eyes had a look of weariness and dejection.
"I shall leave you alone now, and let you get the good of this
improvement," she said, rising suddenly to go. I detained her, however,
for a kiss, and could feel on her cold cheek something moist, but did
not know whether it was the dampness of the night air through which she
had just passed. Next day, she did not come to my room until the
evening, having had, she told me, to go out. I considered that this
shewed a surprising indifference to my welfare, and I had to restrain
myself so as not to reproach her with it.
As my chokings had persisted long after any congestion remained that
could account for them, my parents asked for a consultation with
Professor Cottard. It is not enough that a physician who is called in to
treat cases of this sort should be learned. Brought face to face with
symptoms which may or may not be those of three or four different
complaints, it is in the long run his instinct, his eye that must decide
with which, despite the more or less similar appearance of them all, he
has to deal. This mysterious gift does not imply any superiority in the
other departments of the intellect, and a creature of the utmost
vulgarity, who admires the worst pictures, the worst music, in whose
mind there is nothing out of the common, may perfectly well possess it.
In my case, what was physically evident might equally well have been due
to nervous spasms, to the first stages of tuberculosis, to asthma, to a
toxi-alimentary dyspnoea with renal insufficiency, to chronic
bronchitis, or to a complex state into which more than one of these
factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required to be treated firmly, and
discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care and with a "feeding-up"
process which would have been bad for an arthritic condition such as
asthma, and might indeed have been dangerous in a case of
toxi-alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for a strict diet which, in
return, would be fatal to a tuberculous patient. But Cottard's
hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious. "Purges; violent
and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk. No meat. No
alcohol." My mother murmured that I needed, all the same, to be "built
up", that my nerves were already weak, that drenching me like a horse
and restricting my diet would make me worse. I could see in Cottard's
eyes, as uneasy as though he were afraid of missing a train, that he was
asking himself whether he had not allowed his natural good-humour to
appear. He was trying to think whether he had remembered to put on his
mask of coldness, as one looks for a mirror to see whether one has not
forgotten to tie one's tie. In his uncertainty, and, so as, whatever he
had done, to put things right, he replied brutally: "I am not in the
habit of repeating my instructions. Give me a pen. Now remember, milk!
Later on, when we have got the crises and the agrypnia by the throat, I
should like you to take a little clear soup, and then a little broth,
but always with milk; _au lait!_ You'll enjoy that, since Spain is all
the rage just now; _ollé, ollé!_" His pupils knew this joke well, for
he made it at the hospital whenever he had to put a heart or liver case
on a milk diet. "After that, you will gradually return to your normal
life. But whenever there is any coughing or choking--purges, injections,
bed, milk!" He listened with icy calm, and without uttering a word, to
my mother's final objections, and as he left us without having
condescended to explain the reasons for this course of treatment, my
parents concluded that it had no bearing on my case, and would weaken me
to no purpose, and so they did not make me try it. Naturally they sought
to conceal their disobedience from the Professor, and to succeed in this
avoided all the houses in which he was likely to be found. Then, as my
health became worse, they decided to make me follow out Cottard's
prescriptions to the letter; in three days my "rattle" and cough had
ceased, I could breathe freely. Whereupon we realised that Cottard,
while finding, as he told us later on, that I was distinctly asthmatic,
and still more inclined to "imagine things", had seen that what was
really the matter with me at the moment was intoxication, and that by
loosening my liver and washing out my kidneys he would get rid of the
congestion of my bronchial tubes and thus give me back my breath, my
sleep and my strength. And we realised that this imbecile was a clinical
genius. At last I was able to get up. But they spoke of not letting me
go any more to the Champs-Elysées. They said that it was because the
air there was bad; but I felt sure that this was only a pretext so that
I should not see Mlle. Swann, and I forced myself to repeat the name of
Gilberte all the time, like the native tongue which peoples in captivity
endeavour to preserve among themselves so as not to forget the land that
they will never see again. Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead
with her hand, saying: "So little boys don't tell Mamma their troubles
any more?" And Françoise used to come up to me every day with: "What a
face, to be sure! If you could just see yourself! Anyone would think
there was a corpse in the house." It is true that, if I had simply had a
cold in the head, Françoise would have assumed the same funereal air.
These lamentations pertained rather to her "class" than to the state of
my health. I could not at the time discover whether this pessimism was
due to sorrow or to satisfaction. I decided provisionally that it was
social and professional.
One day, after the postman had called, my mother laid a letter upon my
bed. I opened it carelessly, since it could not bear the one signature
that would have made me happy, the name of Gilberte, with whom I had no
relations outside the Champs-Elysées. And lo, at the foot of the page,
embossed with a silver seal representing a man's head in a helmet, and
under him a scroll with the device _Per viam rectam_, beneath a letter
written in a large and flowing hand, in which almost every word appeared
to be underlined, simply because the crosses of the 't's ran not across
but over them, and so drew a line beneath the corresponding letters of
the word above, it was indeed Gilberte's signature and nothing else that
I saw. But because I knew that to be impossible upon a letter addressed
to myself, the sight of it, unaccompanied by any belief in it, gave me
no pleasure. For a moment it merely struck an impression of unreality on
everything round about me. With lightning rapidity the impossible
signature danced about my bed, the fireplace, the four walls. I saw
everything sway, as one does when one falls from a horse, and I asked
myself whether there was not an existence altogether different from the
one I knew, in direct contradiction of it, but itself the true
existence, which, being suddenly revealed to me, filled me with that
hesitation which sculptors, in representing the Last Judgment, have
given to the awakening dead who find themselves at the gates of the next
world. "My dear Friend," said the letter, "I hear that you have been
very ill and have given up going to the Champs-Elysées. I hardly ever
go there either because there has been such an enormous lot of illness.
But I'm having my friends to tea here every Monday and Friday. Mamma
asks me to tell you that it will be a great pleasure to us all if you
will come too, as soon as you are well again, and we can have some more
nice talks here, just like the Champs-Elysées. Good-bye, dear friend; I
hope that your parents will allow you to come to tea very often. With
all my kindest regards. GILBERTE."
While I was reading these words, my nervous system was receiving, with
admirable promptitude, the news that a piece of great good fortune had
befallen me. But my mind, that is to say myself, and in fact the party
principally concerned, was still in ignorance. Such good fortune, coming
from Gilberte, was a thing of which I had never ceased to dream; a thing
wholly in my mind, it was, as Leonardo says of painting, _cosa mentale._
Now, a sheet of paper covered with writing is not a thing that the mind
assimilates at once. But as soon as I had finished reading the letter, I
thought of it, it became an object of my dreams, became, it also, _cosa
mentale_, and I loved it so much already that every few minutes I must
read it, kiss it again. Then at last I was conscious of my happiness.
Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love can
always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought
about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all
interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just
as, when I was little and went first to the seaside, so as to give me
some pleasure in bathing, which I detested because it took away my
breath, she used secretly to hand to the man who was to "dip" me
marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed
that I myself had discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However,
with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted
situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to
understand it, since in so far as these are inexorable, as they are
unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by
rational laws. When a multi-millionaire--who for all his millions is
quite a charming person--sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman
with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his desperation, all
the resources of wealth, and brings every worldly influence to bear
without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in
the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that
Fate intends to crush him, and to make him die of an affection of the
heart, than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles, against
which lovers have to contend, and which their imagination, over-excited
by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are contained, as often as not,
in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot bring back
to themselves, in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her, the
fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the
kind of pleasures which, at the moment, she is demanding of life,
pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover's wealth can procure for
her. In any event, the lover is scarcely in a position to discover the
nature of these obstacles, which her womanly cunning hides from him and
his own judgment, falsified by love, prevents him from estimating
exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor
succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source.
Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they
last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as that is not a
disinterested passion, the lover who is no longer in love does not seek
to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in
love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her.
Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a
catastrophe, when love is in question, envelops just as frequently the
suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had come to me with
Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few
solutions that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment
of such a kind that every satisfaction which we can bring to it does no
more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is
granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion that we are
healed.
So far as concerns this letter, at the foot of which Françoise declined
to recognise Gilberte's name, because the elaborate capital 'G' leaning
against the undotted 'i' looked more like an 'A' while the final
syllable was indefinitely prolonged by a waving flourish, if we persist
in looking for a rational explanation of the sudden reversal of her
attitude towards me which it indicated, and which made me so radiantly
happy, we may perhaps find that I was to some extent indebted for it to
an incident which I should have supposed, on the contrary, to be
calculated to ruin me for ever in the sight of the Swann family. A short
while back, Bloch had come to see me at a time when Professor Cottard,
whom, now that I was following his instructions, we were again calling
in, happened to be in my room. As his examination of me was over, and he
was sitting with me simply as a visitor because my parents had invited
him to stay to dinner, Bloch was allowed to come in. While we were all
talking, Bloch having mentioned that he had heard it said that Mme.
Swann was very fond of me, by a lady with whom he had been dining the
day before, who was herself very intimate with Mme. Swann, I should have
liked to reply that he was most certainly mistaken, and to establish the
fact (from the same scruple of conscience that had made me proclaim it
to M. de Norpois, and for fear of Mme. Swann's taking me for a liar)
that I did not know her and had never spoken to her. But I had not the
courage to correct Bloch's mistake, because I could see quite well that
it was deliberate, and that, if he invented something that Mme. Swann
could not possibly have said, it was simply to let us know (what he
considered flattering to himself, and was not true either) that he had
been dining with one of that lady's friends. And so it fell out that,
whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know but would very
much like to know Mme. Swann, had taken great care to avoid speaking to
her about me, Cottard, who was her doctor also, having gathered from
what he had heard Bloch say that she knew me quite well and thought
highly of me, concluded that to remark, when next he saw her, that I was
a charming young fellow and a great friend of his could not be of the
smallest use to me and would be of advantage to himself, two reasons
which made him decide to speak of me to Odette whenever an opportunity
arose.
Thus at length I found my way into that abode from which was wafted even
on to the staircase the scent that Mme. Swann used, though it was
embalmed far more sweetly still by the peculiar, disturbing charm that
emanated from the life of Gilberte. The implacable porter, transformed
into a benevolent Eumenid, adopted the custom, when I asked him if I
might go upstairs, of indicating to me, by raising his cap with a
propitious hand, that he gave ear to my prayer. Those windows which,
seen from outside, used to interpose between me and the treasures
within, which were not intended for me, a polished, distant and
superficial stare, which seemed to me the very stare of the Swanns
themselves, it fell to my lot, when in the warm weather I had spent a
whole afternoon with Gilberte in her room, to open them myself, so as to
let in a little air, and even to lean over the sill of one of them by
her side, if it was her mothers "at home" day, to watch the visitors
arrive who would often, raising their heads as they stepped out of their
carriages, greet me with a wave of the hand, taking me for some nephew
of their hostess. At such moments Gilberte's plaits used to brush my
cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once
natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed
tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been
used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, even infinitely
minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given as a reliquary.
But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if
at least I had been able to have their photograph, how far more precious
than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci's pencil! To acquire one
of these, I stooped--with friends of the Swanns, and even with
photographers--to servilities which did not procure for me what I
wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people.
Gilberte's parents, who for so long had prevented me from seeing her,
now--when I entered the dark hall in which hovered perpetually, more
formidable and more to be desired than, at Versailles of old, the
apparition of the King, the possibility of my encountering them, in
which too, invariably, after butting into an enormous hat-stand with
seven branches, like the Candlestick in Holy Writ, I would begin bowing
confusedly before a footman, seated among the skirts of his long grey
coat upon the wood-box, whom in the dim light I had mistaken for Mme.
Swann--Gilberte's parents, if one of them happened to be passing at the
moment of my arrival, so far from seeming annoyed would come and shake
hands with a smile, and say:
"How d'e do?" (They both pronounced it in the same clipped way, which,
you may well imagine, once I was back at home, I made an incessant and
delightful practice of copying.) "Does Gilberte know you're here? She
does? Then I'll leave you to her."
Better still, the tea-parties themselves to which Gilberte invited her
friends, parties which for so long had seemed to me the most
insurmountable of the barriers heaped up between her and myself, became
now an opportunity for uniting us of which she would inform me in a few
lines, written (because I was still a comparative stranger) upon sheets
that were always different. One was adorned with a poodle embossed in
blue, above a fantastic inscription in English with an exclamation mark
after it; another was stamped with an anchor, or with the monogram G. S.
preposterously elongated in a rectangle which ran from top to bottom of
the page, or else with the name Gilberte, now traced across one corner
in letters of gold which imitated my friend's signature and ended in a
flourish, beneath an open umbrella printed in black, now enclosed in a
monogram in the shape of a Chinaman's hat, which contained all the
letters of the word in capitals without its being possible to make out a
single one of them. At last, as the series of different writing-papers
which Gilberte possessed, numerous as it might be, was not unlimited,
after a certain number of weeks I saw reappear the sheet that bore (like
the first letter she had written me) the motto _Per viam rectam_, and
over it the man's head in a helmet, set in a medallion of tarnished
silver. And each of them was chosen, on one day rather than another, by
virtue of a certain ritual, as I then supposed, but more probably, as I
now think, because she tried to remember which of them she had already
used, so as never to send the same one twice to any of her
correspondents, of those at least whom she took special pains to please,
save at the longest possible intervals. As, on account of the different
times of their lessons, some of the friends whom Gilberte used to invite
to her parties were obliged to leave just as the rest were arriving,
while I was still on the stairs I could hear escaping from the hall a
murmur of voices which, such was the emotion aroused in me by the
imposing ceremony in which I was to take part, long before I had reached
the landing, broke all the bonds that still held me to my past life, so
that I did not even remember that I was to take off my muffler as soon
as I felt too hot, and to keep an eye on the clock so as not to be late
in getting home. That staircase, besides, all of wood, as they were
built about that time in certain houses, in keeping with that Henri II
style which had for so long been Odette's ideal though she was shortly
to lose interest in it, and furnished with a placard, to which there was
no equivalent at home, on which one read the words: "NOTICE. The lift
must not be taken downstairs", seemed to me a thing so marvellous that I
told my parents that it was an ancient staircase brought from ever so
far away by M. Swann. My regard for the truth was so great that I should
not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it
to be false, for it alone could enable them to feel for the dignity of
the Swanns' staircase the same respect that I felt myself. It was just
as, when one is talking to some ignorant person who cannot understand in
what the genius of a great physician consists, it is as well not to
admit that he does not know how to cure a cold in the head. But since I
had no power of observation, since, as a general rule, I never knew
either the name or the nature of things that were before my eyes, and
could understand only that when they were connected with the Swanns they
must be extraordinary, I was by no means certain that in notifying my
parents of the artistic value and remote origin of the staircase I was
guilty of falsehood. It did not seem certain; but it must have seemed
probable, for I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me
with: "I know those houses; I have been in one; they are all alike;
Swann just has several floors in one; it was Berlier built them all." He
added that he had thought of taking a flat in one of them, but that he
had changed his mind, finding that they were not conveniently arranged,
and that the landings were too dark. So he said; but I felt
instinctively that my mind must make the sacrifices necessary to the
glory of the Swanns and to my own happiness, and by a stroke of internal
authority, in spite of what I had just heard, I banished for ever from
my memory, as a good Catholic banishes Renan's _Vie de Jésus_, the
destroying thought that their house was just an ordinary flat in which
we ourselves might have been living.
Meanwhile on those tea-party days, pulling myself up the staircase step
by step, reason and memory already cast off like outer garments, and
myself no more now than the sport of the basest reflexes, I would arrive
in the zone in which the scent of Mme. Swann greeted my nostrils. I felt
that I could already behold the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled
by plates heaped with little cakes, and by tiny napkins of grey damask
with figures on them, as required by convention but peculiar to the
Swanns. But this unalterable and governed whole seemed, like Kant's
necessary universe, to depend on a supreme act of free-will. For when we
were all together in Gilberte's little sitting-room, suddenly she would
look at the clock and exclaim:
"I say! It's getting a long time since luncheon, and we aren't having
dinner till eight. I feel as if I could eat something. What do you say?"
And she would make us go into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior
of an Asiatic Temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural
cake, as gracious and sociable as it was imposing, seemed to be
enthroned there in any event, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to
discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown
slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the
palace of Darius. Better still, in proceeding to the demolition of that
Babylonitish pastry, Gilberte did not consider only her own hunger; she
inquired also after mine, while she extracted for me from the crumbling
monument a whole glazed slab jewelled with scarlet fruits, in the
oriental style. She asked me even at what o'clock my parents were
dining, as if I still knew, as if the disturbance that governed me had
allowed to persist the sensation of satiety or of hunger, the notion of
dinner or the picture of my family in my empty memory and paralysed
stomach. Alas, its paralysis was but momentary. The cakes that I took
without noticing them, a time would come when I should have to digest
them. But that time was still remote. Meanwhile Gilberte was making "my"
tea. I went on drinking it indefinitely, whereas a single cup would keep
me awake for twenty-four hours. Which explains why my mother used always
to say: "What a nuisance it is; he can never go to the Swanns' without
coming home ill." But was I aware even, when I was at the Swanns', that
it was tea that I was drinking? Had I known, I should have taken it just
the same, for even supposing that I had recovered for a moment the sense
of the present, that would not have restored to me the memory of the
past or the apprehension of the future. My imagination was incapable of
reaching to the distant time in which I might have the idea of going to
bed, and the need to sleep.
Gilberte's girl friends were not all plunged in that state of
intoxication in which it is impossible to make up one's mind. Some of
them refused tea! Then Gilberte would say, using a phrase highly
fashionable that I year: "I can see I'm not having much of a success
with my tea!" And to destroy more completely any idea of ceremony, she
would disarrange the chairs that were drawn up round the table, with:
"We look just like a wedding breakfast. Good lord, what fools servants
are!"
She nibbled her cake, perched sideways upon a cross-legged seat placed
at an angle to the table. And then, just as though she could have had
all those cakes at her disposal without having first asked leave of her
mother, when Mme. Swann, whose "day" coincided as a rule with Gilberte's
tea-parties, had shewn one of her visitors to the door, and came
sweeping in, a moment later, dressed sometimes in blue velvet, more
often in a black satin gown draped with white lace, she would say with
an air of astonishment: "I say, that looks good, what you've got there.
It makes me quite hungry to see you all eating cake."
"But, Mamma, do! We invite you!" Gilberte would answer.
"Thank you, no, my precious; what would my visitors say? I've still got
Mme. Trombert and Mme. Cottard and Mme. Bontemps; you know dear Mme.
Bontemps never pays very short visits, and she has only just come. What
would all those good people say if I never went back to them? If no one
else calls, I'll come in again and have a chat with you (which will be
far more amusing) after they've all gone. I really think I've earned a
little rest; I have had forty-five different people to-day, and
forty-two of them told me about Gérôme's picture! But you must come
along one of these days," she turned to me, "and take 'your' tea with
Gilberte. She will make it for you just as you like it, as you have it
in your own little 'studio'," she went on, flying off to her visitors,
as if it had been something as familiar to me as my own habits (such as
the habit that I should have had of taking tea, had I ever taken it; as
for my "studio", I was uncertain whether I had one or not) that I had
come to seek in this mysterious world. "When can you come? To-morrow? We
will make you 'toast' every bit as good, as you get at Colombin's. No?
You are horrid!"--for, since she also had begun to form a salon, she had
borrowed Mme. Verdurin's mannerisms, and notably her tone of petulant
autocracy. "Toast" being as incomprehensible to me as "Colombin's", this
further promise could not add to my temptation. It will appear stranger
still, now that everyone uses such expressions--and perhaps even at
Combray they are creeping in--that I had not at first understood of whom
Mme. Swann was speaking when I heard her sing the praises of our old
"nurse". I did not know any English; I gathered, however, as she went on
that the word was intended to denote Françoise. I who, in the
Champs-Elysées, had been so terrified of the bad impression that she
must make, I now learned from Mme. Swann that it was all the things that
Gilberte had told them about my "nurse" that had attracted her husband
and her to me. "One feels that she is so devoted to you; she must be
nice!" (At once my opinion of Françoise was diametrically changed. By
the same token, to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a
feather in her hat no longer appeared quite so essential.) Finally I
learned from some words which Mme. Swann let fall with regard to Mme.
Blatin (whose good nature she recognised but dreaded her visits) that
personal relations with that lady would have been of less value to me
than I had supposed, and would not in any way have improved my standing
with the Swanns.
If I had now begun to explore, with tremors of reverence and joy the
faery domain which, against all probability, had opened to me its
hitherto locked approaches, this was still only in my capacity as a
friend of Gilberte. The kingdom into which I was received was itself
contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his
wife led their supernatural existence and towards which they made their
way, after taking my hand in theirs, when they crossed the hall at the
same moment as myself but in the other direction. But soon I was to
penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary. For instance, Gilberte
might be out when I called, but M. or Mme. Swann was at home. They would
ask who had rung, and on being told that it was myself would send out to
ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in
one way or another, and with this or that object in view, my influence
over their daughter. I reminded myself of that letter, so complete, so
convincing, which I had written to Swann only the other day, and which
he had not deigned even to acknowledge. I marvelled at the impotence of
the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to
solve a single one of those difficulties which, in the sequel, life,
without one's so much as knowing what steps it has taken, so easily
unravels. My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an
excellent influence over her, entitling me now to enjoy the same favours
as if, having had as a companion at some school where they had always
put me at the head of my class the son of a king, I had owed to that
accident the right of informal entry into the palace and to audiences in
the throne-room, Swann, with an infinite benevolence and as though he
were not overburdened with glorious occupations, would make me go into
his library and there let me for an hour on end respond in stammered
monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of
courage, to utterances of which my emotion prevented me from
understanding a single word; would shew me works of art and books which
he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt,
before seeing them, that they infinitely surpassed in beauty anything
that the Louvre possessed or the National Library, but at which I found
it impossible to look. At such moments I should have been grateful to
Swann's butler, had he demanded from me my watch, my tie-pin, my boots,
and made me sign a deed acknowledging him as my heir: in the admirable
words of a popular expression of which, as of the most famous epics, we
do not know who was the author, although, like those epics, and with all
deference to Wolff and his theory, it most certainly had an author, one
of those inventive, modest souls such as we come across every year, who
light upon such gems as "putting a name to a face", though their own
names they never let us learn, I did not know what I was doing. All the
greater was my astonishment, when my visit was prolonged, at finding to
what a zero of realisation, to what an absence of happy ending those
hours spent in the enchanted dwelling led me. But my disappointment
arose neither from the inadequacy of the works of art that were shewn to
me nor from the impossibility of fixing upon them my distracted gaze.
For it was not the intrinsic beauty of the objects themselves that made
it miraculous for me to be sitting in Swann's library, it was the
attachment to those objects--which might have been the ugliest in the
world--of the particular feeling, melancholy and voluptuous, which I had
for so many years localised in that room and which still impregnated it;
similarly the multitude of mirrors, of silver-backed brushes, of altars
to Saint Anthony of Padua, carved and painted by the most eminent
artists, her friends, counted for nothing in the feeling of my own
unworthiness and of her regal benevolence which was aroused in me when
Mme. Swann received me for a moment in her own room, in which three
beautiful and impressive creatures, her principal and second and third
maids, smilingly prepared for her the most marvellous toilets, and
towards which, on the order conveyed to me by the footman in
knee-breeches that Madame wished to say a few words to me, I would make
my way along the tortuous path of a corridor all embalmed, far and near,
by the precious essences which exhaled without ceasing from her
dressing-room a fragrance exquisitely sweet.
When Mme. Swann had returned to her visitors, we could still hear her
talking and laughing, for even with only two people in the room, and as
though she had to cope with all the "good friends" at once, she would
raise her voice, ejaculate her words, as she had so often in the "little
clan" heard its "Mistress" do, at the moments when she "led the
conversation". The expressions which we have borrowed from other people
being those which, for a time at least, we are fondest of using, Mme.
Swann used to select at one time those which she had learned from
distinguished people whom her husband had not managed to prevent her
from getting to know (it was from them that she derived the mannerism
which consists in suppressing the article or demonstrative pronoun, in
French, before an adjective qualifying a person's name), at another time
others more plebeian (such as "It's a mere nothing!" the favourite
expression of one of her friends), and used to make room for them in all
the stories which, by a habit formed among the "little clan", she loved
to tell about people. She would follow these up automatically with, "I
do love that story!" or "Do admit, it's a very _good_ story!" which came
to her, through her husband, from the Guermantes, whom she did not know.
Mme. Swann had left the dining-room, but her husband, who had just
returned home, made his appearance among us in turn. "Do you know if
your mother is alone, Gilberte?" "No, Papa, she has still some people."
"What, still? At seven o'clock! It's appalling! The poor woman must be
absolutely dead. It's odious." (At home I had always heard the first
syllable of this word pronounced with a long 'o', like "ode", but M. and
Mme. Swann made it short, as in "odd".) "Just think of it; ever since
two o'clock this afternoon!" he went on, turning to me. "And Camille
tells me that between four and five he let in at least a dozen people.
Did I say a dozen? I believe he told me fourteen. No, a dozen; I don't
remember. When I came home I had quite forgotten it was her 'day', and
when I saw all those carriages outside the door I thought there must be
a wedding in the house. And just now, while I've been in the library for
a minute, the bell has never stopped ringing; upon my word, it's given
me quite a headache. And are there a lot of them in there still?" "No;
only two." "Who are they, do you know?" "Mme. Cottard and Mme.
Bontemps." "Oh! the wife of the Chief Secretary to the Minister of
Posts." "I know her husband's a clerk in some Ministry or other, but I
don't know what he does." Gilberte assumed a babyish manner.
"What's that? You silly child, you talk as if you were two years old.
What do you mean; 'a clerk in some Ministry or other' indeed! He is
nothing less than Chief Secretary, chief of the whole show, and what's
more--what on earth am I thinking of? Upon my word, I'm getting as
stupid as yourself; he is not the Chief Secretary, he's the Permanent
Secretary."
"I don't know, I'm sure; does that mean a lot, being Permanent
Secretary?" answered Gilberte, who never let slip an opportunity of
displaying her own indifference to anything that gave her parents cause
for vanity. (She may, of course, have considered that she only enhanced
the brilliance of such an acquaintance by not seeming to attach any
undue importance to it.)
"I should think it did 'mean a lot'!" exclaimed Swann, who preferred to
this modesty, which might have left me in doubt, a more explicit mode of
speech. "Why it means simply that he's the first man after the Minister.
In fact, he's more important than the Minister, because it is he that
does all the work. Besides, it appears that he has immense capacity, a
man quite of the first rank, a most distinguished individual. He's an
Officer of the Legion of Honour. A delightful man, he is, and very
good-looking too."
(This man's wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone's
wishes and advice because he was a c charming creature'. He had, what
may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky
beard, good features, a nasal voice, powerful lungs and a glass eye.)
"I may tell you," he added, turning again to me, "that I am greatly
amused to see that lot serving in the present Government, because they
are Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, typical old-fashioned
middle class people, reactionary, clerical, tremendously strait-laced.
Your grandfather knew quite well--at least by name and by sight he must
have known old Chenut, the father, who never tipped the cabmen more than
a ha'penny, though he was a rich enough man for those days, and the
Baron Bréau-Chenut. All their money went in the Union Générale
smash--you're too young to remember that, of course--and, gad! they've
had to get it back as best they could."
"He's the uncle of a little girl who used to come to my lessons, in a
class a long way below mine, the famous 'Albertine'. She's certain to be
dreadfully 'fast' when she's older, but just now she's the quaintest
spectacle." "She is amazing, this daughter of mine. She knows everyone."
"I don't know her. I only used to see her going about, and hear them
calling 'Albertine' here, and 'Albertine' there. But I do know Mme.
Bontemps, and I don't like her much either."
"You are quite wrong; she is charming, pretty, intelligent. In fact,
she's quite clever. I shall go in and say how d'ye do to her, and ask
her if her husband thinks we're going to have war, and whether we can
rely on King Theodosius. He's bound to know, don't you think, since he's
in the counsels of the gods."
It was not thus that Swann used to talk in days gone by; but which of us
cannot call to mind some royal princess of limited intelligence who let
herself be carried off by a footman, and then, ten years later, tried to
get back into society, and found that people were not very willing to
call upon her; have we not found her spontaneously adopting the language
of all the old bores, and, when we referred to some duchess who was at
the height of fashion, heard her say: "She came to see me only
yesterday," or "I live a very quiet life." So that it is superfluous to
make a study of manners, since we can deduce them all from psychological
laws.
The Swanns shared this eccentricity of people who have not many friends;
a visit, an invitation, a mere friendly word from some one ever so
little prominent were for them events to which they aspired to give full
publicity. If bad luck would have it that the Verdurins were in London
when Odette gave a rather smart dinner-party, arrangements were made by
which some common friend was to "cable" a report to them across the
Channel. Even the complimentary letters and telegrams received by Odette
the Swanns were incapable of keeping to themselves. They spoke of them
to their friends, passed them from hand to hand. Thus the Swanns'
drawing-room reminded one of a seaside hotel where telegrams containing
the latest news are posted up on a board.
Still, people who had known the old Swann not merely Outside society, as
I had known him, but in society, in that Guermantes set which, with
certain concessions to Highnesses and Duchesses, was almost infinitely
exacting in the matter of wit and charm, from which banishment was
sternly decreed for men of real eminence whom its members found boring
or vulgar,--such people might have been astonished to observe that their
old Swann had ceased to be not only discreet when he spoke of his
acquaintance, but difficult when he was called upon to enlarge it. How
was it that Mme. Bontemps, so common, so ill-natured, failed to
exasperate him? How could he possibly describe her as attractive? The
memory of the Guermantes set must, one would suppose, have prevented
him; as a matter of fact it encouraged him. There was certainly among
the Guermantes, as compared with the great majority of groups in
society, taste, indeed a refined taste, but also a snobbishness from
which there arose the possibility of a momentary interruption in the
exercise of that taste. If it were a question of some one who was not
indispensable to their circle, of a Minister for Foreign Affairs, a
Republican and inclined to be pompous, or of an Academician who talked
too much, their taste would be brought to bear heavily against him,
Swann would condole with Mme. de Guermantes on having had to sit next to
such people at dinner at one of the Embassies, and they would a thousand
times rather have a man of fashion, that is to say a man of the
Guermantes kind, good for nothing, but endowed with the wit of the
Guermantes, some one who was "of the same chapel" as themselves. Only, a
Grand Duchess, a Princess of the Blood, should she dine often with Mme.
de Guermantes, would soon find herself enrolled in that chapel also,
without having any right to be there, without being at all so endowed.
But with the simplicity of people in society, from the moment they had
her in their houses they went out of their way to find her attractive,
since they were unable to say that it was because she was attractive
that they invited her. Swann, coming to the rescue of Mme. de
Guermantes, would say to her after the Highness had gone: "After all,
she's not such a bad woman; really, she has quite a sense of the comic.
I don't suppose for a moment that she has mastered the _Critique of Pure
Reason_; still, she is not unattractive." "Oh, I do so entirely agree
with you!" the Duchess would respond. "Besides, she was a little
frightened of us all; you will see that she can be charming." "She is
certainly a great deal less devastating than Mme. X----" (the wife of
the talkative Academician, and herself a remarkable woman) "who quotes
twenty volumes at you." "Oh, but there isn't any comparison between
them." The faculty of saying such things as these, and of saying them
sincerely, Swann had acquired from the Duchess, and had never lost. He
made use of it now with reference to the people who came to his house.
He forced himself to distinguish, and to admire in them the qualities
that every human being will display if we examine him with a prejudice
in his favour, and not with the distaste of the nice-minded; he extolled
the merits of Mme. Bontemps, as he had once extolled those of the
Princesse de Parme, who must have been excluded from the Guermantes set
if there had not been privileged terms of admission for certain
Highnesses, and if, when they presented themselves for election, no
consideration had indeed been paid except to wit and charm. We have seen
already, moreover, that Swann had always an inclination (which he was
now putting into practice, only in a more lasting fashion) to exchange
his social position for another which, in certain circumstances, might
suit him better. It is only people incapable of analysing, in their
perception, what at first sight appears indivisible who believe that
one's position is consolidated with one's person. One and the same man,
taken at successive points in his life, will be found to breathe, at
different stages on the social ladder, in atmospheres that do not of
necessity become more and more refined; whenever, in any period of our
existence, we form or re-form associations with a certain environment,
and feel that we can move at ease in it and are made comfortable, we
begin quite naturally to make ourselves fast to it by putting out roots
and tendrils.
In so far as Mme. Bontemps was concerned, I believe also that Swann, in
speaking of her with so much emphasis, was not sorry to think that my
parents would hear that she had been to see his wife. To tell the truth,
in our house the names of the people whom Mme. Swann was gradually
getting to know pricked our curiosity more than they aroused our
admiration. At the name of Mme. Trombert, my mother exclaimed: "Ah!
That's a new recruit, and one who will bring in others." And as though
she found a similarity between the somewhat summary, rapid and violent
manner in which Mme. Swann acquired her friends, as it were by conquest,
and a Colonial expedition, Mamma went on to observe: "Now that the
Tromberts have surrendered, the neighbouring tribes will not be long in
coming in." If she had passed Mme. Swann in the street, she would tell
us when she came home: "I saw Mme. Swann in all her war-paint; she must
have been embarking on some triumphant offensive against the
Massachutoes, or the Cingalese, or the Tromberts." And so with all the
new people whom I told her that I had seen in that somewhat composite
and artificial society, to which they had often been brought with great
difficulty and from widely different surroundings, Mamma would at once
divine their origin, and, speaking of them as of trophies dearly bought,
would say: "Brought back from an Expedition against the so-and-so!"
As for Mme. Cottard, my father was astonished that Mme. Swann could find
anything to be gained by getting so utterly undistinguished a woman to
come to her house, and said: "In spite of the Professor's position, I
must say that I cannot understand it." Mamma, on the other hand,
understood quite well; she knew that a great deal of the pleasure which
a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in
which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of
keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more
brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. Therefore, she requires an
eye-witness who may be allowed to penetrate this new, delicious world
(as a buzzing, browsing insect bores its way into a flower) and will
then, as the course of her visits may carry her, spread abroad, or so at
least one hopes, with the tidings, a latent germ of envy and of wonder.
Mme. Cottard, who might have been created on purpose to fill this part,
belonged to that special category in a visiting list which Mamma (who
inherited certain facets of her father's turn of mind) used to call the
"Tell Sparta" people. Besides--apart from another reason which did not
come to our knowledge until many years later--Mme. Swann, in inviting
this good-natured, reserved and modest friend, had no need to fear lest
she might be introducing into her drawing-room, on her brilliant "days",
a traitor or a rival. She knew what a vast number of homely blossoms
that busy worker, armed with her plume and card-case, could visit in a
single afternoon. She knew the creature's power of dissemination, and,
basing her calculations upon the law of probability, was led to believe
that almost certainly some intimate of the Verdurins would be bound to
hear, within two or three days, how the Governor of Paris had left cards
upon her, or that M. Verdurin himself would be told how M. Le Hault de
Pressagny, the President of the Horse Show, had taken them, Swann and
herself, to the King Theodosius gala; she imagined the Verdurins as
informed of these two events, both so flattering to herself and of these
alone, because the particular materialisations in which we embody and
pursue fame are but few in number, by the default of our own minds which
are incapable of imagining at one time all the forms which, none the
less, we hope--in a general way--that fame will not fail simultaneously
to assume for our benefit.
Mme. Swann had, however, met with no success outside what was called the
"official world". Smart women did not go to her house. It was not the
presence there of Republican "notables" that frightened them away. In
the days of my early childhood, conservative society was to the last
degree worldly, and no "good" house would ever have opened its doors to
a Republican. The people who lived in such an atmosphere imagined that
the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist"--still more, a
"horrid radical"--to their parties was something that would endure for
ever, like oil-lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But, like at
kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges
successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed
to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern. Before I had made my
first Communion, ladies on the "right side" in politics had had the
stupefaction of meeting, while paying calls, a smart Jewess. These new
arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher
would call a "change of criterion". The Dreyfus case brought about
another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to
Mme. Swann's, and the kaleidoscope scattered once again its little
scraps of colour. Everything Jewish, even the smart lady herself, fell
out of the pattern, and various obscure nationalities appeared in its
place. The most brilliant drawing-room in Paris was that of a Prince who
was an Austrian and ultra-Catholic. If instead of the Dreyfus case there
had come a war with Germany, the base of the kaleidoscope would have
been turned in the other direction, and its pattern reversed. The Jews
having shewn, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots also,
would have kept their position, and no one would have cared to go any
more, or even to admit that he had ever gone to the Austrian Prince's.
All this does not, however, prevent the people who move in it from
imagining, whenever society is stationary for the moment, that no
further change will occur, just as in spite of having witnessed the
birth of the telephone they decline to believe in the aeroplane.
Meanwhile the philosophers of journalism are at work, castigating the
preceding epoch, and not only the kind of pleasures in which it
indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even
the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least
value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the
successive moods of fashionable frivolity. The one thing that does not
change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been
"great changes". At the time when I went to Mme. Swann's the Dreyfus
storm had not yet broken, and some of the more prominent Jews were
extremely powerful. None more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife,
Lady Israels, was Swann's aunt. She had not herself any intimate
acquaintance so distinguished as her nephew's, while he, since he did
not care for her, had never much cultivated her society, although he
was, so far as was known, her heir. But she was the only one of Swann's
relatives who had any idea of his social position, the others having
always remained in the state of ignorance, in that respect, which had
long been our own. When, from a family circle, one of its members
emigrates into "high society"--which to him appears a feat without
parallel until after the lapse of a decade he observes that it has been
performed in other ways and for different reasons by more than one of
the men whom he knew as boys--he draws round about himself a zone of
shadow, a _terra incognita_, which is clearly visible in its minutest
details to all those who inhabit it with him, but is darkest night and
nothingness to those who may not penetrate it but touch its fringe
without the least suspicion of its existence in their midst. There being
no news agency to furnish Swann's lady cousins with intelligence of the
people with whom he consorted, it was (before his appalling marriage, of
course) with a smile of condescension that they would tell one another,
over family dinner-tables, that they had spent a "virtuous" Sunday in
going to see "cousin Charles", whom (regarding him as a "poor relation"
who was inclined to envy their prosperity,) they used wittily to name,
playing upon the title of Balzac's story, "Le Cousin Bête". Lady
Israels, however, was letter-perfect in the names and quality of the
people who lavished upon Swann a friendship of which she was frankly
jealous. Her husband's family, which almost equalled the Rothschilds in
importance, had for several generations managed the affairs of the
Orleans Princes. Lady Israels, being immensely rich, exercised a wide
influence, and had employed it so as to ensure that no one whom she knew
should be "at home" to Odette. One only had disobeyed her, in secret,
the Comtesse de Marsantes. And then, as ill luck would have it, Odette
having gone to call upon Mme. de Marsantes, Lady Israels had entered the
room almost at her heels. Mme. de Marsantes was on tenter-hooks. With
the craven impotence of those who are at liberty to act as they choose,
she did not address a single word to Odette, who thus found little
encouragement to press farther the invasion of a world which, moreover,
was not at all that into which she would have liked to be welcomed. In
this complete detachment of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Odette continued
to be regarded as the illiterate "light woman", utterly different from
the respectable ladies, "well up" in all the minutest points of
genealogy, who endeavoured to quench by reading biographies and memoirs
their thirst for the aristocratic relations with which real life had
omitted to provide them. And Swann, for his part, continued no doubt to
be the lover in whose eyes all these peculiarities of an old mistress
would appear lovable or at least inoffensive, for I have often heard his
wife profess what were really social heresies, without his attempting
(whether from lingering affection for her, loss of regard for society or
weariness of the effort to make her perfect) to correct them. It was
perhaps also another form of the simplicity which for so long had misled
us at Combray, and which now had the effect that, while he continued to
know, on his own account at least, many highly distinguished people, he
did not make a point, in conversation in his wife's drawing-room, of our
seeming to feel that they were of the smallest importance. They had,
indeed, less than ever for Swann, the centre of gravity of his life
having been displaced. In any case, Odette's ignorance of social
distinctions was so dense that if the name of the Princesse de
Guermantes were mentioned in conversation after that of the Duchess, her
cousin, "So those ones are Princes, are they?" she would exclaim; "Why,
they've gone up a step." Were anyone to say "the Prince", in speaking of
the Duc de Chartres, she would put him right with, "The Duke, you mean;
he is Duc de Chartres, not Prince." As for the Duc d'Orléans, son of
the Comte de Paris: "That's funny; the son is higher than the father!"
she would remark, adding, for she was afflicted with anglomania, "Those
_Royalties_ are so dreadfully confusing!"--while to someone who asked
her from what province the Guermantes family came she replied, "From the
Aisne."
But, so far as Odette was concerned, Swann was quite blind, not merely
to these deficiencies in her education but to the general mediocrity of
her intelligence. More than that; whenever Odette repeated a silly story
Swann would sit listening to his wife with a complacency, a merriment,
almost an admiration into which some survival of his desire for her must
have entered; while in the same conversation, anything subtle, anything
deep even that he himself might say would be listened to by Odette with
an habitual lack of interest, rather curtly, with impatience, and would
at times be sharply contradicted. And we must conclude that this
enslavement of refinement by vulgarity is the rule in many households,
when we think, conversely, of all the superior women who yield to the
blandishments of a boor, merciless in his censure of their most delicate
utterances, while they go into ecstasies, with the infinite indulgence
of love, over the feeblest of his witticisms. To return to the reasons
which prevented Odette, at this period, from making her way into the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, it must be observed that the latest turn of the
social kaleidoscope had been actuated by a series of scandals. Women to
whose houses one had been going with entire confidence had been
discovered to be common prostitutes, if not British spies. One would,
therefore, for some time to come expect people (so, at least, one
supposed) to be, before anything else, in a sound position, regular,
settled, accountable. Odette represented simply everything with which
one had just severed relations, and was incidentally to renew them at
once (for men, their natures not altering from day to day, seek in every
new order a continuance of the old) but to renew them by seeking it
under another form which would allow one to be innocently taken in, and
to believe that it was no longer the same society as before the
disaster. However, the scapegoats of that society and Odette were too
closely alike. People who move in society are very short-sighted; at the
moment in which they cease to have any relations with the Israelite
ladies whom they have known, while they are asking themselves how they
are to fill the gap thus made in their lives, they perceive, thrust into
it as by the windfall of a night of storm, a new lady, an Israelite
also; but by virtue of her novelty she is not associated in their minds
with her predecessors, with what they are convinced that they must
abjure. She does not ask that they shall respect her God. They take her
up. There was no question of anti-semitism at the time when I used first
to visit Odette. But she was like enough to it to remind people of what
they wished, for a while, to avoid.
As for Swann himself, he was still a frequent visitor of several of his
former acquaintance, who, of course, were all of the very highest rank.
And yet when he spoke to us of the people whom he had just been to see I
noticed that, among those whom he had known in the old days, the choice
that he made was dictated by the same kind of taste, partly artistic
partly historic, that inspired him as a collector. And remarking that it
was often some great lady or other of waning reputation, who interested
him because she had been the mistress of Liszt or because one of
Balzac's novels was dedicated to her grandmother (as he would purchase a
drawing if Chateaubriand had written about it) I conceived a suspicion
that we had, at Combray, replaced one error, that of regarding Swann as
a mere stockbroker, who did not go into society, by another, when we
supposed him to be one of the smartest men in Paris. To be a friend of
the Comte de Paris meant nothing at all. Is not the world full of such
"friends of Princes", who would not be received in any house that was at
all "exclusive"? Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not
snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything
that is not of their blood royal that great nobles and "business men"
appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.