But Swann went farther than this; not content with seeking in society,

such as it was, when he fastened upon the names which, inscribed upon

its roll by the past, were still to be read there, a simple artistic and

literary pleasure, he indulged in the slightly vulgar diversion of

arranging as it were social nosegays by grouping heterogeneous elements,

bringing together people taken at hazard, here, there and everywhere.

These experiments in the lighter side (or what was to Swann the lighter

side) of sociology did not stimulate an identical reaction, with any

regularity, that is to say, in each of his wife's friends. "I'm thinking

of asking the Cottards to meet the Duchesse de Vendôme," he would

laughingly say to Mme. Bontemps, in the appetised tone of an epicure who

has thought of, and intends to try the substitution, in a sauce, of

cayenne pepper for cloves. But this plan, which was, in fact, to appear

quite humorous, in an archaic sense of the word, to the Cottards, had

also the power of infuriating Mme. Bontemps. She herself had recently

been presented by the Swanns to the Duchesse de Vendôme, and had found

this as agreeable as it seemed to her natural. The thought of winning

renown from it at the Cottards', when she related to them what had

happened, had been by no means the least savoury ingredient of her

pleasure. But like those persons recently decorated who, their

investiture once accomplished, would like to see the fountain of honour

turned off at the main, Mme. Bontemps would have preferred that, after

herself, no one else in her own circle of friends should be made known

to the Princess. She denounced (to herself, of course) the licentious

taste of Swann who, in order to gratify a wretched aesthetic whim, was

obliging her to scatter to the winds, at one swoop, all the dust that

she would have thrown in the eyes of the Cottards when she told them

about the Duchesse de Vendôme. How was she even to dare to announce to

her husband that the Professor and his wife were in their turn to

partake of this pleasure, of which she had boasted to him as though it

were unique. And yet, if the Cottards could only be made to know that

they were being invited not seriously but for the amusement of their

host! It is true that the Bontemps had been invited for the same reason,

but Swann, having acquired from the aristocracy that eternal "Don Juan"

spirit which, in treating with two women of no importance, makes each of

them believe that it is she alone who is seriously loved, had spoken to

Mme. Bontemps of the Duchesse de Vendôme as of a person whom it was

clearly laid down that she must meet at dinner. "Yes, we're determined

to have the Princess here with the Cottards," said Mme. Swann a few

weeks later; "My husband thinks that we might get something quite

amusing out of that conjunction." For if she had retained from the

"little nucleus" certain habits dear to Mme. Verdurin, such as that of

shouting things aloud so as to be heard by all the faithful, she made

use, at the same time, of certain expressions, such as "conjunction",

which were dear to the Guermantes circle, of which she thus felt

unconsciously and at a distance, as the sea is swayed by the moon, the

attraction, though without being drawn perceptibly closer to it. "Yes,

the Cottards and the Duchesse de Vendôme. Don't you think that might be

rather fun?" asked Swann. "I think they'll be exceedingly ill-assorted,

and it can only lead to a lot of bother; people oughtn't to play with

fire, is what I say!" snapped Mme. Bontemps, furious. She and her

husband were, all the same, invited, as was the Prince d'Agrigente, to

this dinner, which Mme. Bontemps and Cottard had each two alternative

ways of describing, according to whom they were telling about it. To one

set Mme. Bontemps for her part, and Cottard for his would say casually,

when asked who else had been of the party: "Only the Prince d'Agrigente;

it was all quite intimate." But there were others who might, alas, be

better informed (once, indeed, some one had challenged Cottard with:

"But weren't the Bontemps there too?" "Oh, I forgot them," Cottard had

blushingly admitted to the tactless questioner whom he ever afterwards

classified among slanderers and speakers of evil). For these the

Bontemps and Cottards had each adopted, without any mutual arrangement,

a version the framework of which was identical for both parties, their

own names alone changing places. "Let me see;" Cottard would say, "there

were our host and hostess, the Duc and Duchesse de Vendôme--" (with a

satisfied smile) "Professor and Mme. Cottard, and, upon my soul, heaven

only knows how they got there, for they were about as much in keeping as

hairs in the soup, M. and Mme. Bontemps!" Mme. Bontemps would recite an

exactly similar "piece", only it was M. and Mme. Bontemps who were named

with a satisfied emphasis between the Duchesse de Vendôme and the

Prince d'Agrigente, while the "also ran", whom finally she used to

accuse of having invited themselves, and who completely spoiled the

party, were the Cottards.

When he had been paying calls Swann would often come home with little

time to spare before dinner. At that point in the evening, six o'clock,

when in the old days he had felt so wretched, he no longer asked himself

what Odette might be about, and was hardly at all concerned to hear that

she had people still with her, or had gone out. He recalled at times

that he had once, years ago, tried to read through its envelope a letter

addressed by Odette to Forcheville. But this memory was not pleasing to

him, and rather than plumb the depth of shame that he felt in it he

preferred to indulge in a little grimace, twisting up the corners of his

mouth and adding, if need be, a shake of the head which signified "What

does it all matter?" In truth, he considered now that the hypothesis by

which he had often been brought to a standstill in days gone by,

according to which it was his jealous imagination alone that blackened

what was in reality the innocent life of Odette--that this hypothesis

(which after all was beneficent, since, so long as his amorous malady

had lasted, it had diminished his sufferings by making them seem

imaginary) was not the truth, that it was his jealousy that had seen

things in the right light, and that if Odette had loved him better than

he supposed, she had deceived him more as well. Formerly, while his

sufferings were still keen, he had vowed that, as soon as he should have

ceased to love Odette, and so to be afraid either of vexing her or of

making her believe that he loved her more than he did, he would afford

himself the satisfaction of elucidating with her, simply from his love

of truth and as a historical point, whether or not she had had

Forcheville in her room that day when he had rung her bell and rapped on

her window without being let in, and she had written to Forcheville that

it was an uncle of hers who had called. But this so interesting problem,

of which he was waiting to attempt the solution only until his jealousy

should have subsided, had precisely lost all interest in Swann's eyes

when he had ceased to be jealous. Not immediately, however. He felt no

other jealousy now with regard to Odette than what the memory of that

day, that afternoon spent in knocking vainly at the little house in the

Rue Lapérouse, had continued to excite in him; as though his jealousy,

not dissimilar in that respect from those maladies which appear to have

their seat, their centre of contagion less in certain persons than in

certain places, in certain houses, had had for its object not so much

Odette herself as that day, that hour in the irrevocable past when Swann

had beaten at every entrance to her house in turn. You would have said

that that day, that hour alone had caught and preserved a few last

fragments of the amorous personality which had once been Swann's, and

that there alone could he now recapture them. For a long time now it had

made no matter to him that Odette had been false to him, and was false

still. And yet he had continued for some years to seek out old servants

of Odette, so strongly in him persisted the painful curiosity to know

whether on that day, so long ago, at six o'clock, Odette had been in bed

with Forcheville. Then that curiosity itself had disappeared, without,

however, his abandoning his investigations. He continued the attempt to

discover what no longer interested him, because his old ego though it

had shrivelled to the extreme of decrepitude still acted mechanically,

following the course of preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann

could not now succeed even in forming an idea of that anguish--so

compelling once that he had been unable to foresee his ever being

delivered from it, that only the death of her whom he loved (death

which, as will be shewn later on in this story, by a cruel example, in

no way diminishes the sufferings caused by jealousy) seemed to him

capable of making smooth the road, then insurmountably barred to him, of

his life.

But to bring to light, some day, those passages in the life of Odette to

which he owed his sufferings had not been Swann's only ambition; he had

in reserve that also of wreaking vengeance for his sufferings when,

being no longer in love with Odette, he should no longer be afraid of

her; and the opportunity of gratifying this second ambition had just

occurred, for Swann was in love with another woman, a woman who gave

him--grounds for jealousy, no, but who did all the same make him

jealous, because he was not capable, now, of altering his way of making

love, and it was the way he had used with Odette that must serve him now

for another. To make Swann's jealousy revive it was not essential that

this woman should be unfaithful, it sufficed that for any reason she was

separated from him, at a party for instance, where she was presumably

enjoying herself. That was enough to reawaken in him the old anguish,

that lamentable and inconsistent excrescence of his love, which held

Swann ever at a distance from what she really was, like a yearning to

attain the impossible (what this young woman really felt for him, the

hidden longing that absorbed her days, the secret places of her heart),

for between Swann and her whom he loved this anguish piled up an

unyielding mass of already existing suspicions, having their cause in

Odette, or in some other perhaps who had preceded Odette, allowing this

now ageing lover to know his mistress of the moment only in the

traditional and collective phantasm of the "woman who made him jealous",

in which he had arbitrarily incarnated his new love. Often, however,

Swann would charge his jealousy with the offence of making him believe

in imaginary infidelities; but then he would remember that he had given

Odette the benefit of the same argument and had in that been wrong. And

so everything that the young woman whom he loved did in those hours when

he was not with her appeared spoiled of its innocence in his eyes. But

whereas at that other time he had made a vow that if ever he ceased to

love her whom he did not then imagine to be his future wife, he would

implacably exhibit to her an indifference that would at length be

sincere, so as to avenge his pride that had so long been trampled upon

by her--of those reprisals which he might now enforce without risk to

himself (for what harm could it do him to be taken at his word and

deprived of those intimate moments with Odette that had been so

necessary to him once), of those reprisals he took no more thought; with

his love had vanished the desire to shew that he was in love no longer.

And he who, when he was suffering at the hands of Odette, would have

looked forward so keenly to letting her see one day that he had fallen

to a rival, now that he was in a position to do so took infinite

precautions lest his wife should suspect the existence of this new love.

*

* *

It was not only in those tea-parties, on account of which I had formerly

had the sorrow of seeing Gilberte leave me and go home earlier than

usual, that I was henceforth to take part, but the engagements that she

had with her mother, to go for a walk or to some afternoon party, which

by preventing her from coming to the Champs-Elysées had deprived me of

her, on those days when I loitered alone upon the lawn or stood before

the wooden horses,--to these outings M. and Mme. Swann henceforth

admitted me, I had a seat in their landau, and indeed it was me that

they asked if I would rather go to the theatre, to a dancing lesson at

the house of one of Gilberte's friends, to some social gathering given

by friends of her parents (what Odette called "a little meeting") or to

visit the tombs at Saint-Denis.

On days when I was going anywhere with the Swanns I would arrive at the

house in time for _déjeuner_, which Mme. Swann called "le lunch"; as

one was not expected before half-past twelve, while my parents in those

days had their meal at a quarter past eleven, it was not until they had

risen from the table that I made my way towards that sumptuous quarter,

deserted enough at any hour, but more particularly just then, when

everyone had gone indoors. Even on winter days of frost, if the weather

held, tightening every few minutes the knot of a gorgeous necktie from

Charvet's and looking to see that my varnished boots were not getting

dirty, I would roam to and fro among the avenues, waiting until

twenty-seven minutes past the hour. I could see from afar in the Swanns'

little garden-plot the sunlight glittering like hoar frost from the

bare-boughed trees. It is true that the garden boasted but a pair of

them. The unusual hour presented the scene in a new light. Into these

pleasures of nature (intensified by the suppression of habit and indeed

by my physical hunger) the thrilling prospect of sitting down to

luncheon with Mme. Swann was infused; it did not diminish them, but

taking command of them trained them to its service; so that if, at this

hour when ordinarily I did not perceive them, I seemed now to be

discovering the fine weather, the cold, the wintry sunlight, it was all

as a sort of preface to the creamed eggs, as a patina, a cool and

coloured glaze applied to the decoration of that mystic chapel which was

the habitation of Mme. Swann, and in the heart of which there were, by

contrast, so much warmth, so many scents and flowers.

At half-past twelve I would finally make up my mind to enter that house

which, like an immense Christmas stocking, seemed ready to bestow upon

me supernatural delights. (The French name "Noël" was, by the way,

unknown to Mme. Swann and Gilberte, who had substituted for it the

English "Christmas", and would speak of nothing but "Christmas pudding",

what people had given them as "Christmas presents" and of going

away--the thought of which maddened me with grief--"for Christmas". At

home even, I should have thought it degrading to use the word "Noël",

and always said "Christmas", which my father considered extremely

silly.)

I encountered no one at first but a footman who after leading me through

several large drawing-rooms shewed me into one that was quite small,

empty, its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of

afternoon; I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and

violets, which, like people who are kept waiting in a room beside you

but do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as

living things made all the more impressive, and received coldly the

warmth of a glowing fire of coals, preciously displayed behind a screen

of crystal, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled, now and

again, its perilous rubies.

I had sat down, but I rose hurriedly on hearing the door opened; it was

only another footman, and then a third, and the minute result that their

vainly alarming entrances and exits achieved was to put a little more

coal on the fire or water in the vases. They departed, I found myself

alone, once that door was shut which Mme. Swann was surely soon going to

open. Of a truth, I should have been less ill at ease in a magician's

cave than in this little waiting-room where the fire appeared to me to

be performing alchemical transmutations as in Klingsor's laboratory.

Footsteps sounded afresh, I did not rise, it was sure to be just another

footman; it was M. Swann. "What! All by yourself? What is one to do;

that poor wife of mine has never been able to remember what time means!

Ten minutes to one. She gets later every day. And you'll see, she will

come sailing in without the least hurry, and imagine she's in heaps of

time." And as he was still subject to neuritis, and as he was becoming a

trifle ridiculous, the fact of possessing so unpunctual a wife, who came

in so late from the Bois, forgot everything at her dressmaker's and was

never in time for luncheon made Swann anxious for his digestion but

flattered his self-esteem.

He shewed me his latest acquisitions and explained their interest to me,

but my emotion, added to the unfamiliarity of being still without food

at this hour, sweeping through my mind left it void, so that while able

to speak I was incapable of hearing. Anyhow, so far as the works of art

in Swann's possession were concerned, it was enough for me that they

were contained in his house, formed a part there of the delicious hour

that preceded luncheon. The Gioconda herself might have appeared there

without giving me any more pleasure than one of Mme. Swann's indoor

gowns, or her scent bottles.

I continued to wait, alone or with Swann, and often with Gilberte, come

in to keep us company. The arrival of Mme. Swann, prepared for me by all

those majestic apparitions, must (so it seemed to me) be something truly

immense. I strained my ears to catch the slightest sound. But one never

finds quite as high as one has been expecting a cathedral, a wave in a

storm, a dancer's leap in the air; after those liveried footmen,

suggesting the chorus whose processional entry upon the stage leads up

to and at the same time diminishes the final appearance of the queen,

Mme. Swann, creeping furtively in, with a little otter-skin coat, her

veil lowered to cover a nose pink-tipped by the cold, did not fulfil the

promises lavished, while I had been waiting, upon my imagination.

But if she had stayed at home all morning, when she arrived in the

drawing-room it would be clad in a wrapper of _crêpe-de-Chine_,

brightly coloured, which seemed to me more exquisite than any of her

dresses.

Sometimes the Swanns decided to remain in the house all afternoon, and

then, as we had had luncheon so late, very soon I must watch setting,

beyond the garden-wall, the sun of that day which had seemed to me bound

to be different from other days; then in vain might the servants bring

in lamps of every size and shape, burning each upon the consecrated

altar of a console, a card-table, a corner-cupboard, a bracket, as

though for the celebration of some strange and secret rite; nothing

extraordinary transpired in the conversation, and I went home

disappointed, as one often is in one's childhood after the midnight

mass.

But my disappointment was scarcely more than mental. I was radiant with

happiness in this house where Gilberte, when she was still not with us,

was about to appear and would bestow on me in a moment, and for hours to

come, her speech, her smiling and attentive gaze, just as I had caught

it, that first time, at Combray. At the most I was a trifle jealous when

I saw her so often disappear into vast rooms above, reached by a private

staircase. Obliged myself to remain in the drawing-room, like a man in

love with an actress who is confined to his stall "in front" and wonders

anxiously what is going on behind the scenes, in the green-room, I put

to Swann, with regard to this other part of the house questions artfully

veiled, but in a tone from which I could not quite succeed in banishing

the note of uneasiness. He explained to me that the place to which

Gilberte had gone was the linen-room, offered himself to shew it to me,

and promised me that whenever Gilberte had occasion to go there again he

would insist upon her taking me with her. By these last words and the

relief which they brought me Swann at once annihilated for me one of

those terrifying interior perspectives at the end of which a woman with

whom we are in love appears so remote. At that moment I felt for him an

affection which I believed to be deeper than my affection for Gilberte.

For he, being the master over his daughter, was giving her to me,

whereas she, she withheld herself now and then, I had not the same

direct control over her as I had indirectly through Swann. Besides, it

was she whom I loved and could not, therefore look upon without that

disturbance, without that desire for something more which destroys in

us, in the presence of one whom we love, the sensation of loving.

As a rule, however, we did not stay indoors, we went out. Sometimes,

before going to dress, Mme. Swann would sit down at the piano. Her

lovely hands, escaping from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly

coloured sleeves of her _crêpe-de-Chine_ wrapper, drooped over the keys

with that same melancholy which was in her eyes but was not in her

heart. It was on one of those days that she happened to play me the part

of Vinteuil's sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had

been so fond. But often one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece

of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first

time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played over to me two

or three times I found that I knew it quite well. And so it is not wrong

to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as

one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second,

the third would be equally "first hearings" and there would be no reason

why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what

is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our

memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to

face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of

a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets

them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a

minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these

multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an

immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with

regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the

schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson

which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it

by heart next morning. It was only that I had not, until then, heard a

note of the sonata, and where Swann and his wife could make out a

distinct phrase that was as far beyond the range of my perception as a

name which one endeavours to recall and in place of which one discovers

only a void, a void from which, an hour later, when one is not thinking

about them, will spring of their own accord, in one continuous flight,

the syllables that one has solicited in vain. And not only does one not

seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great,

but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of

Vinteuil's sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first

perceives. Thus it was that I was mistaken not only in thinking that

this work held nothing further in store for me (so that for a long time

I made no effort to hear it again) from the moment in which Mme. Swann

had played over to me its most famous passage; I was in this respect as

stupid as people are who expect to feel no astonishment when they stand

in Venice before the front of Saint Mark's, because photography has

already acquainted them with the outline of its domes. Far more than

that, even when I had heard the sonata played from beginning to end, it

remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which its

distance or a haze in the atmosphere allows us to catch but a faint and

fragmentary glimpse. Hence the depression inseparable from one's

knowledge of such works, as of everything that acquires reality in time.

When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to

me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my

sensibility, those that I had from die first distinguished and preferred

in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in

successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me,

I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less

disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us

all their best. In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one discovers at

once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same

reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one

already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is

left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition too new and

strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made

indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been

meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in

reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become

invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But

this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love

it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it.

The time, moreover, that a person requires--as I required in the matter

of this sonata--to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a

symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse

before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new.

So that the man of genius, to shelter himself from the ignorant contempt

of the world, may say to himself that, since one's contemporaries are

incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity

should be read by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one

cannot appreciate when one stands too close to them. But, as it happens,

any such cowardly precaution to avoid false judgments is doomed to

failure; they are inevitable. The reason for which a work of genius is

not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is

extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven's

Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth)

that devoted half-a-century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a

public for Beethoven's Quartets, marking in this way, like every great

work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in

intellectual society, largely composed to-day of what was not to be

found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of

enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of

art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for

brevity's sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the

same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed

public in the future, a public from which other men of genius shall reap

the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held

in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that

particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries

who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is

essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had done), if he

wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, shall launch it,

wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently outward bound towards

the future. And yet this interval of time, the true perspective in which

to behold a work of art, if leaving it out of account is the mistake

made by bad judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous

precaution of the good. No doubt one can easily imagine, by an illusion

similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear

equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in

painting or in music did at least shew respect for certain rules,

whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it impressionism, a

striving after discord, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism,

futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that have

occurred before. Simply because those that have occurred before we are

apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation

has melted them into a continuous substance, varied of course but,

taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo blends with Molière.

Let us try to imagine the shocking incoherence that we should find, if

we did not take into account the future, and the changes that it must

bring about, in a horoscope of our own riper years, drawn and presented

to us in our youth. Only horoscopes are not always accurate, and the

necessity, when judging a work of art, of including the temporal factor

in the sum total of its beauty introduces, to our way of thinking,

something as hazardous, and consequently as barren of interest, as every

prophecy the non-fulfilment of which will not at all imply any

inadequacy on the prophet's part, for the power to summon possibilities

into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the

competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed

in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant

psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose

treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen.

If I did not understand the sonata, it enchanted me to hear Mme. Swann

play. Her touch appeared to me (like her wrappers, like the scent of her

staircase, her cloaks, her chrysanthemums) to form part of an individual

and mysterious whole, in a world infinitely superior to that in which

the mind is capable of analysing talent. "Attractive, isn't it, that

Vinteuil sonata?" Swann asked me. "The moment when night is darkening

among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling

dew upon the earth. You must admit that it is rather charming; it shews

all the static side of moonlight, which is the essential part. It is not

surprising that a course of radiant heat such as my wife is taking,

should act on the muscles, since moonlight can prevent the leaves from

stirring. That is what he expresses so well in that little phrase, the

Bois de Boulogne plunged in a cataleptic trance. By the sea it is even

more striking, because you have there the faint response of the waves,

which, of course, you can hear quite distinctly, since nothing else

dares to move. In Paris it is the other way; at the most, you may notice

unfamiliar lights among the old buildings, the sky brightened as though

by a colourless and harmless conflagration, that sort of vast variety

show of which you get a hint here and there. But in Vinteuil's little

phrase, and in the whole sonata for that matter, it is not like that;

the scene is laid in the Bois; in the _gruppetto_ you can distinctly

hear a voice saying: 'I can almost see to read the paper!'" These words

from Swann might have falsified, later on, my impression of the sonata,

music being too little exclusive to inhibit absolutely what other people

suggest that we should find in it. But I understood from other words

which he let fall that this nocturnal foliage was simply that beneath

whose shade in many a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris he had

listened on many an evening to the little phrase. In place of the

profound significance that he had so often sought in it, what it

recalled now to Swann were the leafy boughs, arranged, wreathed, painted

round about it (which it gave him the desire to see again because it

seemed to him to be their inner, their hidden self, as it were their

soul); was the whole of one spring season which he had not been able to

enjoy before, not having had--feverish and moody as he then was--enough

strength of body and mind for its enjoyment, which, as one puts by for

an invalid the dainties that he has not been able to eat, it had kept in

store for him. The charm that he had been made to feel by certain

evenings in the Bois, a charm of which Vinteul's sonata served to remind

him, he could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she,

as well as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette

had been merely his companion, by his side, not (as the phrase had been)

within him, and so had seen nothing--nor would she, had she been a

thousand times as comprehending, have seen anything of that vision which

for no one among us (or at least I was long under the impression that

this rule admitted no exception) can be made externally visible. "It is

rather charming, don't you think," Swann continued, "that sound can give

a reflection, like water, or glass. It is curious, too, that Vinteul's

phrase now shews me only the things to which I paid no attention then.

Of my troubles, my loves of those days it recalls nothing, it has

altered all my values." "Charles, I don't think that's very polite to

me, what you're saying." "Not polite? Really, you women are superb! I

was simply trying to explain to this young man that what the music

shews--to me, at least--is not for a moment 'Free-will' or 'In Tune with

the Infinite', but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock coat in the

palm-house at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Hundreds of times, without my

leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me off to dine with it

at Armenonville. Gad, it is less boring, anyhow, than having to go there

with Mme. de Cambremer." Mme. Swann laughed. "That is a lady who is

supposed to have been violently in love with Charles," she explained, in

the same tone in which, shortly before, when we were speaking of Vermeer

of Delft, of whose existence I had been surprised to find her conscious,

she had answered me with: "I ought to explain that M. Swann was very

much taken up with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn't

that so, Charles dear?" "You're not to start saying things about Mme. de

Cambremer!" Swann checked her, secretly flattered. "But I'm only

repeating what I've been told. Besides, it seems that she's an extremely

clever woman; I don't know her myself. I believe she's very pushing,

which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone says that she

was quite mad about you; there's no harm in repeating that." Swann

remained silent as a deaf-mute which was in a way a confirmation of what

she had said, and a proof of his own fatuity. "Since what I'm playing

reminds you of the Jardin d'Acclimatation," his wife went on, with a

playful semblance of being offended, "we might take him there some day

in the carriage, if it would amuse him. It's lovely there just now, and

you can recapture your fond impressions! Which reminds me, talking of

the Jardin d'Acclimatation, do you know, this young man thought that we

were devotedly attached to a person whom I cut, as a matter of fact,

whenever I possibly can, Mme. Blatin! I think it is rather crushing for

us, that she should be taken for a friend of ours. Just fancy, dear Dr.

Cottard, who never says a harsh word about anyone, declares that she's

positively contagious." "A frightful woman! The one thing to be said for

her is that she is exactly like Savonarola. She is the very image of

that portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolomeo." This mania which Swann

had for finding likenesses to people in pictures was defensible, for

even what we call individual expression is--as we so painfully discover

when we are in love and would fain believe in the unique reality of the

beloved--something diffused and general, which can be found existing at

different periods. But if one had listened to Swann, the processions of

the Kings of the East, already so anachronistic when Benozzo Gozzoli

introduced in their midst various Medici, would have been even more so,

since they would have included the portraits of a whole crowd of men,

contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, subsequent, that is to say

not only by fifteen centuries to the Nativity but by four more to the

painter himself. There was not missing from those trains, according to

Swann, a single living Parisian of any note, any more than there was

from that act in one of Sardou's plays, in which, out of friendship for

the author and for the leading lady, and also because it was the

fashion, all the best known men in Paris, famous doctors, politicians,

barristers, amused themselves, each on a different evening, by "walking

on". "But what has she got to do with the Jardin d'Acclimatation?"

"Everything!" "What? You don't suggest that she's got a sky-blue behind,

like the monkeys?" "Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking

of what the Cingalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles; it really is a

gem." "Oh, it's too silly. You know, Mme. Blatin loves asking people

questions, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really

overpowering." "What our good friends on the Thames call 'patronising',"

interrupted Odette. "Exactly. Well, she went the other day to the Jardin

d'Acclimatation, where they have some blackamoors--Cingalese, I think I

heard my wife say; she is much 'better up' in ethnology than I am."

"Now, Charles, you're not to make fun of poor me." "I've no intention of

making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these

black fellows with 'Good morning, nigger!' . . ." "Oh, it's too absurd!"

"Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. 'Me

nigger,' he shouted, (quite furious, don't you know), to Mme. Blatin,

'me nigger; you, old cow!'" "I do think that's so delightful! I adore

that story. Do say it's a good one. Can't you see old Blatin standing

there, and hearing him: 'Me nigger; you, old cow'?" I expressed an

intense desire to go there and see these Cingalese, one of whom had

called Mme. Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least.

But I reflected that in going to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and again

on our way home, we should pass along that Allée des Acacias in which I

had loved so, once, to gaze on Mme. Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin's

mulatto friend, to whom I had never managed to exhibit myself in the act

of saluting her, would see me there, seated at her side, as the victoria

swept by.

During those minutes in which Gilberte, having gone to "get ready", was

not in the room with us, M. and Mme. Swann would take delight in

revealing to me all the rare virtues of their child. And everything that

I myself observed seemed to prove the truth of what they said. I

remarked that, as her mother had told me, she had not only for her

friends but for the servants, for the poor, the most delicate attentions

carefully thought out, a desire to give pleasure, a fear of causing

annoyance, translated into all sorts of trifling actions which must

often have meant great inconvenience to her. She had done some "work"

for our stall-keeper in the Champs-Elysées, and went out in the snow to

give it to her with her own hands, so as not to lose a day. "You have no

idea how kind-hearted she is, she won't let it be seen," her father

assured me. Young as she was, she appeared far more sensible already

than her parents. When Swann boasted of his wife's grand friends

Gilberte would turn away, and remain silent, but without any air of

reproaching him, for it seemed inconceivable to her that her father

could be subjected to the slightest criticism. One day, when I had

spoken to her of Mlle. Vinteuil, she said to me:

"I shall never know her, for a very good reason, and that is that she

was not nice to her father, by what one hears, she gave him a lot of

trouble. You can't understand that any more than I, can you; I'm sure

you could no more live without your papa than I could, which is quite

natural after all. How can one ever forget a person one has loved all

one's life?"

And once when she was making herself particularly endearing to Swann, as

I mentioned this to her when he was out of the room:

"Yes, poor Papa, it is the anniversary of his father's death, just now.

You can understand what he must be feeling; you do understand, don't

you; you and I feel the same about things like that. So I just try to be

a little less naughty than usual." "But he doesn't ever think you

naughty. He thinks you're quite perfect." "Poor Papa, that's because

he's far too good himself."

But her parents were not content with singing the praises of

Gilberte--that same Gilberte, who, even before I had set eyes on her,

used to appear to me standing before a church, in a landscape of the

Ile-de-France, and later, awakening in me not dreams now but memories,

was embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane

that I took when I was going the Méséglise way. Once when I had asked

Mme. Swann (and had made an effort to assume the indifferent tone of a

friend of the family, curious to know the preferences of a child), which

among all her playmates Gilberte liked the best, Mme. Swann replied:

"But you ought to know a great deal better than I do. You are in her

confidence, her great favourite, her 'chum' as the English say."

It appears that in a coincidence as perfect as this was, when reality is

folded over to cover the ideal of which we have so long been dreaming,

it completely hides that ideal, absorbing it in itself, as when two

geometrical figures that are congruent are made to coincide, so that

there is but one, whereas we would rather, so as to give its full

significance to our enjoyment, preserve for all those separate points of

our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them, and

so as to be quite certain that they are indeed themselves, the

distinction of being intangible. And our thought cannot even reconstruct

the old state so as to confront the new with it, for it has no longer a

clear field: the acquaintance that we have made, the memory of those

first, unhoped-for moments, the talk to which we have listened are there

now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the

outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react

more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise

without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of

our future. I had been able to believe, year after year, that the right

to visit Mme. Swann was a vague and fantastic privilege to which I

should never attain; after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her

drawing-room, it was the period in which I did not yet know her that was

become fantastic and vague like a possibility which the realisation of

an alternative possibility has made impossible. How was I ever to dream

again of her dining-room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not

make the least movement in my mind without crossing the path of that

inextinguishable ray cast backwards to infinity, even into my own most

distant past, by the lobster _à l'Américaine_ which I had just been

eating. And Swann must have observed in his own case a similar

phenomenon; for this house in which he entertained me might be regarded

as the place into which had flowed, to coincide and be lost in one

another, not only the ideal dwelling that my imagination had

constructed, but another still, that which his jealous love, as

inventive as any fantasy of mine, had so often depicted to him, that

dwelling common to Odette and himself which had appeared so inaccessible

once, on evenings when Odette had taken him home with Forcheville to

drink orangeade with her; and what had flowed in to be absorbed, for

him, in the walls and furniture of the dining-room in which we now sat

down to luncheon was that unhoped-for paradise in which, in the old

days, he could not without a pang imagine that he would one day be

saying to _their_ butler those very words, "Is Madame ready yet?" which

I now heard him utter with a touch of impatience mingled with

self-satisfaction. No more than, probably, Swann himself could I succeed

in knowing my own happiness, and when Gilberte once broke out: "Who

would ever have said that the little girl you watched playing prisoners'

base, without daring to speak to her, would one day be your greatest

friend, and you would go to her house whenever you liked?" she spoke of

a change the occurrence of which I could verify only by observing it

from without, finding no trace of it within myself, for it was composed

of two separate states on both of which I could not, without their

ceasing to be distinct from one another, succeed in keeping my thoughts

fixed at one and the same time.

And yet this house, because it had been so passionately desired by

Swann, must have kept for him some of its attraction, if I was to judge

by myself for whom it had not lost all its mystery. That singular charm

in which I had for so long supposed the life of the Swanns to be bathed

I had not completely exorcised from their house on making my own way

into it; I had made it, that charm, recoil, overpowered as it must be by

the sight of the stranger, the pariah that I had been, to whom now Mme.

Swann pushed forward graciously for him to sit in it an armchair

exquisite, hostile, scandalised; but all round me that charm, in my

memory, I can still distinguish. Is it because, on those days on which

M. and Mme. Swann invited me to luncheon, to go out afterwards with them

and Gilberte, I imprinted with my gaze,--while I sat waiting for them

there alone--on the carpet, the sofas, the tables, the screens, the

pictures, the idea engraved upon my mind that Mme. Swann, or her

husband, or Gilberte was about to enter the room? Is it because those

objects have dwelt ever since in my memory side by side with the Swanns,

and have gradually acquired something of their personal character? Is it

because, knowing that the Swanns passed their existence among all those

things, I made of all of them as it were emblems of the private lives,

of those habits of the Swanns from which I had too long been excluded

for them not to continue to appear strange to me, even when I was

allowed the privilege of sharing in them? However it may be, always when

I think of that drawing-room which Swann (not that the criticism implied

on his part any intention to find fault with his wife's taste) found so

incongruous--because, while it was still planned and carried out in the

style, half conservatory half studio, which had been that of the rooms

in which he had first known Odette, she had, none the less, begun to

replace in its medley a quantity of the Chinese ornaments, which she now

felt to be rather gimcrack, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm of little chairs

and stools and things upholstered in old Louis XIV silks; not to mention

the works of art brought by Swann himself from his house on the Quai

d'Orléans--it has kept in my memory, on the contrary, that composite,

heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an individual charm never

possessed even by the most complete, the least spoiled of such

collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the most modern,

alive and stamped with the imprint of a living personality; for we alone

can, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, give to

certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep,

which they develop in our minds. All the ideas that I had formed of the

hours, different from those that exist for other men, passed by the

Swanns in that house which was to their life what the body is to the

soul, and must give expression to its singularity, all those ideas were

rearranged, amalgamated--equally disturbing and indefinite

throughout--in the arrangement of the furniture, the thickness of the

carpets, the position of the windows, the ministrations of the servants.

When, after luncheon, we went in the sunshine to drink our coffee in the

great bay window of the drawing-room, while Mme. Swann was asking me how

many lumps of sugar I took, it was not only the silk-covered stool which

she pushed towards me that emitted, with the agonising charm that I had

long ago felt--first among the pink hawthorn and then beside the clump

of laurels--in the name of Gilberte, the hostility that her parents had

shewn to me, which this little piece of furniture seemed to have so well

understood, to have so completely shared that I felt myself unworthy,

and found myself almost reluctant to set my feet on its defenceless

cushion; a personality, a soul was latent there which linked it secretly

to the light of two o'clock in the afternoon, so different from any

other light, in the gulf in which there played about our feet its

sparkling tide of gold out of which the bluish crags of sofas and

vaporous carpet beaches emerged like enchanted islands; and there was

nothing, even to the painting by Rubens hung above the chimneypiece,

that was not endowed with the same quality and almost the same intensity

of charm as the laced boots of M. Swann, and that hooded cape, the like

of which I had so dearly longed to wear, whereas now Odette would beg

her husband to go and put on another, so as to appear more smart,

whenever I did them the honour of driving out with them. She too went

away to change her dress--not heeding my protestations that no "outdoor"

clothes could be nearly so becoming as the marvellous garment of

_crêpe-de-Chine_ or silk, old rose, cherry-coloured, Tiepolo pink,

white, mauve, green, red or yellow, plain or patterned, in which Mme.

Swann had sat down to luncheon and which she was now going to take off.

When I assured her that she ought to go out in that costume, she

laughed, either in scorn of my ignorance or from delight in my

compliment. She apologised for having so many wrappers, explaining that

they were the only kind of dress in which she felt comfortable, and left

us, to go and array herself in one of those regal toilets which imposed

their majesty on all beholders, and yet among which I was sometimes

summoned to decide which of them I preferred that she should put on.

In the Jardin d'Acclimatation, how proud I was when we had left the

carriage to be walking by the side of Mme. Swann! While she strolled

carelessly on, letting her cloak stream on the air behind her, I kept

eyeing her with an admiring gaze to which she coquettishly responded in

a lingering smile. And now, were we to meet one or other of Gilberte's

friends, boy or girl, who saluted us from afar, I would in my turn be

looked upon by them as one of those happy creatures whose lot I had

envied, one of those friends of Gilberte who knew her family and had a

share in that other part of her life, the part which was not spent in

the Champs-Elysées.

Often upon the paths of the Bois or the Jardin we passed, we were

greeted by some great lady who was Swann's friend, whom he perchance did

not see, so that his wife must rally him with a "Charles! Don't you see

Mme. de Montmorency?" And Swann, with that amicable smile, bred of a

long and intimate friendship, bared his head, but with a slow sweeping

gesture, with a grace peculiarly his own. Sometimes the lady would stop,

glad of an opportunity to shew Mme. Swann a courtesy which would involve

no tiresome consequences, by which they all knew that she would never

seek to profit, so thoroughly had Swann trained her in reserve. She had

none the less acquired all the manners of polite society, and however

smart, however stately the lady might be, Mme. Swann was invariably a

match for her; halting for a moment before the friend whom her husband

had recognised and was addressing, she would introduce us, Gilberte and

myself, with so much ease of manner, would remain so free, so tranquil

in her exercise of courtesy, that it would have been hard to say,

looking at them both, which of the two was the aristocrat. The day on

which we went to inspect the Cingalese, on our way home we saw coming in

our direction, and followed by two others who seemed to be acting as her

escort, an elderly but still attractive woman cloaked in a dark mantle

and capped with a little bonnet tied beneath her chin with a pair of

ribbons. "Ah! Here is someone who will interest you!" said Swann. The

old lady, who had come within a few yards of us, now smiled at us with a

caressing sweetness. Swann doffed his hat. Mme. Swann swept to the

ground in a curtsey and made as if to kiss the hand of the lady, who,

standing there like a Winterhalter portrait, drew her up again and

kissed her cheek. "There, there; will you put your hat on, you!" she

scolded Swann in a thick and almost growling voice, speaking like an old

and familiar friend. "I am going to present you to Her Imperial

Highness," Mme. Swann whispered. Swann drew me aside for a moment while

his wife talked of the weather and of the animals recently added to the

Jardin d'Acclimatation, with the Princess. "That is the Princesse

Mathilde;" he told me, "you know who' I mean, the friend of Flaubert,

Sainte-Beuve, Dumas. Just fancy, she's the niece of Napoleon I. She had

offers of marriage from Napoleon III and the Emperor of Russia. Isn't

that interesting? Talk to her a little. But I hope she won't keep us

standing here for an hour!. . . I met Taine the other day," he went on,

addressing the Princess, "and he told me that your Highness was vexed

with him." "He's behaved like a perfect peeg!" she said gruffly,

pronouncing the word _cochon_ as though she referred to Joan of Arc's

contemporary, Bishop Cauchon. "After his article on the Emperor I left

my card on him with p. p. c. on it." I felt the surprise that one feels

on opening the Correspondence of that Duchesse d'Orléans who was by

birth a Princess Palatine. And indeed Princesse Mathilde, animated by

sentiments so entirely French, expressed them with a straightforward

bluntness that recalled the Germany of an older generation, and was

inherited, doubtless, from her Wurtemberg mother. This somewhat rude and

almost masculine frankness she softened, as soon as she began to smile,

with an Italian languor. And the whole person was clothed in a dress so

typically "Second Empire" that--for all that the Princess wore it simply

and solely, no doubt, from attachment to the fashions that she had loved

when she was young--she seemed to have deliberately planned to avoid the

slightest discrepancy in historic colour, and to be satisfying the

expectations of those who looked to her to evoke the memory of another

age. I whispered to Swann to ask her whether she had known Musset. "Very

slightly, sir," was the answer, given in a tone which seemed to feign

annoyance at the question, and of course it was by way of a joke that

she called Swann "Sir", since they were intimate friends. "I had him to

dine once. I had invited him for seven o'clock. At half-past seven, as

he had not appeared, we sat down to dinner. He arrived at eight, bowed

to me, took his seat, never opened his lips, went off after dinner

without letting me hear the sound of his voice. Of course, he was dead

drunk. That hardly encouraged me to make another attempt." We were

standing a little way off, Swann and I. "I hope this little audience is

not going to last much longer," he muttered, "the soles of my feet are

hurting. I cannot think why my wife keeps on making conversation. When

we get home it will be she that complains of being tired, and she knows

I simply cannot go on standing like this." For Mme. Swann, who had had

the news from Mme. Bontemps, was in the course of telling the Princess

that the Government, having at last begun to realise the depth of its

depravity, had decided to send her an invitation to be present on the

platform in a few days' time, when the Tsar Nicholas was to visit the

Invalides. But the Princess who, in spite of appearances, in spite of

the character of her circle, which consisted mainly of artists and

literary people, had remained at heart and shewed herself, whenever she

had to take action, the niece of Napoleon, replied: "Yes, Madame, I

received it this morning, and I sent it back to the Minister, who must

have had it by now. I told him that I had no need of an invitation to go

to the Invalides. If the Government desires my presence there, it will

not be on the platform, it will be in our vault, where the Emperor's

tomb is. I have no need of a card to admit me there. I have my keys. I

go in and out when I choose. The Government has only to let me know

whether it wishes, me to be present or not. But if I do go to the

Invalides, it will be down below there or nowhere at all." At that

moment we were saluted, Mme. Swann and I, by a young man who greeted her

without stopping, and whom I was not aware that she knew; it was Bloch.

I inquired about him, and was told that he had been introduced to her by

Mme. Bontemps, and that he was employed in the Minister's secretariat,

which was news to me. Anyhow, she could not have seen him often--or

perhaps she had not cared to utter the name, hardly "smart" enough for

her liking, of Bloch, for she told me that he was called M. Moreul. I

assured her that she was mistaken, that his name was Bloch. The Princess

gathered up the train that flowed out behind her, while Mme. Swann gazed

at it with admiring eyes. "It is only a fur that the Emperor of Russia

sent me," she explained, "and as I have just been to see him I put it

on, so as to shew him that I'd managed to have it made up as a mantle."

"I hear that Prince Louis has joined the Russian Army; the Princess will

be very sad at losing him," went on Mme. Swann, not noticing her

husband's signals of distress. "That was a fine thing to do. As I said

to him, 'Just because there's been a. soldier, before, in the family,

that's no reason!'" replied the Princess, alluding with this abrupt

simplicity to Napoleon the Great. But Swann could hold out no longer.

"Ma'am, it is I that am going to play the Prince, and ask your

permission to retire; but, you see, my wife has not been so well, and I

do not like her to stand still for any time." Mme. Swann curtseyed

again, and the Princess conferred upon us all a celestial smile, which

she seemed to have summoned out of the past, from among the graces of

her girlhood, from the evenings at Compiègne, a smile which glided,

sweet and unbroken, over her hitherto so sullen face; then she went on

her way, followed by the two ladies in waiting, who had confined

themselves, in the manner of interpreters, of children's or invalids'

nurses, to punctuating our conversation with insignificant sentences and

superfluous explanations. "You should go and write your name in her

book, one day this week," Mme. Swann counselled me. "One doesn't leave

cards upon these 'Royalties', as the English call them, but she will

invite you to her house if you put your name down."

Sometimes in those last days of winter we would go, before proceeding on

our expedition, into one of the small picture-shows that were being

given at that time, where Swann, as a collector of mark, was greeted

with special deference by the dealers in whose galleries they were held.

And in that still wintry weather the old longing to set out for the

South of France and Venice would be reawakened in me by those rooms in

which a springtime, already well advanced, and a blazing sun cast violet

shadows upon the roseate Alpilles and gave the intense transparency of

emeralds to the Grand Canal. If the weather were inclement, we would go

to a concert or a theatre, and afterwards to one of the fashionable

tea-rooms. There, whenever Mme. Swann had anything to say to me which

she did not wish the people at the next table, or even the waiters who

brought our tea to understand, she would say it in English, as though

that had been a secret language known to our two selves alone. As it

happened everyone in the place knew English--I only had not yet learned

the language, and was obliged to say so to Mme. Swann in order that she

might cease to make, on the people who were drinking tea or were serving

us with it, remarks which I guessed to be uncomplimentary without either

my understanding or the person referred to losing a single word.

Once, in the matter of an afternoon at the theatre, Gilberte gave me a

great surprise. It was precisely the day of which she had spoken to me

some time back, on which fell the anniversary of her grandfather's

death. We were to go, she and I, with her governess, to hear selections

from an opera, and Gilberte had dressed with a view to attending this

performance, and wore the air of indifference with which she was in the

habit of treating whatever we might be going to do, with the comment

that it might be anything in the world, no matter what, provided that it

amused me and had her parents' approval. Before luncheon, her mother

drew us aside to tell us that her father was vexed at the thought of our

going to a theatre on that day. This seemed to me only natural. Gilberte

remained impassive, but grew pale with an anger which she was unable to

conceal; still she uttered not a word. When M. Swann joined us his wife

took him to the other end of the room and said something in his ear. He

called Gilberte, and they went together into the next room. We could

hear their raised voices. And yet I could not bring myself to believe

that Gilberte, so submissive, so loving, so thoughtful, would resist her

father's appeal, on such a day and for so trifling a matter. At length

Swann reappeared with her, saying: "You heard what I said. Now you may

do as you like."

Gilberte's features remained compressed in a frown throughout luncheon,

after which we retired to her room. Then suddenly, without hesitating

and as though she had never at any point hesitated over her course of

action: "Two o'clock!" she exclaimed, "You know the concert begins at

half-past." And she told her governess to make haste.

"But," I reminded her, "won't your father be cross with you?"

"Not the least little bit!"

"Surely, he was afraid it would look odd, because of the anniversary."

"What difference can it make to me what people think? I think it's

perfectly absurd to worry about other people in matters of sentiment. We

feel things for ourselves, not for the public. Mademoiselle has very few

pleasures; she's been looking forward to going to this concert. I am not

going to deprive her of it just to satisfy public opinion."

"But, Gilberte," I protested, taking her by the arm, "it is not to

satisfy public opinion, it is to please your father."

"You are not going to pass remarks upon my conduct, I hope," she said

sharply, plucking her arm away.

*

* *

A favour still more precious than their taking me with them to the

Jardin d'Acclimatation, the Swanns did not exclude me even from their

friendship with Bergotte, which had been at the root of the attraction

that I had found in them when, before I had even seen Gilberte, I

reflected that her intimacy with that god-like elder would have made her,

for me, the most passionately enthralling of friends, had not the

disdain that I was bound to inspire in her forbidden me to hope that she

would ever take me, in his company, to visit the towns that he loved.

And lo, one day, came an invitation from Mme. Swann to a big

luncheon-party. I did not know who else were to be the guests. On my

arrival I was disconcerted, as I crossed the hall, by an alarming

incident. Mme. Swann seldom missed an opportunity of adopting any of

those customs which pass as fashionable for a season, and then, failing

to find support, are speedily abandoned (as, for instance, many years

before, she had had her "private hansom", or now had, printed in English

upon a card inviting you to luncheon, the words, "To meet", followed by

the name of some more or less important personage). Often enough these

usages implied nothing mysterious and required no initiation. Take, for

instance, a minute innovation of those days, imported from England;

Odette had made her husband have some visiting cards printed on which

the name Charles Swann was preceded by "Mr.". After the first visit that

I paid her, Mme. Swann had left at my door one of these "pasteboards",

as she called them. No one had ever left a card on me before; I felt at

once so much pride, emotion, gratitude that, scraping together all the

money I possessed, I ordered a superb basket of camellias and had it

sent to Mme. Swann. I implored my father to go and leave a card on her,

but first, quickly, to have some printed on which his name should bear

the prefix "Mr.". He vouchsafed neither of my prayers; I was in despair

for some days, and then asked myself whether he might not after all have

been right. But this use of "Mr.", if it meant nothing, was at least

intelligible. Not so with another that was revealed to me on the

occasion of this luncheon-party, but revealed without any indication of

its purport. At the moment when I was about to step from the hall into

the drawing-room the butler handed me a thin, oblong envelope upon which

my name was inscribed. In my surprise I thanked him; but I eyed the

envelope with misgivings. I no more knew what I was expected to do with

it than a foreigner knows what to do with one of those little utensils

that they lay by his place at a Chinese banquet. I noticed that it was

gummed down; I was afraid of appearing indiscreet, were I to open it

then and there; and so I thrust it into my pocket with an air of knowing

all about it. Mme. Swann had written to me a few days before, asking me

to come to luncheon with "just a few people". There were, however,

sixteen of us, among whom I never suspected for a moment that I was to

find Bergotte. Mme. Swann, who had already "named" me, as she called it,

to several of her guests, suddenly, after my name, in the same tone that

she had used in uttering it (in fact, as though we were merely two of

the guests at her party, who ought each to feel equally flattered on

meeting the other), pronounced that of the sweet Singer with the snowy

locks. The name Bergotte made me jump like the sound of a revolver fired

at me point blank, but instinctively, for appearance's sake, I bowed;

there, straight in front of me, as by one of those conjurers whom we see

standing whole and unharmed, in their frock coats, in the smoke of a

pistol shot out of which a pigeon has just fluttered, my salute was

returned by a young common little thick-set peering person, with a red

nose curled like a snail-shell and a black tuft on his chin. I was

cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the

explosion was not only the feeble old man, of whom no vestige now

remained; there was also the beauty of an immense work which I had

contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had

constructed, like a temple, expressly for itself, but for which no room

was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with blood-vessels,

bones, muscles, sinews, of the little man with the snub nose and black

beard who stood before me. All the Bergotte whom I had slowly and

delicately elaborated for myself, drop by drop, like a stalactite, out

of the transparent beauty of his books, ceased (I could see at once) to

be of any use, the moment I was obliged to include in him the

snail-shell nose and to utilise the little black beard; just as we must

reject as worthless the solution of a problem the terms of which we have

not read in full, having failed to observe that the total must amount to

a specified figure. The nose and beard were elements similarly

ineluctable, and all the more aggravating in that, while forcing me to

reconstruct entirely the personage of Bergotte, they seemed further to

imply, to produce, to secrete incessantly a certain quality of mind,

alert and self-satisfied, which was not in the picture, for such a mind

had no connexion whatever with the sort of intelligence that was

diffused throughout those books, so intimately familiar to me, which

were permeated by a gentle and god-like wisdom. Starting from them, I

should never have arrived at that snail-shell nose; but starting from

the nose, which did not appear to be in the slightest degree ashamed of

itself, but stood out alone there like a grotesque ornament fastened on

his face, I must proceed in a diametrically opposite direction from the

work of Bergotte, I must arrive, it would seem, at the mentality of a

busy and preoccupied engineer, of the sort who when you accost them in

the street think it correct to say: "Thanks, and you?" before you have

actually inquired of them how they are, or else, if you assure them that

you have been charmed to make their acquaintance, respond with an

abbreviation which they imagine to be effective, intelligent and

up-to-date, inasmuch as it avoids any waste of precious time on vain

formalities: "Same here!" Names are, no doubt, but whimsical

draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so little

like the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have

before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for

that matter, is not the true world, our senses being little more endowed

than our imagination with the art of portraiture, so little, indeed,

that the final and approximately lifelike pictures which we manage to

obtain of reality are at least as different from the visible world as

that was from the imagined). But in Bergotte's case, my preconceived

idea of him from his name troubled me far less than my familiarity with

his work, to which I was obliged to attach, as to the cord of a balloon,

the man with the little beard, without knowing whether it would still

have the strength to raise him from the ground. It seemed quite clear,

however, that it really was he who had written the books that I had so

greatly enjoyed, for Mme. Swann having thought it incumbent upon her to

tell him of my admiration for one of these, he shewed no surprise that

she should have mentioned this to him rather than to any other of the

party, nor did he seem to regard her action as due to a misapprehension,

but, swelling out the frock coat which he had put on in honour of all

these distinguished guests with a body distended in anticipation of the

coming meal, while his mind was completely occupied by other, more real

and more important considerations, it was only as at some finished

episode in his early life, as though one had made an allusion to a

costume of the Duc de Guise which he had worn, one season, at a fancy

dress ball, that he smiled as he bore his mind back to the idea of his

books; which at once began to fall in my estimation (dragging down with

them the whole value of Beauty, of the world, of life itself), until

they seemed to have been merely the casual amusement of a man with a

little beard. I told myself that he must have taken great pains over

them, but that, if he had lived upon an island surrounded by beds of

pearl-oysters, he would instead have devoted himself to, and would have

made a fortune out of the pearling trade. His work no longer appeared to

me so inevitable. And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed

prove that great writers were gods, ruling each one over a kingdom that

was his alone, or whether all that was not rather make-believe, whether

the differences between one man's book and another's were not the result

of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and

essential difference between two contrasted personalities.

Meanwhile we had taken our places at the table. By the side of my plate

I found a carnation, the stalk of which was wrapped in silver paper. It

embarrassed me less than the envelope that had been handed to me in the

hall, which, however, I had completely forgotten. This custom, strange

as it was to me, became more intelligible when I saw all the male guests

take up the similar carnations that were lying by their plates and slip

them into the buttonholes of their coats. I did as they had done, with

the air of spontaneity that a free-thinker assumes in church, who is not

familiar with the order of service but rises when everyone else rises

and kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees. Another usage,

equally strange to me but less ephemeral, disquieted me more. On the

other side of my plate was a smaller plate, on which was heaped a

blackish substance which I did not then know to be caviare. I was

ignorant of what was to be done with it but firmly determined not to let

it enter my mouth.

Bergotte was sitting not far from me and I could hear quite well

everything that he said. I understood then the impression that M. de

Norpois had formed of him. He had indeed a peculiar "organ"; there is

nothing that so much alters the material qualities of the voice as the

presence of thought behind what one is saying; the resonance of one's

diphthongs, the energy of one's labials are profoundly affected--in

fact, one's whole way of speaking. His seemed to me to differ entirely

from his way of writing, and even the things that he said from those

with which he filled his books. But the voice issues from behind a mask

through which it is not powerful enough to make us recognise, at first

sight, a face which we have seen uncovered in the speaker's literary

style. At certain points in the conversation, when Bergotte, by force of

habit, began to talk in a way which no one but M. de Norpois would have

thought affected or unpleasant, it was a long time before I discovered

an exact correspondence with the parts of his books in which his form

became so poetic and so musical. At those points he could see in what he

was saying a plastic beauty independent of whatever his sentences might

mean, and as human speech reflects the human soul, though without

expressing it as does literary style, Bergotte appeared almost to be

talking nonsense, intoning certain words and, if he were secretly

pursuing, beneath them, a single image, stringing them together

uninterruptedly on one continuous note, with a wearisome monotony. So

that a pretentious, emphatic and monotonous opening was a sign of the

rare aesthetic value of what he was saying, and an effect, in his

conversation, of the same power which, in his books, produced that

harmonious flow of imagery. I had had all the more difficulty in

discovering this at first since what he said at such moments, precisely

because it was the authentic utterance of Bergotte, had not the

appearance of being Bergotte's. It was an abundant crop of clearly

defined ideas, not included in that "Bergotte manner" which so many

story-tellers had appropriated to themselves; and this dissimilarity was

probably but another aspect--made out with difficulty through the stream

of conversation, as an eclipse is seen through a smoked glass--of the

fact that when one read a page of Bergotte it was never just what would

have been written by any of those lifeless imitators who, nevertheless,

in newspapers and in books, adorned their prose with so many

"Bergottish" images and ideas. This difference in style arose from the

fact that what was meant by "Bergottism" was, first and foremost, a

priceless element of truth hidden in the heart of everything, whence it

was extracted by that great writer, by virtue of his genius, and that

this extraction, and not simply the perpetration of "Bergottisms", was

my sweet Singer's aim in writing. Though, it must be added, he continued

to perpetrate them in spite of himself, and because he was Bergotte, so

that, in one sense, every fresh beauty in his work was the little drop

of Bergotte buried at the heart of a thing which he had distilled from

it. But if, for that reason, each of those beauties was related to all

the rest, and had a "family likeness", yet each remained separate and

individual, as was the act of discovery that had brought it to the light

of day; new, and consequently different from what was called the

Bergotte manner, which was a loose synthesis of all the "Bergottisms"

already invented and set forth by him in writing, with no indication by

which men who lacked genius might forecast what would be his next

discovery. So it is with all great writers, the beauty of their language

is as incalculable as that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is

creative, because it is applied to an external object of which, and not

of their language or its beauty, they are thinking, to which they have

not yet given expression. An author of memorials of our time, wishing to

write without too obviously seeming to be writing like Saint-Simon,

might, on occasion, give us the first line of his portrait of Villars:

"He was a rather tall man, dark . . . with an alert, open, expressive

physiognomy," but what law of determinism could bring him to the

discovery of Saint-Simon's next line, which begins with "and, to tell

the truth, a trifle mad"? The true variety is in this abundance of real

and unexpected elements, in the branch loaded with blue flowers which

thrusts itself forward, against all reason, from the spring hedgerow

that seemed already overcharged with blossoms, whereas the purely formal

imitation of variety (and one might advance the same argument for all

the other qualities of style) is but a barren uniformity, that is to say

the very antithesis of variety, and cannot, in the work of imitators,

give the illusion or recall other examples of variety save to a reader

who has not acquired the sense of it from the masters themselves.

And so--just as Bergotte's way of speaking would no doubt have been

charming if he himself had been merely an amateur repeating imitations

of Bergotte, whereas it was attached to the mind of Bergotte, at work

and in action, by essential ties which the ear did not at once

distinguish--so it was because Bergotte applied that mind with precision

to the reality which pleased him that his language had in it something

positive, something over-rich, disappointing those who expected to hear

him speak only of the "eternal torrent of forms," and of the "mystic

thrills of beauty". Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what

he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of

approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already

familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail,

to be quite wrong about it, to be speaking in paradox, so that his ideas

seemed as often as not to be in confusion, for each of us finds lucidity

only in those ideas which are in the same state of confusion as his own.

Besides, as all novelty depends upon the elimination, first, of the

stereotyped attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which has

seemed to us to be reality itself, every new conversation, as well as

all original painting and music, must always appear laboured and

tedious. It is founded upon figures of speech with which we are not

familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors;

and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth.

(After all, the old forms of speech must in their time have been images

difficult to follow when the listener was not yet cognisant of the

universe which they depicted. But he has long since decided that this

must be the real universe, and so relies confidently upon it.) So when

Bergotte--and his figures appear simple enough to-day--said of Cottard

that he was a mannikin in a bottle, always trying to rise to the

surface, and of Brichot that "to him even more than to Mme. Swann the

arrangement of his hair was a matter for anxious deliberation, because,

in his twofold preoccupation over his profile and his reputation, he had

always to make sure that it was so brushed as to give him the air at

once of a lion and of a philosopher," one immediately felt the strain,

and sought a foothold upon something which one called more concrete,

meaning by that more ordinary. These unintelligible words, issuing from

the mask that I had before my eyes, it was indeed to the writer whom I

admired that they must be attributed, and yet they could not have been

inserted among his books, in the form of a puzzle set in a series of

different puzzles, they occupied another plane and required a

transposition by means of which, one day, when I was repeating to myself

certain phrases that I had heard Bergotte use, I discovered in them the

whole machinery of his literary style, the different elements of which I

was able to recognise and to name in this spoken discourse which had

struck me as being so different.

From a less immediate point of view the special way, a little too

meticulous, too intense, that he had of pronouncing certain words,

certain adjectives which were constantly recurring in his conversation,

and which he never uttered without a certain emphasis, giving to each of

their syllables a separate force and intoning the last syllable (as for

instance the word _visage_, which he always used in preference to

figure, and enriched with a number of superfluous v's and s's and g's,

which seemed all to explode from his outstretched palm at such moments)

corresponded exactly to the fine passages in which, in his prose, he

brought those favourite words into the light, preceded by a sort of

margin and composed in such a way in the metrical whole of the phrase

that the reader was obliged, if he were not to make a false quantity, to

give to each of them its full value. And yet one did not find in the

speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those

of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the

appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues

from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken

words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of

conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves. In

this respect, there were more intonations, there was more accent in his

books than in his talk; an accent independent of the beauty of style,

which the author himself has possibly not perceived, for it is not

separable from his most intimate personality. It was this accent which,

at the moments when, in his books, Bergotte was entirely natural, gave a

rhythm to the words--often at such times quite insignificant--that he

wrote. This accent is not marked on the printed page, there is nothing

there to indicate it, and yet it comes of its own accord to his phrases,

one cannot pronounce them in any other way, it is what was most

ephemeral and at the same time most profound in the writer, and it is

what will bear witness to his true nature, what will say whether,

despite all the austerity that he has expressed he was gentle, despite

all his sensuality sentimental.

Certain peculiarities of elocution, faint traces of which were to be

found in Bergotte's conversation, were not exclusively his own; for

when, later on, I came to know his brothers and sisters, I found those

peculiarities much more accentuated in their speech. There was something

abrupt and harsh in the closing words of a light and spirited utterance,

something faint and dying at the end of a sad one. Swann, who had known

the Master as a boy, told me that in those days one used to hear on his

lips, just as much as on his brothers' and sisters', those inflexions,

almost a family type, shouts of violent merriment interspersed with

murmurings of a long-drawn melancholy, and that in the room in which

they all played together he used to perform his part, better than any of

them, in their symphonies, alternately deafening and subdued. However

characteristic it may be, the sound that escapes from human lips is

fugitive and does not survive the speaker. But it was not so with the

pronunciation of the Bergotte family. For if it is difficult ever to

understand, even in the _Meistersinger_ how an artist can invent music

by listening to the twittering of birds, yet Bergotte had transposed and

fixed in his written language that manner of dwelling on words which

repeat themselves in shouts of joy, or fall, drop by drop, in melancholy

sighs. There are in his books just such closing phrases where the

accumulated sounds are prolonged (as in the last chords of the overture

of an opera which cannot come to an end, and repeats several times over

its supreme cadence before the conductor finally lays down his baton),

in which, later on, I was to find a musical equivalent for those

phonetic 'brasses' of the Bergotte family. But in his own case, from the

moment in which he transferred them to his books, he ceased

instinctively to make use of them in his speech. From the day on which

he had begun to write--all the more markedly, therefore, in the later

years in which I first knew him--his voice had lost this orchestration

for ever.

These young Bergottes--the future writer and his brothers and

sisters--were doubtless in no way superior, far from it, to other young

people, more refined, more intellectual than themselves, who found the

Bergottes rather "loud", that is to say a trifle vulgar, irritating one

by the witticisms which characterised the tone, at once pretentious and

puerile, of their household. But genius, and even what is only great

talent, spring less from seeds of intellect and social refinement

superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transposing,

and so transforming them. To heat a liquid over an electric lamp one

requires to have not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the

current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as instead of light

to give heat. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most

powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing

to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the

horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its

speed into ascending force. Similarly the men who produce works of

genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose

conversation is most brilliant or their culture broadest, but those who

have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to

make use of their personality as of a mirror, in such a way that their

life, however unimportant it may be socially, and even, in a sense,

intellectually speaking, is reflected by it, genius consisting in the

reflective power of the writer and not in the intrinsic quality of the

scene reflected. The day on which young Bergotte succeeded in shewing to

the world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had passed

his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself

and his brothers, on that day he climbed far above the friends of his

family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself; they in

their fine Rolls Royces might return home expressing due contempt for

the vulgarity of the Bergottes; but he, with his modest engine which had

at last left the ground, he soared above their heads.

But there were other characteristics of his elocution which it was not

with the members of his family, but with certain contemporary writers

that he must share. Younger men, who were beginning to repudiate him as

a master and disclaimed any intellectual affinity to him in themselves,

displayed their affinity without knowing it when they made use of the

same adverbs, the same prepositions that he incessantly repeated, when

they constructed their sentences in the same way, spoke in the same

quiescent, lingering tone, by a reaction from the eloquent, easy

language of an earlier generation. Perhaps these young men--we shall

come across some of whom this may be said--had never known Bergotte. But

his way of thinking, inoculated into them, had led them to those

alterations of syntax and of accent which bear a necessary relation to

originality of mind. A relation which, incidentally, requires to be

traced. Thus Bergotte, if he owed nothing to any man for his manner of

writing, derived his manner of speaking from one of his early

associates, a marvellous talker to whose ascendancy he had succumbed,

whom he imitated, unconsciously, in his conversation, but who himself,

being less gifted, had never written any really outstanding book. So

that if one had been in quest of originality in speech, Bergotte must

have been labelled a disciple, a writer at second-hand, whereas,

influenced by his friend only so far as talk went, he had been original

and creative in his writings. Doubtless again, so as to distinguish

himself from the previous generation, too fond as it had been of

abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte wished to speak

favourably of a book, what he would bring into prominence, what he would

quote with approval would always be some scene that furnished the reader

with an image, some picture that had no rational significance. "Ah,

yes!" he would exclaim, "it is quite admirable! There is a little girl

in an orange shawl. It is excellent!" or again, "Oh, yes, there is a

passage in which there is a regiment marching along the street; yes, it

is excellent!" As for style, he was not altogether of his time (though

he remained quite exclusively of his race, abominating Tolstoy, George

Eliot, Ibsen and Dostoievsky), for the word that always came to his lips

when he wished to praise the style of any writer was "mild". "Yes, you

know I like Chateaubriand better in _Atala_ than in _René_; he seems to

me to be 'milder'." He said the word like a doctor who, when his patient

assures him that milk will give him indigestion, answers, "But, you

know, it's very 'mild'." And it is true that there was in Bergotte's

style a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients used to

praise certain of their orators in terms which we now find it hard to

understand, accustomed as we are to our own modern tongues in which

effects of that kind are not sought.

He would say also, with a shy smile, of pages of his own for which some

one had expressed admiration: "I think it is more or less true, more or

less accurate; it may be of some value perhaps," but he would say this

simply from modesty, as a woman to whom one has said that her dress, or

her daughter is charming replies, "It is comfortable," or "She is a good

girl." But the constructive instinct was too deeply implanted in

Bergotte for him not to be aware that the sole proof that he had built

usefully and on the lines of truth lay in the pleasure that his work had

given, to himself first of all and afterwards to his readers. Only many

years later, when he no longer had any talent, whenever he wrote

anything with which he was not satisfied, so as not to have to suppress

it, as he ought to have done, so as to be able to publish it with a

clear conscience he would repeat, but to himself this time: "After all,

it is more or less accurate, it must be of some value to the country."

So that the phrase murmured long ago among his admirers by the insincere

voice of modesty came in the end to be whispered in the secrecy of his

heart by the uneasy tongue of pride. And the same words which had served

Bergotte as an unwanted excuse for the excellence of his earliest works

became as it were an ineffective consolation to him for the hopeless

mediocrity of the latest.

A kind of austerity of taste which he had, a kind of determination to

write nothing of which he could not say that it was "mild", which had

made people for so many years regard him as a sterile and precious

artist, a chiseller of exquisite trifles, was on the contrary the secret

of his strength, for habit forms the style of the writer just as much as

the character of the man, and the author who has more than once been

patient to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind

of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of

his talent, just as if he yields too often to pleasure, to laziness, to

the fear of being put to trouble, he will find himself describing in

terms which no amount of revision can modify, the forms of his own vices

and the limits of his virtue.

If, however, despite all the analogies which I was to perceive later on

between the writer and the man, I had not at first sight, in Mme.

Swann's drawing-room, believed that this could be Bergotte, the author

of so many divine books, who stood before me, perhaps I was not

altogether wrong, for he himself did not, in the strict sense of the

word, "believe" it either. He did not believe it because he shewed a

great assiduity in the presence of fashionable people (and yet he was

not a snob), of literary men and journalists who were vastly inferior to

himself. Of course he had long since learned, from the suffrage of his

readers, that he had genius, compared to which social position and

official rank were as nothing. He had learned that he had genius, but he

did not believe it because he continued to simulate deference towards

mediocre writers in order to succeed, shortly, in becoming an

Academician, whereas the Academy and the Faubourg Saint-Germain have no

more to do with that part of the Eternal Mind which is the author of the

works of Bergotte than with the law of causality or the idea of God.

That also he knew, but as a kleptomaniac knows, without profiting by the

knowledge, that it is wrong to steal. And the man with the little beard

and snail-shell nose knew and used all the tricks of the gentleman who

pockets your spoons, in his efforts to reach the coveted academic chair,

I or some duchess or other who could dispose of several votes at the

election, but while on his way to them he would endeavour to make sure

that no one who would consider the pursuit of such an object a vice in

him should see what he was doing. He was only half-successful; one could

hear, alternating with the speech of the true Bergotte, that of the

other Bergotte, ambitious, utterly selfish, who thought it not worth his

while to speak of any but his powerful, rich or noble friends, so as to

enhance his own position, he who in his books, when he was really

himself, had so well portrayed the charm, pure as a mountain spring, of

poverty.

As for those other vices to which M. de Norpois had alluded, that almost

incestuous love, which was made still worse, people said, by a want of

delicacy in the matter of money, if they contradicted, in a shocking

manner, the tendency of his latest novels, in which he shewed everywhere

a regard for what was right and proper so painfully rigid that the most

innocent pleasures of their heroes were poisoned by it, and that even

the reader found himself turning their pages with a sense of acute

discomfort, and asked himself whether it was possible to go y on living

even the quietest of lives, those vices did not at I all prove,

supposing that they were fairly imputed to Bergotte, that his literature

was a lie and all his sensitiveness mere play-acting. Just as in

pathology certain conditions similar in appearance are due, some to an

excess others to an insufficiency of tension, of secretion and so forth,

so there may be vice arising from supersensitiveness just as much as

from the lack of it. Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the

moral problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of this

problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not of his own personal

life but of what is for him the true life, a general, a literary

solution. As the great Doctors of the Church began often, without losing

their virtue, by acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind,

out of which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great

artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of their vices in

order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us

all. It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses and follies) of the

circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous

or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives, or

their own misdeeds that writers have most often castigated in their

books, without, however, thinking it necessary to alter their domestic

economy or to improve the tone of their households. And this contrast

had never before been so striking as it was in Bergotte's time, because,

on the one hand, in proportion as society grew more corrupt, our notions

of morality were increasingly exalted, while on the other hand the

public were now told far more than they had ever hitherto known about

the private lives of literary men; and on certain evenings in the

theatre people would point out the author whom I had so greatly admired

at Combray, sitting at the back of a box the mere composition of which

seemed an oddly humorous, or perhaps keenly ironical commentary upon--a

brazen-faced denial of the thesis which he had just been maintaining in

his latest book. Not that anything which this or that casual informant

could tell me was of much use in helping me to settle the question of

the goodness or wickedness of Bergotte. An intimate friend would furnish

proofs of his hardheartedness; then a stranger would cite some instance

(touching, since he had evidently wished it to remain hidden) of his

real depth of feeling. He had behaved cruelly to his wife. But in a

village inn, where he had gone to spend the night, he had stayed on to

watch over a poor woman who had tried to drown herself, and when he was

obliged to continue his journey had left a large sum of money with the

landlord, so that he should not turn the poor creature out, but see that

she got proper attention. Perhaps the more the great writer was

developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard,

so much the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all

the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to

perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty

of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he

imagined the feelings of others as completely as if they had been his

own, whenever he was obliged, for any reason, to talk to some person who

had been unfortunate (that is to say in a casual encounter) he would, in

doing so, take up not his own personal standpoint but that of the

sufferer himself, a standpoint in which he would have been horrified by

the speech of those who continued to think of their own petty concerns

in the presence of another's grief. With the result that he gave rise

everywhere to justifiable rancour and to undying gratitude.

Above all, he was a man who in his heart of hearts loved nothing really

except certain images and (like a miniature set in the floor of a

casket) the composing and painting of them in words. For a trifle that

some one had sent him, if that trifle gave him the opportunity of

introducing one or two of these images, he would be prodigal in the

expression of his gratitude, while shewing none whatever for an

expensive present. And if he had had to plead before a tribunal, he

would inevitably have chosen his words not for the effect that they

might have on the judge but with an eye to certain images which the

judge would certainly never have perceived.

That first day on which I met him with Gilberte's parents, I mentioned

to Bergotte that I had recently been to hear Berma in _Phèdre_; and he

told me that in the scene in which she stood with her arm raised to the

level of her shoulder--one of those very scenes that had been greeted

with such applause--she had managed to suggest with great nobility of

art certain classical figures which, quite possibly, she had never even

seen, a Hesperid carved in the same attitude upon a metope at Olympia,

and also the beautiful primitive virgins on the Erechtheum.

"It may be sheer divination, and yet I fancy that she visits the

museums. It would be interesting to 'establish' that." ("Establish" was

one of those regular Bergotte expressions, and one which various young

men who had never met him had caught from him, speaking like him by some

sort of telepathic suggestion.)

"Do you mean the Cariatides?" asked Swann.

"No, no," said Bergotte, "except in the scene where she confesses her

passion to Œnone, where she moves her hand exactly like Hegeso on the

stele in the Ceramic, it is a far more primitive art that she revives. I

was referring to the Korai of the old Erechtheum, and I admit that there

is perhaps nothing quite so remote from the art of Racine, but there are

so many things already in _Phèdre_, . . . that one more . . . Oh, and

then, yes, she is really charming, that little sixth century Phaedra,

the rigidity of the arm, the lock of hair 'frozen into marble', yes, you

know, it is wonderful of her to have discovered all that. There is a

great deal more antiquity in it than in most of the books they are

labelling 'antique' this year."

As Bergotte had in one of his volumes addressed a famous invocation to

these archaic statues, the words that he was now uttering were quite

intelligible to me and gave me a fresh reason for taking an interest in

Berma's acting. I tried to picture her again in my mind, as she had

looked in that scene in which I remembered that she had raised her arm

to the level of her shoulder. And I said to myself, "There we have the

Hesperid of Olympia; there we have the sister of those adorable

suppliants on the Acropolis; there is indeed nobility in art!" But if

these considerations were to enhance for me the beauty of Berma's

gesture, Bergotte should have put them into my head before the

performance. Then, while that attitude of the actress was actually

existing in flesh and blood before my eyes, at that moment in which the

thing that was happening had still the substance of reality, I might

have tried to extract from it the idea of archaic sculpture. But of

Berma in that scene all that I retained was a memory which was no longer

liable to modification, slender as a picture which lacks that abundant

perspective of the present tense where one is free to delve and can

always discover something new, a picture to which one cannot

retrospectively give a meaning that is not subject to verification and

correction from without. At this point Mme. Swann joined in the

conversation, asking me whether Gilberte had remembered to give me what

Bergotte had written about _Phèdre_, and adding, "My daughter is such

a scatter-brain!" Bergotte smiled modestly and protested that they were

only a few pages, of no importance. "But it is perfectly charming, that

little pamphlet, that little 'tract' of yours!" Mme. Swann assured him,

to shew that she was a good hostess, to make the rest of us think that

she had read Bergotte's essay, and also because she liked not merely to

flatter Bergotte, but to make a selection for herself out of what he

wrote, to control his writing. And it must be admitted that she did

inspire him, though not in the way that she supposed. But when all is

said there is, between what constituted the smartness of Mme. Swann's

drawing-room and a whole side of Bergotte's work, so close a

correspondence that either of them might serve, among elderly men

to-day, as a commentary upon the other.

I let myself go in telling him what my impressions had been. Often

Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him that

I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her

arm. "Ah! The designer will be glad to hear that; he is a real artist. I

shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I

must say, myself, that I do not care for it very much, it drowns

everything in a sort of aqueous vapour, little Phèdre standing there

looks too like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. You will

tell me, of course, that it brings out the cosmic aspect of the play.

That is quite true. All the same, it would be more appropriate if the

scene were laid in the Court of Neptune. Oh yes, of course, I know the

Vengeance of Neptune does come into the play. I don't suggest for a

moment that we should think only of Port-Royal, but after all the story

that Racine tells us is not the 'Loves of the Sea-Urchins'. Still, it is

what my friend wished to have, and it is very well done, right or wrong,

and it's really quite pretty when you come to look at it. Yes, so you

liked that, did you; you understood what it meant, of course; we feel

the same about it, don't we, really; it is a trifle unbalanced, what

he's done, you agree with me, but on the whole it is very clever of

him." And so, when Bergotte had to express an opinion which was the

opposite of my own, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the

impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done.

This does not prove that Bergotte's opinions were of less value than the

Ambassador's; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its

strength to him who challenges it. Being itself a part of the riches of

the universal Mind, it makes its way into, grafts itself upon the mind

of him whom it is employed to refute, slips in among the ideas already

there, with the help of which, gaining a little ground, he completes and

corrects it; so that the final utterance is always to some extent the

work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not,

properly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, founded upon nothing,

can find no support, no kindred spirit among the ideas of the adversary,

that he, grappling with something which, is not there, can find no word

to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art)

were unanswerable simply because they were without reality.

Since Bergotte did not sweep aside my objections, I confessed to him

that they had won the scorn of M. de Norpois. "But he's an old parrot!"

was the answer. "He keeps on pecking you because he imagines all the

time that you're a piece of cake, or a slice of cuttle-fish." "What's

that?" asked Swann. "Are you a friend of Norpois?" "He's as dull as a

wet Sunday," interrupted his wife, who had great faith in Bergotte's

judgment, and was no doubt afraid that M. de Norpois might have spoken

ill of her to us. "I tried to make him talk after dinner; I don't know

if it's his age or his indigestion, but I found him too sticky for

words. I really thought I should have to 'dope' him." "Yes, isn't he?"

Bergotte chimed in. "You see, he has to keep his mouth shut half the

time so as not to use up all the stock of inanities that hold his

shirt-front down and his white waistcoat up." "I think that Bergotte and

my wife are both very hard on him," came from Swann, who took the

"line", in his own house, of a plain, sensible man. "I quite see that

Norpois cannot interest you very much, but from another point of view,"

(for Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of "real life") "he is

quite remarkable, quite a remarkable instance of a lover. When he was

Secretary at Rome," he went on, after making sure that Gilberte could

not hear him, "he had, here in Paris, a mistress with whom he was madly

in love, and he found time to make the double journey every week, so as

to see her for a couple of hours. She was, as it happens, a most

intelligent woman, and is quite attractive to this day; she is a dowager

now. And he has had any number of others since then. I'm sure I should

have gone stark mad if the woman I was in love with lived in Paris and I

was kept shut up in Rome. Nervous men ought always to love, as the lower

orders say, 'beneath' them, so that their women have a material

inducement to do what they tell them." As he spoke, Swann realised that

I might be applying this maxim to himself and Odette, and as, even among

superior beings, at the moment when you and they seem to be soaring

together above the plane of life, their personal pride is still basely

human, he was seized by a violent ill-will towards me. But this was made

manifest only in the uneasiness of his glance. He said nothing more to

me at the time. Not that this need surprise us. When Racine (according

to a story the truth of which has been exploded, though the theme of it

may be found recurring every day in Parisian life) made an illusion to

Scarron in front of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said

nothing to the poet that evening. It was on the following day, only,

that he fell.

But as a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this

momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, finished saying

what was in his mind in these words, words which were to assume later on

in my memory the importance of a prophetic warning, which I had not had

the sense to take: "The danger of that kind of love, however, is that

the woman's subjection calms the man's jealousy for a time but also

makes it more exacting. After a little he will force his mistress to

live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day and

night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble."

I reverted to M. de Norpois. "You must never trust him; he has the most

wicked tongue!" said Mme. Swann in an accent which seemed to me to

indicate that M. de Norpois had been "saying things" about her,

especially as Swann looked across at his wife with an air of rebuke, as

though to stop her before she went too far.

Meanwhile Gilberte, who had been told to go and get ready for our drive,

stayed to listen to the conversation, and hovered between her mother and

her father, leaning affectionately against his shoulder. Nothing, at

first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme. Swann, who was dark,

than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But after looking at

them both for a moment one saw in Gilberte many of the features--for

instance, the nose cut short with a sharp, unfaltering decision by the

unseen sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive

generations--the expression, the movements of her mother; to take an

illustration from another form of art, she made one think of a portrait

that was not a good likeness of Mme. Swann, whom the painter, to carry

out some whim of colouring, had posed in a partial disguise, dressed to

go out to a party in Venetian "character". And as not merely was she

wearing a fair wig, but every atom of a swarthier complexion had been

discharged from her flesh which, stripped of its veil of brownness,

seemed more naked, covered simply in rays of light shed by an internal

sun, this "make-up" was not just superficial but was incarnate in her;

Gilberte had the appearance of embodying some fabulous animal or of

having assumed a mythological disguise. This reddish skin was so exactly

that of her father that nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was

being created, to solve the problem of how to reconstruct Mme. Swann

piecemeal, without any material at her disposal save the skin of M.

Swann. And nature had utilised this to perfection, like a master carver

who makes a point of leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in

evidence. On Gilberte's face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of

Odette's nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact the two

beauty spots of M. Swann. It was a new variety of Mme. Swann that was

thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree beside

a purple. At the same time it did not do to imagine the boundary line

between these two likenesses as definitely fixed. Now and then, when

Gilberte smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father's cheek

upon her mother's face, as though some one had mixed them together to

see what would result from the blend; this oval grew distinct, as an

embryo grows into a living shape, it lengthened obliquely, expanded, and

a moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte's eyes there was the frank

and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when

she gave me the agate marble and said "Keep it, to remind yourself of

our friendship." But were one to put a question to Gilberte, to ask her

what she had been doing, then one saw in those same eyes the

embarrassment, the uncertainty, the prevarication, the misery that

Odette used in the old days to shew, when Swann asked her where she had

been and she gave him one of those lying answers which, in those days,

drove the lover to despair and now made him abruptly change the

conversation, as an incurious and prudent husband. Often in the

Champs-Elysées I was disturbed by seeing this look on Gilberte's face.

But as a rule my fears were unfounded. For in her, a purely physical

survival of her mother, this look (if nothing else) had ceased to have

any meaning. It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go

home for some lesson that Gilberte's pupils executed that movement

which, in time past, in the eyes of Odette, had been caused by the fear

of disclosing that she had, during the day, opened the door to one of

her lovers, or was at that moment in a hurry to be at some

trysting-place. So one could see the two natures of M. and Mme. Swann

ebb and flow, encroaching alternately one upon the other in the body of

this Melusine.

It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its

father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the merits and

defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good

qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents you will find

but one in the child, and allied to that very fault in the other parent

which seemed most irreconcilable with it. Indeed, the incarnation of a

good moral quality in an incompatible physical blemish is often one of

the laws of filial resemblance. Of two sisters, one will combine with

the proud bearing of her father the mean little soul of her mother; the

other, abundantly endowed with the paternal intelligence, will present

it to the world in the aspect which her mother has made familiar; her

mother's shapeless nose and scraggy bosom are become the bodily covering

of talents which you had learned to distinguish beneath a superb

presence. With the result that of each of the sisters one can say with

equal justification that it is she who takes more after one or other of

her parents. It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were,

at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father's and her

mother's, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the

possession of her--and yet one cannot exactly say that, which would let

it be thought that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering by

being the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one

and the other, and at any given moment no more than one of the two, that

is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering

accordingly, the better Gilberte not being able at the time, on account

of her momentary absence, to detect the other's lapse from virtue. And

so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of an ignoble

kind. When the other spoke to you from the heart of her father, she held

broad views, you would have liked to engage with her upon a fine and

beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as your arrangements

were being completed, her mother's heart would already have resumed its

control; hers was the voice that answered; and you were disappointed and

vexed--almost baffled, as in the face of a substitution of one person

for another--by an unworthy thought, an in sincere laugh, in which

Gilberte saw no harm, for they sprang from what she herself at that

moment was. Indeed, the disparity was at times so great between these

two Gilbertes that you asked yourself, though without finding an answer,

what on earth you could have said or done to her, last time, to find her

now so different. When she herself had arranged to meet you somewhere,

not only did she fail to appear, and offer no excuse afterwards, but,

whatever the influence might have been that had made her change her

mind, she shewed herself in so different a character when you did meet

her that you might well have supposed that, taken in by a likeness such

as forms the plot of the _Menaechmi_, you were now talking to some one

not the person who had so politely expressed her desire to see you, had

she not shewn signs of an ill-humour which revealed that she felt

herself to be in the wrong, and wished to avoid the necessity of an

explanation.

"Now then, run along and get ready; you're keeping us waiting," her

mother reminded her.

"I'm so happy here with my little Papa; I want to stay just for a

minute," replied Gilberte, burying her head beneath the arm of her

father, who passed his fingers lovingly through her bright hair.