illusions of love, have seen the prosperity that they themselves brought
to numberless women increase the happiness of those women without
exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their
benefactors; but in their child they believe that they can feel an
affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to
remain in the world after their death. When there should no longer be
any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle. Swann, or a Mme.
something else, née Swann, who would continue to love the vanished
father. Indeed, to love him too well, perhaps, Swann may have been
thinking, for he acknowledged Gilberte's caress with a "Good girl!" in
that tone, made tender by our apprehension, to which, when we think of
the future, we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a
creature who is destined to survive us. To conceal his emotion, he
joined in our talk about Berma. He pointed out to me, but in a detached,
a listless tone, as though he wished to remain to some extent
unconcerned in what he was saying, with what intelligence, with what an
astonishing fitness the actress said to Œnone, "You knew it!" He was
right. That intonation at least had a value that was really
intelligible, and might therefore have satisfied my desire to find
incontestable reasons for admiring Berma. But it was by the very fact of
its clarity that it did not at all content me. Her intonation was so
ingenious so definite in intention and in its meaning, that it seemed to
exist by itself, so that any intelligent actress might have learned to
use it. It was a fine idea; but whoever else should conceive it as fully
must possess it equally. It remained to Berma's credit that she had
discovered it, but is one entitled to use the word "discover" when the
object in question is something that would not be different if one had
been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one's own
nature seeing that some one else may afterwards reproduce it?
"Upon my soul, your presence among us does raise the tone of the
conversation!" Swann observed to me, as though to excuse himself to
Bergotte; for he had formed the habit, in the Guermantes set, of
entertaining great artists as if they were just ordinary friends whom
one seeks only to make eat the dishes that they like, play the games,
or, in the country, indulge in whatever form of sport they please. "It
seems to me that we're talking a great deal of art," he went on. "But
it's so nice, I do love it!" said Mme. Swann, throwing me a look of
gratitude, as well from good nature as because she had not abandoned her
old aspirations towards a more intellectual form of conversation. After
this it was to others of the party, and principally to Gilberte that
Bergotte addressed himself. I had told him everything that I felt with a
freedom which had astonished me, and was due to the fact that, having
acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those hours of
solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better part of
myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence, I was less
frightened by him than by a person with whom I should have been talking
for the first time. And yet, for the same reason, I was greatly
disturbed by the thought of the impression that I must have been making
on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for my ideas
dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant time in
which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray. And yet I
ought perhaps to have reminded myself that, since it was in all
sincerity, abandoning myself to the train of my thoughts, that I had
felt, on the one hand, so intensely in sympathy with the work of
Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theatre, a disappointment the
reason of which I did not know, those two instinctive movements which
had both carried me away could not be so very different from one
another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of
Bergotte which I had loved in his books could not be anything entirely
foreign and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to express
it. For my intelligence must be a uniform thing, perhaps indeed there
exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in the world
participates, towards which each of us from the position of his own
separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his
own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage. Of
course, the ideas which I was tempted to seek to disentangle were
probably not those whose depths Bergotte usually sounded in his books.
But if it were one and the same intelligence which we had, he and I, at
our disposal, he must, when he heard me express those ideas, be reminded
of them, cherish them, smile upon them, keeping probably, in spite of
what I supposed, before his mind's eye a whole world of intelligence
other than that an excerpt of which had passed into his books, an
excerpt upon which I had based my imagination of his whole mental
universe. Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human
heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves
commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human
intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition
to those which form the foundation of its own writings. I ought to have
told myself all this (though, for that matter, it was none too consoling
a thought, for the benevolent condescension of great minds has as a
corollary the incomprehension and hostility of small; and one derives
far less happiness from the friendliness of a great writer, which one
finds expressed, failing a more intimate association, in his books, than
suffering from the hostility of a woman whom one did not choose for her
intelligence but cannot help loving). I ought to have told myself all
this, but I did not; I was convinced that I had appeared a fool to
Bergotte, when Gilberte whispered in my ear:
"You can't think how delighted I am, because you have made a conquest of
my great friend Bergotte. He's been telling Mamma that he found you
extremely intelligent."
"Where are we going?" I asked her. "Oh, wherever you like; you know,
it's all the same to me." But since the incident that had occurred on
the anniversary of her grandfather's death I had begun to ask myself
whether Gilberte's character was not other than I had supposed, whether
that indifference to what was to be done, that wisdom, that calm, that
gentle and constant submission did not indeed conceal passionate
longings which her self-esteem would not allow to be visible and which
she disclosed only by her sudden resistance whenever by any chance they
were frustrated.
As Bergotte lived in the same neighbourhood as my parents, we left the
house together; in the carriage he spoke to me of my health. "Our
friends were telling me that you had been ill. I am very sorry. And yet,
after all, I am not too sorry, because I can see quite well that you are
able to enjoy the pleasures of the mind, and they are probably what mean
most to you, as to everyone who has known them."
Alas, what he was saying, how little, I felt, did it apply to myself,
whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was
happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and well;
I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and
how easily I could dispense with the intellect. As I made no distinction
among my pleasures between those that came to me from different sources,
of varying depth and permanence, I was thinking, when the moment came to
answer him, that I should have liked an existence in which I was on
intimate terms with the Duchesse de Guermantes, and often came across,
as in the old toll-house in the Champs-Elysées, a chilly smell that
would remind me of Combray. But in this ideal existence which I dared
not confide to him the pleasures of the mind found no place.
"No, sir, the pleasures of the mind count for very little with me; it is
not them that I seek after; indeed I don't even know that I have ever
tasted them."
"You really think not?" he replied. "Well, it may be, no, wait a minute
now, yes, after all that must be what you like best, I can see it now
dearly, I am certain of it."
As certainly, he did not succeed in convincing me; and yet I was already
feeling happier, less restricted. After what M. de Norpois had said to
me, I had regarded my moments of dreaming, of enthusiasm, of
self-confidence as purely subjective and barren of truth. But according
to Bergotte, who appeared to understand my case, it seemed that it was
quite the contrary, that the symptom I ought to disregard was, in fact,
my doubts, my disgust with myself. Moreover, what he had said about M.
de Norpois took most of the sting out of a sentence from which I had
supposed that no appeal was possible.
"Are you being properly looked after?" Bergotte asked me. "Who is
treating you?" I told him that I had seen, and should probably go on
seeing Cottard. "But that's not at all the sort of man you want!" he
told me. "I know nothing about him as a doctor. But I've met him at Mme.
Swann's. The man's an imbecile. Even supposing that that doesn't prevent
his being a good doctor, which I hesitate to believe, it does prevent
his being a good doctor for artists, for men of intelligence. People
like you must have suitable doctors, I would almost go so far as to say
treatment and medicines specially adapted to themselves. Cottard will
bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from having any
effect. Besides, the proper course of treatment cannot possibly be the
same for you as for any Tom, Dick or Harry. Nine tenths of the ills from
which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need
at least a doctor who understands their disease. How do you expect that
Cottard should be able to treat you; he has made allowances for the
difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no
allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare. So that his
calculations are inaccurate in your case, the balance is upset; you see,
always the little bottle-imp bobbing up again. He will find that you
have a dilated stomach; he has no need to examine you for it, since he
has it already in his eye. You can see it there, reflected in his
glasses." This manner of speaking tired me greatly; I said to myself,
with the stupidity of common sense: "There is no more any dilated
stomach reflected in Professor Cottard's glasses than there are
inanities stored behind the white waistcoat of M. de Norpois." "I should
recommend you, instead," went on Bergotte, "to consult Dr. du Boulbon,
who is quite an intelligent man." "He is a great admirer of your books,"
I replied. I saw that Bergotte knew this, and I decided that kindred
spirits soon come together, that one has few really "unknown friends".
What Bergotte had said to me with respect to Cottard impressed me, While
running contrary to everything that I myself believed. I was in no way
disturbed by finding my doctor a bore; I expected of him that, thanks to
an art the laws of which were beyond me, he should pronounce on the
subject of my health an infallible oracle, after consultation of my
entrails. And I did not at all require that, with the aid of an
intellect, in which I easily outstripped him, he should seek to
understand my intellect, which I pictured to myself merely as a means,
of no importance in itself, of trying to attain to certain external
verities. I doubted greatly whether intellectual people required a
different form of hygiene from imbeciles, and I was quite prepared to
submit myself to the latter kind. "I'll tell you who does need a good
doctor, and that is our friend Swann," said Bergotte. And on my asking
whether he was ill, "Well, don't you see, he's typical of the man who
has married a whore, and has to swallow a hundred serpents every day,
from women who refuse to meet his wife, or men who were there before
him. You can see them in his mouth, writhing. Just look, any day you're
there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes in, to see who's
in the room." The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of
the friends in whose house he had so long been received as a welcome
guest was as new to me as the almost amorous tone which, in that house,
he had constantly been adopting to speak to them. Certainly a person
like my great-aunt, for instance, would have been incapable of treating
any of us with that politeness which I had heard Bergotte lavishing upon
Swann. Even to the people whom she liked, she enjoyed saying
disagreeable things. But behind their backs she would never have uttered
a word to which they might not have listened. There was nothing less
like the social "world" than our society at Combray. The Swanns' house
marked a stage on the way towards it, towards its inconstant tide. If
they had not yet reached the open sea, they were certainly in the
lagoon. "This is all between ourselves," said Bergotte as he left me
outside my own door. A few years later I should have answered: "I never
repeat things." That is the ritual phrase of society, from which the
slanderer always derives a false reassurance. It is what I should have
said then and there to Bergotte, for one does not invent all one's
speeches, especially when, one is acting merely as a card in the social
pack. But I did not yet know the formula. What my great-aunt, on the
other hand, would have said on a similar occasion was: "If you don't
wish it to be repeated, why do you say it?" That is the answer of the
unsociable, of the quarrelsome. I was nothing of that sort: I bowed my
head in silence.
Men of letters who were in my eyes persons of considerable importance
had had to plot for years before they succeeded in forming with Bergotte
relations which continued to the end to be but dimly literary, and never
emerged beyond the four walls of his study, whereas I, I had now been
installed among the friends of the great writer, at the first attempt
and without any effort, like a man who, instead of standing outside in a
crowd for hours in order to secure a bad seat in a theatre, is shown in
at once to the best, having entered by a door that is closed to the
public. If Swann had thus opened such a door to me, it was doubtless
because, just as a king finds himself naturally inviting his children's
friends into the royal box, or on board the royal yacht, so Gilberte's
parents received their daughter's friends among all the precious things
that they had in their house, and the even more precious intimacies that
were enshrined there. But at that time I thought, and perhaps was right
in thinking that this friendliness on Swann's part was aimed indirectly
at my parents. I seemed to remember having heard once at Combray that he
had suggested to them that, in view of my admiration for Bergotte, he
should take me to dine with him, and that my parents had declined,
saying that I was too young, and too easily excited to "go out" yet. My
parents, no doubt, represented to certain other people (precisely those
who seemed to me the most marvellous) something quite different from
what they were to me, so that, just as when the lady in pink had paid my
father a tribute of which he had shewn himself so unworthy, I should
have wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just
received, and to testify their gratitude to that generous and courteous
Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without seeming any
more to be conscious of its value than is, in Luini's fresco, the
charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair, to whom, it appeared,
Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance.
Unfortunately, this favour that Swann had done me, which, as I entered
the house, before I had even taken off my greatcoat, I reported to my
parents, in the hope that it would awaken in their hearts an emotion
equal to my own, and would determine them upon some immense and decisive
act of politeness towards the Swanns, did not appear to be greatly
appreciated by them. "Swann introduced you to Bergotte? An excellent
friend for you, charming society!" cried my father, ironically. "It only
wanted that!" Alas, when I had gone on to say that Bergotte was by no
means inclined to admire M. de Norpois:
"I dare say!" retorted my father. "That simply proves that he's a
foolish and evil-minded fellow. My poor boy, you never had much common
sense, still, I'm sorry to see you fall among a set that will finish you
off altogether."
Already the mere fact of my frequenting the Swanns had been far from
delighting my parents. This introduction to Bergotte seemed to them a
fatal but natural consequence of an original mistake, namely their own
weakness in controlling me, which my grandfather would have called a
"want of circumspection". I felt that I had only, in order to complete
their ill-humour, to tell them that this perverse fellow who did not
appreciate M. de Norpois had found me extremely intelligent. For I had
observed that whenever my father decided that anyone, one of my school
friends for instance, was going astray--as I was at that moment--if that
person had the approval of somebody whom my father did not rate high, he
would see in this testimony the confirmation of his own stern judgment.
The evil merely seemed to him more pronounced. I could hear him already
exclaiming, "Of course, it all hangs together," an expression that
terrified me by the vagueness and vastness of the reforms the
introduction of which into my quiet life it seemed to threaten. But
since, were I not to tell them what Bergotte had said of me, even then
nothing could efface the impression my parents had formed, that this
should be made slightly worse mattered little. Besides, they seemed to
me so unfair, so completely mistaken, that not only had I not any hope,
I had scarcely any desire to bring them to a more equitable point of
view. At the same time, feeling, as the words came from my lips, how
alarmed they would be by the thought that I had found favour in the
sight of a person who dismissed clever men as fools and had earned the
contempt of all decent people, praise from whom, since it seemed to me a
thing to be desired, would only encourage me in wrongdoing, it was in
faltering tones and with a slightly shamefaced air that, coming to the
end of my story, I flung them the bouquet of: "He told the Swanns that
he had found me extremely intelligent." Just as a poisoned dog, in a
field, rushes, without knowing why, straight to the grass which is the
precise antidote to the toxin that he has swallowed, so I, without in
the least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was
capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to
Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best reasons that I could have
urged, all the tributes that I could have paid him must have proved
powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed.
"Oh! He said that he found you intelligent," repeated my mother. "I am
glad to hear that, because he is a man of talent."
"What! He said that, did he?" my father joined in. "I don't for a moment
deny his literary distinction, before which the whole world bows; only
it is a pity that he should lead that scarcely reputable existence to
which old Norpois made a guarded allusion, when he was here," he went
on, not seeing that against the sovran virtue of the magic words which I
had just repeated the depravity of Bergotte's morals was little more
able to contend than the falsity of his judgment.
"But, my dear," Mamma interrupted, "we've no proof that it's true.
People say all sorts of things. Besides, M. de Norpois may have the most
perfect manners in the world, but he's not always very good-natured,
especially about people who are not exactly his sort."
"That's quite true; I've noticed it myself," my father admitted.
"And then, too, a great deal ought to be forgiven Bergotte, since he
thinks well of my little son," Mamma went on, stroking my hair with her
fingers and fastening upon me a long and pensive gaze.
My mother had not, indeed, awaited this verdict from Bergotte before
telling me that I might ask Gilberte to tea whenever I had friends
coming. But I dared not do so for two reasons. The first was that at
Gilberte's there was never anything else to drink but tea. Whereas at
home Mamma insisted on there being a pot of chocolate as well. I was
afraid that Gilberte might regard this as "common"; and so conceive a
great contempt for us. The other reason was a formal difficulty, a
question of procedure which I could never succeed in settling. When I
arrived at Mme. Swann's she used to ask me: "And how is your mother?" I
had made several overtures to Mamma to find out whether she would do the
same when Gilberte came to us, a point which seemed to me more serious
that, at the Court of Louis XIV, the use of "Monseigneur." But Mamma
would not hear of it for a moment.
"Certainly not. I do not know Mme. Swann."
"But neither does she know you."
"I never said she did, but we are not obliged to behave in exactly the
same way about everything. I shall find other ways of being civil to
Gilberte than Mme. Swann has with you."
But I was unconvinced, and preferred not to invite Gilberte.
Leaving my parents, I went upstairs to change my clothes and on emptying
my pockets came suddenly upon the envelope which the Swanns' butler had
handed me before shewing me into the drawing-room. I was now alone. I
opened it; inside was a card on which I was told the name of the lady
whom I ought to have "taken in" to luncheon.
It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world
and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, for that
matter, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by
assuring me that, in contradiction of all that I had believed at the
time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for
anything better than to make love. He added to this service a second,
the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later; it was he
who took me for the first time into a disorderly house. He had indeed
told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might enjoy.
But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those houses were
to enable me to substitute actual human features. So that if I owed to
Bloch--for his "good tidings" that beauty and the enjoyment of beauty
were not inaccessible things, and that we have acted foolishly in
renouncing them for all time--a debt of gratitude of the same kind that
we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher who has given us reason
to hope for length of days in this world and not to be entirely cut off
from it when we shall have passed beyond the veil, the houses of
assignation which I began to frequent some years later--by furnishing me
with specimens of beauty, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women
that element which we are powerless to invent, which is something more
than a mere summary of former beauties, that present indeed divine, the
one present that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which faint and
fail all the logical creations of our intellect, and which we can seek
from reality alone: an individual charm--deserved to be ranked by me
with those other benefactors more recent in origin but of comparable
utility (before finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the
seductive charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, by studying other
painters, hearing other composers, visiting other cities): namely
illustrated editions of the history of painting, symphonic concerts and
handbooks to 'Mediaeval Towns'. But the house to which Bloch led me,
(and which he himself, for that matter, had long ceased to visit) was of
too humble a grade, its denizens were too inconspicuous and too little
varied to be able to satisfy my old or to stimulate new curiosities. The
mistress of this house knew none of the women with whom one asked her to
negotiate, and was always suggesting others whom, one did not want. She
boasted to me of one in particular, one of whom, with a smile full of
promise (as though this; had been a great rarity and a special treat)
she would whisper: "She is a Jewess! Doesn't that make you want to?"
(That, by the way, was probably why the girl's name was Rachel.) And
with a silly and affected excitement which, she hoped, would prove
contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of sensual
satisfaction: "Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn't that be lovely?
Rrrr!" This Rachel, of whom I caught a glimpse without her seeing me,
was dark and not good-looking, but had an air of intelligence, and would
pass the tip of her tongue over her lips as she smiled, with a look of
boundless impertinence at the "boys" who were introduced to her and whom
I could hear making conversation. Her small and narrow face was framed
in short curls of black hair, irregular as though they were outlined in
pen-strokes upon a wash-drawing in Indian ink. Every evening I promised
the old woman who offered her to me with a special insistence, boasting
of her superior intelligence and her education, that I would not fail to
come some day on purpose to make the acquaintance of Rachel, whom I had
nicknamed "Rachel when from the Lord". But the first evening I had heard
her, as she was leaving the house, say to the mistress: "That's settled
then; I shall be free to-morrow, if you have anyone you won't forget to
send for me."
And these words had prevented me from recognising her as a person
because they had made me classify her at once in a general category of
women whose habit, common to all of them, was to come there in the
evening to see whether there might not be a louis or two to be earned.
She would simply vary her formula, saying indifferently: "If you want
me" or "If you want anybody."
The mistress, who was not familiar with Halévy's opera, did not know
why I always called the girl "Rachel when from the Lord." But failure to
understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing, and it
was always with a whole-hearted laugh that she would say to me:
"Then there's nothing doing to-night? When am I going to fix you up with
'Rachel when from the Lord'? Why do you always say that, 'Rachel when
from the Lord'? Oh, that's very smart, that is. I'm going to make a
match of you two. You won't be sorry for it, you'll see."
Once I was just making up my mind, but she was "in the press", another
time in the hands of the hairdresser, an elderly gentleman who never did
anything for the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and then
comb it. And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the humbler
frequenters of the place (working girls, they called themselves, but
they always seemed to be out of work), had come to mix drinks for me and
to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects
discussed, the partial or total nudity of the speakers gave an
attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to this house because,
anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and
was in need of furniture, I had given her several pieces, notably a big
sofa, which I had inherited from my aunt Léonie. I used never to see
them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at
home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I discovered
them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own
uses, all the virtues that one had imbibed in the air of my aunt's room
at Combray became apparent to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which
I had abandoned them in their helplessness! Had I outraged the dead, I
should not have suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their
new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive, and to be appealing to
me, like those objects, apparently inanimate, in a Persian fairy tale,
in which are embodied human souls that are undergoing martyrdom and
plead for deliverance. Besides, as our memory presents things to us, as
a rule, not in their chronological sequence but as it were by a
reflexion in which the order of the parts is reversed, I remembered only
long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before,
I had tasted for the first time the sweets of love with one of my girl
cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat rashly
suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie had
left her room.
A whole lot more of my aunt Léonie's things, and notably a magnificent
set of old silver plate, I sold, in spite of my parents' warnings, so as
to have more money to spend, and to be able to send more flowers to Mme.
Swann who would greet me, after receiving an immense basket of orchids,
with: "If I were your father, I should have you up before the magistrate
for this." How was I to suppose that one day I might regret more than
anything the loss of my silver plate, and rank certain other pleasures
more highly than that (which would have shrunk perhaps into none at all)
of bestowing favours upon Gilberte's parents. Similarly, it was with
Gilberte in my mind, and so as not to be separated from her, that I had
decided not to enter a career of diplomacy abroad. It is always thus,
impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make
our irrevocable decisions. I could scarcely imagine that that strange
substance which was housed in Gilberte, and from her permeated her
parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to all things else, could
be liberated from her, could migrate into another person. The same
substance, unquestionable, and yet one that would have a wholly
different effect on me. For a single malady goes through various
evolutions, and a delicious poison can no longer be taken with the same
impunity when, with the passing of the years, the heart's power of
resistance has diminished.
My parents meanwhile would have liked to see the intelligence that
Bergotte had discerned in me made manifest in some remarkable
achievement. When I still did not know the Swanns I thought that I was
prevented from working by the state of agitation into which I was
thrown by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte when I chose. But, now
that their door stood open to me, scarcely had I sat down at my desk
than I would rise and run to them. And after I had left them and was at
home again, my isolation was apparent only, my mind was powerless to
swim against the stream of words on which I had allowed myself
mechanically to be borne for hours on end. Sitting alone, I continued to
fashion remarks such as might have pleased or amused the Swanns, and to
make this pastime more entertaining I myself took the parts of those
absent players, I put to myself imagined questions, so chosen that my
brilliant epigrams served merely as happy answers to them. Though
conducted in silence, this exercise was none the less a conversation and
not a meditation, my solitude a mental society in which it was not I
myself but other imaginary speakers who controlled my choice of words,
and in which I felt as I formulated, in place of the thoughts that I
believed to be true, those that came easily to my mind, and involved no
introspection from without, that kind of pleasure, entirely passive,
which sitting still affords to anyone who is burdened with a sluggish
digestion.
Had I been less firmly resolved upon setting myself definitely to work,
I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my
resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty
frame of that long morrow in which everything was so well arranged
because I myself had not yet entered it, my good intentions would be
realised without difficulty, it was better not to select an evening on
which I was ill-disposed for a beginning for which the following days
were not, alas, to shew themselves any more propitious. But I was
reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had
waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three
days. Confident that by the day after next I should have written several
pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred
to remain patient for a few hours and then to bring to a convinced and
comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way.
Unfortunately the morrow was not that vast, external day to which I in
my fever had looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my
painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply
lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my
plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would
be realised at once, no longer the courage, therefore, to subordinate
everything else to their realisation: I began again to keep late hours,
having no longer, to oblige me to go to bed early on any evening, the
certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I
could recover my creative energy, several days of relaxation, and the
only time that my grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned
tone, to frame the reproach: "Well, and that work of yours; aren't we
even to speak of it now?" I resented her intrusion, convinced that in
her inability to see that my mind was irrevocably made up, she had
further and perhaps for a long time postponed the execution of my task,
by the shock which her denial of justice to me had given my nerves,
since until I had recovered from that shock I should not feel inclined
to begin my work. She felt that her scepticism had charged blindly into
my intention. She apologised, kissing me: "I am sorry; I shall not say
anything again," and, so that I should not be discouraged, assured me
that, from the day on which I should be quite well again, the work would
come of its own accord from my superfluity of strength.
Besides, I said to myself, in spending all my time with the Swanns, am I
not doing exactly what Bergotte does? To my parents it seemed almost as
though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the same
drawing-room with a great writer, the life most favourable to the growth
of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed from
having to create that talent for himself, from within himself, and can
acquire it from some one else, is as impossible as it would be to
suppose that a man can keep himself in good health, in spite of
neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst
excesses, merely by dining out often in the company of a physician. The
person, by the way, who was most completely taken in by this illusion,
which misled me as well as my parents, was Mme. Swann. When I explained
to her that I was unable to come, that I must stay at home and work, she
looked as though she were thinking that I made a great fuss about
nothing, that there was something foolish as well as ostentatious in
what I had said.
"But Bergotte is coming, isn't he? Do you mean that you don't think it
good, what he writes? It will be better still, very soon," she went on,
"for he is more pointed, he concentrates more in newspaper articles than
in his books, where he is apt to spread out too much. I've arranged that
in future he's to do the leading articles in the _Figaro._ He'll be
distinctly the 'right man in the right place' there." And, finally,
"Come! He will tell you, better than anyone, what you ought to do."
And so, just as one invites a gentleman ranker to meet his colonel, it
was in the interests of my career, and as though masterpieces of
literature arose out of "getting to know" people, that she told me not
to fail to come to dinner with her next day, to meet Bergotte.
And so there was not from the Swanns any more than from my parents, that
is to say from those who, at different times, had seemed bound to place
obstacles in my way, any further opposition to that pleasant existence
in which I might see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enjoyment if not
with peace of mind. There can be no peace of mind in love, since the
advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point
for further desires. So long as I had not been free to go to her, having
my eyes fixed upon that inaccessible goal of happiness, I could not so
much as imagine the fresh grounds for anxiety that lay in wait for me
there. Once the resistance of her parents was broken, and the problem
solved at last, it began to set itself anew, and always in different
terms. Each evening, on arriving home, I reminded myself that I had
things to say to Gilberte of prime importance, things upon which our
whole friendship hung, and these things were never the same. But at
least I was happy, and no further menace arose to threaten my happiness.
One was to appear, alas, from a quarter in which I had never detected
any peril, namely from Gilberte and myself. And yet I ought to have been
tormented by what, on the contrary, reassured me, by what I mistook for
happiness. We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving
at once to an accident, the most simple to all appearance and one that
may at any moment occur, a serious aspect which that accident by itself
would not bear. What makes us so happy is the presence in our heart of
an unstable element which we are perpetually arranging to keep in
position, and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not
displaced. Actually, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering
which happiness neutralises, makes conditional only, procrastinates, but
which may at any moment become what it would long since have been had we
not obtained what we were seeking, sheer agony.
On several occasions I felt that Gilberte was anxious to put off my
visits. It is true that when I was at all anxious to see her I had only
to get myself invited by her parents who were increasingly persuaded of
my excellent influence over her. "Thanks to them," I used to think, "my
love is running no risk; the moment I have them on my side, I can set my
mind at rest; they have full authority over Gilberte." Until, alas, I
detected certain signs of impatience which she allowed to escape her
when her father made me come to the house, almost against her will, and
asked myself whether what I had regarded as a protection for my
happiness was not in fact the secret reason why that happiness could not
endure.
The last time that I called to see Gilberte, it was raining; she had
been asked to a dancing lesson in the house of some people whom she knew
too slightly to be able to take me there with her. In view of the
dampness of the air I had taken rather more caffeine than usual. Perhaps
on account of the weather, or because she had some objection to the
house in which this party was being given, Mme. Swann, as her daughter
was leaving the room, called her back in the sharpest of tones:
"Gilberte!" and pointed to me, to indicate that I had come there to see
her and that she ought to stay with me. This "Gilberte!" had been
uttered, or shouted rather, with the best of intentions towards myself,
but from the way in which Gilberte shrugged her shoulders as she took
off her outdoor clothes I divined that her mother had unwittingly
hastened the gradual evolution, which until then it had perhaps been
possible to arrest, which was gradually drawing away from me my friend.
"You don't need to go out dancing every day," Odette told her daughter,
with a sagacity acquired, no doubt, in earlier days, from Swann. Then,
becoming once more Odette, she began speaking to her daughter in
English. At once it was as though a wall had sprung up to hide from me a
part of the life of Gilberte, as though an evil genius had spirited my
friend far away. In a language that we know, we have substituted for the
opacity of sounds, the perspicuity of ideas. But a language which we do
not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls she whom we love is
free to play us false, while we, standing without, desperately alert in
our impotence, can see, can prevent nothing. So this conversation in
English, at which, a month earlier, I should merely have smiled,
interspersed with a few proper names in French which did not fail to
accentuate, to give a point to my uneasiness, had, when conducted within
a few feet of me by two motionless persons, the same degree of cruelty,
left me as much abandoned and alone as the forcible abduction of my
companion. At length Mme. Swann left us. That day, perhaps from
resentment against myself, the unwilling cause of her not going out to
enjoy herself, perhaps also because, guessing her to be angry with me, I
was precautionally colder than usual with her, the face of Gilberte,
divested of every sign of joy, bleak, bare, pillaged, seemed all
afternoon to be devoting a melancholy regret to the pas-de-quatre in
which my arrival had prevented her from going to take part, and to be
defying every living creature, beginning with myself, to understand the
subtle reasons that had determined in her a sentimental attachment to
the boston. She confined herself to exchanging with me, now and again,
on the weather, the increasing violence of the rain, the fastness of the
clock, a conversation punctuated with silences and monosyllables, in
which I lashed myself on, with a sort of desperate rage, to the
destruction of those moments which we might have devoted to friendship
and happiness. And on each of our remarks was stamped, as it were, a
supreme harshness, by the paroxysm of their stupefying unimportance,
which at the same time consoled me, for it prevented Gilberte from being
taken in by the banality of my observations and the indifference of my
tone. In vain was my polite: "I thought, the other day, that the clock
was slow, if anything;" she evidently understood me to mean: "How
tiresome you are being!" Obstinately as I might protract, over the whole
length of that rain-sodden afternoon, the dull cloud of words through
which no fitful ray shone, I knew that my coldness was not so
unalterably fixed as I pretended, and that Gilberte must be fully aware
that if, after already saying it to her three times, I had hazarded a
fourth repetition of the statement that the evenings were drawing in, I
should have had difficulty in restraining myself from bursting into
tears. When she was like that, when no smile filled her eyes or unveiled
her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her
melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost livid,
reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out,
wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, fixed in an
immutable and low horizon. At length, as I saw no sign in Gilberte of
the happy change for which I had been waiting now for some hours, I told
her that she was not being nice. "It is you that are not being nice,"
was her answer. "Oh, but surely---" I asked myself what I could have
done, and, finding no answer, put the question to her. "Naturally, you
think yourself nice!" she said to me with a laugh, and went on laughing.
Whereupon I felt all the anguish that there was for me in not being able
to attain to that other, less perceptible plane of her mind which her
laughter indicated. It seemed, that laughter, to mean: "No, no, I'm not
going to let myself be moved by anything that you say, I know you're
madly in love with me, but that leaves me neither hot nor cold, for I
don't care a rap for you." But I told myself that, after all, laughter
was not a language so well defined that I could be certain of
understanding what this laugh really meant. And Gilberte's words were
affectionate. "But how am I not being nice," I asked her, "tell me; I
will do anything you want." "No; that wouldn't be any good. I can't
explain." For a moment I was afraid that she thought that I did not love
her, and this was for me a fresh agony, no less keen, but one that
required treatment by a different conversational method. "If you knew
how much you were hurting me you would tell me." But this pain which,
had she doubted my love for her, must have rejoiced her, seemed instead
to make her more angry. Then, realising my mistake, making up my mind to
pay no more attention to what she said, letting her (without bothering
to believe her) assure me: "I do love you, indeed I do; you will see one
day," (that day on which the guilty are convinced that their innocence
will be made clear, and which, for some mysterious reason, never happens
to be the day on which their evidence is taken), I had the courage to
make a sudden resolution not to see her again, and without telling her
of it yet since she would not have believed me.
Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be
bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations,
pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which
our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when
such a grief has its birth--as was now happening--at a moment when the
happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else,
the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto,
sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we
know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end. The tempest
that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home
baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by
retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte's
presence. But she would have said to herself: "Back again! Evidently I
can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the
more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he'll be."
Besides, I was irresistibly drawn towards her in thought, and those
alternative orientations, that mad careering between them of the
compass-needle within me persisted after I had reached home, and
expressed themselves in the mutually contradictory letters to Gilberte
which I began to draft. I was about to pass through one of those
difficult crises which we generally find that we have to face at various
stages in life, and which, for all that there has been no change in our
character, in our nature (that nature which itself creates our loves,
and almost creates the women whom we love, even to their faults), we do
not face in the same way on each occasion, that is to say at every age.
At such moments our life is divided, and so to speak distributed over a
pair of scales, in two counterpoised pans which between them contain it
all. In one there is our desire not to displease, not to appear too
humble to the creature whom we love without managing to understand her,
but whom we find it more convenient at times to appear almost to
disregard, so that she shall not have that sense of her own
indispensability which may turn her from us; in the other scale there is
a feeling of pain--and one that is not localised and partial only--which
cannot be set at rest unless, abandoning every thought of pleasing the
woman and of making her believe that we can dispense with her, we go at
once to find her. When we withdraw from the pan in which our pride lies
a small quantity of the will-power which we have weakly allowed to
exhaust itself with increasing age, when we add to the pan that holds
our suffering a physical pain which we have acquired and have let grow,
then, instead of the courageous solution that would have carried the day
at one-and-twenty, it is the other, grown too heavy and insufficiently
balanced, that crushes us down at fifty. All the more because
situations, while repeating themselves, tend to alter, and there is
every likelihood that, in middle life or in old age, we shall have had
the grim satisfaction of complicating our love by an intrusion of habit
which adolescence, repressed by other demands upon it, less master of
itself, has never known.
I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of
my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a
few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to
which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later,
the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed
to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those
"nevermores" so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who
will have to read them, whether she believe them to be false and
translate "nevermore" by "this very evening, if you want me," or believe
them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those
final separations which make so little difference to our lives when the
other person is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are
incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the
next persons whom we shall presently have become, and who will then be
in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a
woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her,
we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, so as to
lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same
speeches that she would make if she loved us. When we come to examine
the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely
at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature,
the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been
elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse
still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely
exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing any
connexion between one phenomenon and another, to whose eyes the
spectacle of the world would appear unstable as a dream. Of course I
made efforts to emerge from this incoherence, to find reasons for
things. I tried even to be "objective" and, to that end, to bear well in
mind the disproportion that existed between the importance which
Gilberte had in my eyes and that, not only which I had in hers, but
which she herself had in the eyes of other people, a disproportion
which, had I failed to remark it, would have involved my mistaking mere
friendliness on my friend's part for a passionate avowal, and a
grotesque and debasing display on my own for the simple and graceful
movement with which we are attracted towards a pretty face. But I was
afraid also of falling into the contrary error, in which I should have
seen in Gilberte's unpunctuality in keeping an appointment an
irremediable hostility. I tried to discover between these two
perspectives, equally distorting, a third which would enable me to see
things as they really were; the calculations I was obliged to make with
that object helped to take my mind off my sufferings; and whether in
obedience to the laws of arithmetic or because I had made them give me
the answer that I desired, I made up my mind that next day I would go to
the Swanns', happy, but happy in the same way as people who, having long
been tormented by the thought of a journey which they have not wished to
make, go no farther than to the Station and return home to unpack their
boxes. And since, while one is hesitating, the bare idea of a possible
resolution (unless one has rendered that idea sterile by deciding that
one will make no resolution) develops, like a seed in the ground, the
lineaments, every detail of the emotions that will be born from the
performance of the action, I told myself that it had been quite absurd
of me to be as much hurt by the suggestion that I should not see
Gilberte again as if I had really been about to put that suggestion into
practice, and that since, on the contrary, I was to end by returning to
her side, I might have saved myself the expense of all those vain
longings and painful acceptances. But this resumption of friendly
relations lasted only so long as it took me to reach the Swanns'; not
because their butler, who was really fond of me, told me that Gilberte
had gone out (a statement the truth of which was confirmed, as it
happened, the same evening, by people who had seen her somewhere), but
because of the manner in which he said it. "Sir, the young lady is not
at home; I can assure you, sir, that I am speaking the truth. If you
wish to make any inquiries I can fetch the young lady's maid. You know
very well, sir, that I would do everything in my power to oblige you,
and that if the young lady was at home I would take you to her at once."
These words being of the only kind that is really important, that is to
say spontaneous, the kind that gives us a radiograph shewing the main
points, at any rate, of the unimaginable reality which would be wholly
concealed beneath a prepared speech, proved that in Gilberte's household
there was an impression that I bothered her with my visits; and so,
scarcely had the man uttered them before they had aroused in me a hatred
of which I preferred to make him rather than Gilberte the victim; he
drew upon his own head all the angry feelings that I might have had for
my friend; freed from these complications, thanks to his words, my love
subsisted alone; but his words had, at the same time, shewn me that I
must cease for the present to attempt to see Gilberte. She would be
certain to write to me, to apologise. In spite of which, I should not
return at once to see her, so as to prove to her that I was capable of
living without her. Besides, once I had received her letter, Gilberte's
society was a thing with which I should be more easily able to dispense
for a time, since I should be certain of finding her ready to receive me
whenever I chose. All that I needed in order to support with less pain
the burden of a voluntary separation was to feel that my heart was rid
of the terrible uncertainty whether we were not irreconcilably sundered,
whether she had not promised herself to another, left Paris, been taken
away by force. The days that followed resembled the first week of that
old New Year which I had had to spend alone, without Gilberte. But when
that week had dragged to its end, then for one thing my friend would be
coming again to the Champs-Elysées, I should be seeing her as before; I
had been sure of that; for another thing, I had known with no less
certainty that so long as the New Year holidays lasted it would not be
worth my while to go to the Champs-Elysées, which meant that during
that miserable week, which was already ancient history, I had endured my
wretchedness with a quiet mind because there was blended in it neither
fear nor hope. Now, on the other hand, it was the latter of these which,
almost as much as my fear of what might happen, rendered intolerable the
burden of my grief. Not having had any letter from Gilberte that
evening, I had attributed this to her carelessness, to her other
occupations, I did not doubt that I should find something from her in
the morning's post. This I awaited, every day, with a beating heart
which subsided, leaving me utterly prostrate, when I had found in it
only letters from people who were not Gilberte, or else nothing at all,
which was no worse, the proofs of another's friendship making all the
more cruel those of her indifference. I transferred my hopes to the
afternoon post. Even between the times at which letters were delivered
I dared not leave the house, for she might be sending hers by a
messenger. Then, the time coming at last when neither the postman nor a
footman from the Swanns' could possibly appear that night, I must
procrastinate my hope of being set at rest, and thus, because I believed
that my sufferings were not destined to last, I was obliged, so to
speak, incessantly to renew them. My disappointment was perhaps the
same, but instead of just uniformly prolonging, as in the old days, an
initial emotion, it began again several times daily, starting each time
with an emotion so frequently renewed that it ended--it, so purely
physical, so instantaneous a state--by becoming stabilised, so
consistently that the strain of waiting having hardly time to relax
before a fresh reason for waiting supervened, there was no longer a
single minute in the day in which I was not in that state of anxiety
which it is so difficult to bear even for an hour. So my punishment was
infinitely more cruel than in those New Year holidays long ago, because
this time there was in me, instead of the acceptance, pure and simple,
of that punishment, the hope, at every moment, of seeing it come to an
end. And yet at this state of acceptance I ultimately arrived; then I
understood that it must be final, and I renounced Gilberte for ever, in
the interests of my love itself and because I hoped above all that she
would not retain any contemptuous memory of me. Indeed, from that
moment, so that she should not be led to suppose any sort of lover's
spite on my part, when she made appointments for me to see her I used
often to accept them and then, at the last moment, write to her that I
was prevented from coming, but with the same protestations of my
disappointment that I should have made to anyone whom I had not wished
to see. These expressions of regret, which we keep as a rule for people
who do not matter, would do more, I imagined, to persuade Gilberte of my
indifference than would the tone of indifference which we affect only to
those whom we love. When, better than by mere words, by a course of
action indefinitely repeated, I should have proved to her that I had no
appetite for seeing her, perhaps she would discover once again an
appetite for seeing me. Alas! I was doomed to failure; to attempt, by
ceasing to see her, to reawaken in her that inclination to see me was to
lose her for ever; first of all, because, when it began to revive, if I
wished it to last I must not give way to it at once; besides, the most
agonising hours would then have passed; it was at this very moment that
she was indispensable to me, and I should have liked to be able to warn
her that what presently she would have to assuage, by the act of seeing
me again, would be a grief so far diminished as to be no longer (what a
moment ago it would still have been), nor the thought of putting an end
to it, a motive towards surrender, reconciliation, further meetings. And
then again, later on, when I should at last be able safely to confess to
Gilberte (so far would her liking for me have regained its strength) my
liking for her, the latter, not having been able to resist the strain of
so long a separation, would have ceased to exist; Gilberte would have
become immaterial to me. I knew this, but I could not explain it to her;
she would have assumed that if I was pretending that I should cease to
love her if I remained for too long without seeing her, that was solely
in order that she might summon me back to her at once. In the meantime,
what made it easier for me to sentence myself to this separation was the
fact that (in order to make it quite clear to her that despite my
protestations to the contrary it was my own free-will and not any
conflicting engagement, not the state of my health that prevented me
from seeing her), whenever I knew beforehand that Gilberte would not be
in the house, was going out somewhere with a friend and would not be
home for dinner, I went to see Mme. Swann who had once more become to me
what she had been at the time when I had such difficulty in seeing her
daughter and (on days when the latter was not coming to the
Champs-Elysées) used to repair to the Allée des Acacias. In this way I
should be hearing about Gilberte, and could be certain that she would in
due course hear about me, and in terms which would shew her that I was
not interested in her. And I found, as all those who suffer find, that
my melancholy condition might have been worse. For being free at any
time to enter the habitation in which Gilberte dwelt, I constantly
reminded myself, for all that I was firmly resolved to make no use of
that privilege, that if ever my pain grew too sharp there was a way of
making it cease. I was not unhappy, save only from day to day. And even
that is an exaggeration. How many times in an hour (but now without that
anxious expectancy which had strained every nerve of me in the first
weeks after our quarrel, before I had gone again to the Swanns') did I
not repeat to myself the words of the letter which, one day soon,
Gilberte would surely send, would perhaps even bring to me herself. The
perpetual vision of that imagined happiness helped me to endure the
desolation of my real happiness. With women who do not love us, as with
the "missing", the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent
our continuing to wait for news. We live on tenter-hooks, starting at the
slightest sound; the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous
voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the
fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the
room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this strain of
waiting, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of
her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at
the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son
is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss, or else it
kills her.
On the other hand, my grief found consolation in the idea that my love
must profit by it. Each visit that I paid to Mme. Swann without seeing
Gilberte was a cruel punishment, but I felt that it correspondingly
enhanced the idea that Gilberte had of me.
Besides, if I always took care, before going to see Mme. Swann, that
there should be no risk of her daughter's appearing, that arose, it is
true, from my determination to break with her, but no less perhaps from
that hope of reconciliation which overlay my intention to renounce her
(very few of such intentions are absolute, at least in a continuous
form, in this human soul of ours, one of whose laws, confirmed by the
unlooked-for wealth of illustration that memory supplies, is
intermittence), and hid from me all that in it was unbearably cruel. As
for that hope, I saw clearly how far it was chimerical. I was like a
pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself
that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the
whole of his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make
reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves. Now my
hope remained more intact--while at the same time our separation became
more effectual--if I refrained from meeting Gilberte. If I had found
myself face to face with her in her mother's drawing-room, we might
perhaps have uttered irrevocable words which would have rendered our
breach final, killed my hope and, on the other hand, by creating a fresh
anxiety, reawakened my love and made resignation harder.
Ever so long ago, before I had even thought of breaking with her
daughter, Mme. Swann had said to me: "It is all very well your coming to
see Gilberte; I should like you to come sometimes for my sake, not to my
'kettledrums', which would bore you because there is such a crowd, but
on the other days, when you will always find me at home if you come
fairly late." So that I might be thought, when I came to see her, to be
yielding only after a long resistance to a desire which she had
expressed in the past. And very late in the afternoon, when it was quite
dark, almost at the hour at which my parents would be sitting down to
dinner, I would set out to pay Mme. Swann a visit, in the course of
which I knew that I should not see Gilberte, and yet should be thinking
only of her. In that quarter, then looked upon as remote, of a Paris
darker than Paris is to-day, where even in the centre there was no
electric light in the public thoroughfares and very little in private
houses, the lamps of a drawing-room situated on the ground level, or but
slightly raised above it, as were the rooms in which Mme. Swann
generally received her visitors, were enough to lighten the street, and
to make the passer-by raise his eyes, connecting with their glow, as
with its apparent though hidden cause, the presence outside the door of
a string of smart broughams. This passer-by was led to believe, not
without a certain emotion, that a modification had been effected in this
mysterious cause, when he saw one of the carriages begin to move; but it
was merely a coachman who, afraid of his horses' catching cold, started
them now and again on a brisk walk, all the more impressive because the
rubber-tired wheels gave the sound of their hooves a background of
silence from which it stood out more distinct and more explicit.
The "winter-garden", of which in those days the passer-by generally
caught a glimpse, in whatever street he might be walking, if the
drawing-room did not stand too high above the pavement, is to be seen
to-day only in photogravures in the gift-books of P. J. Stahl, where, in
contrast to the infrequent floral decorations of the Louis XVI
drawing-rooms now in fashion--a single rose or a Japanese iris in a
long-necked vase of crystal into which it would be impossible to squeeze
a second--it seems, because of the profusion of indoor plants which
people had then, and of the absolute want of style in their arrangement,
as though it must have responded in the ladies whose houses it adorned
to some living and delicious passion for botany rather than to any cold
concern for lifeless decoration. It suggested to one, only on a larger
scale, in the houses of those days, those tiny, portable hothouses laid
out on New Year's morning beneath the lighted lamp--for the children
were always too impatient to wait for daylight--among all the other New
Year's presents but the loveliest of them all, consoling them with its
real plants which they could tend as they grew for the bareness of the
winter soil; and even more than those little houses themselves, those
winter gardens were like the hot-house that the children could see there
at the same time, portrayed in a delightful book, another of their
presents, and one which, for all that it was given not to them but to
Mlle. Lili, the heroine of the story, enchanted them to such a pitch
that even now, when they are almost old men and women, they ask
themselves whether, in those fortunate years, winter was not the
loveliest of the seasons. And inside there, beyond the winter-garden,
through the various kinds of arborescence which from the street made the
lighted window appear like the glass front of one of those children's
playthings, pictured or real, the passer-by, drawing himself up on
tiptoe, would generally observe a man in a frock coat, a gardenia or a
carnation in his buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely
outlined, like two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the
drawing-room atmosphere clouded by the samovar--then a recent
importation--with steam which may very possibly be escaping from it
still to-day, but to which, if it does, we are grown so accustomed now
that no one notices it. Mme. Swann attached great importance to her
"tea"; she thought that she shewed her originality and expressed her
charm when she said to a man, "You will find me at home any day, fairly
late; come to tea!" so that she allowed a sweet and delicate smile to
accompany the words which she pronounced with a fleeting trace of
English accent, and which her listener duly noted, bowing solemnly in
acceptance, as though the invitation had been something important and
uncommon which commanded deference and required attention. There was
another reason, apart from those given already, for the flowers' having
more than a merely ornamental part in Mme. Swann's drawing-room, and
this reason pertained not to the period, but, in some degree, to the
former life of Odette. A great courtesan, such as she had been, lives
largely for her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she
comes in time to live for her home. The things that one sees in the
house of a "respectable" woman, things which may of course appear to her
also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost
importance to the courtesan. The culminating point of her day is not the
moment in which she dresses herself for all the world to see, but that
in which she undresses herself for a man. She must be as smart in her
wrapper, in her nightgown, as in her outdoor attire. Other women display
their jewels, but as for her, she lives in the intimacy of her pearls.
This kind of existence imposes on her as an obligation and ends by
giving her a fondness for luxury which is secret, that is to say which
comes near to being disinterested. Mme. Swann extended this to include
her flowers. There was always beside her chair an immense bowl of
crystal filled to the brim with Parma violets or with long white
daisy-petals scattered upon the water, which seemed to be testifying, in
the eyes of the arriving guest, to some favourite and interrupted
occupation, such as the cup of tea which Mme. Swann would, for her own
amusement, have been drinking there by herself; an occupation more
intimate still and more mysterious, so much so that one felt oneself
impelled to apologise on seeing the flowers exposed there by her side,
as one would have apologised for looking at the title of the still open
book which would have revealed to one what had just been read by--and
so, perhaps, what was still in the mind of Odette. And unlike the book
the flowers were living things; it was annoying, when one entered the
room to pay Mme. Swann a visit, to discover that she was not alone, or
if one came home with her not to find the room empty, so prominent a
place in it, enigmatic and intimately associated with hours in the life
of their mistress of which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume
which had not been made ready for Odette's visitors but, as it were,
forgotten there by her, had held and would hold with her again private
conversations which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which
one tried in vain to read, fastening one's eyes on the moist purple, the
still liquid water-colour of the Parma violets. By the end of October
Odette would begin to come home with the utmost punctuality for tea,
which was still known, at that time, as "five-o'clock tea", having once
heard it said, and being fond of repeating that if Mme. Verdurin had
been able to form a salon it was because people were always certain of
finding her at home at the same hour. She imagined that she herself had
one also, of the same kind, but freer, _senza rigore_ as she used to
say. She saw herself figuring thus as a sort of Lespinasse, and believed
that she had founded a rival salon by taking from the du Deffant of the
little group several of her most attractive men, notably Swann himself,
who had followed her in her secession and into her retirement, according
to a version for which one can understand that she had succeeded in
gaining credit among her more recent friends, ignorant of what had
passed, though without convincing herself. But certain favourite parts
are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully
when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious
testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely
forgotten. On days on which Mme. Swann had not left the house, one found
her in a wrapper of _crêpe-de-Chine_, white as the first snows of
winter, or, it might be, in one of those long pleated garments of
_mousseline-de-soie_, which seemed nothing more than a shower of white
or rosy petals, and would be regarded to-day as hardly suitable for
winter, though quite wrongly. For these light fabrics and soft colours
gave to a woman--in the stifling warmth of the drawing-rooms of those
days, with their heavily curtained doors, rooms of which the most
effective thing that the society novelists of the time could find to say
was that they were "exquisitely cushioned"--the same air of coolness
that they gave to the roses which were able to stay in the room there by
her side, despite the winter, in the glowing flesh tints of their
nudity, as though it were already spring. By reason of the muffling of
all sound in the carpets, and of the remoteness of her cosy retreat, the
lady of the house, not being apprised of your entry as she is to-day,
would continue to read almost until you were standing before her chair,
which enhanced still further that sense of the romantic, that charm of a
sort of secret discovery, which we find to-day in the memory of those
gowns, already out of fashion even then, which Mme. Swann was perhaps
alone in not having discarded, and which give us the feeling that the
woman who wore them must have been the heroine of a novel because most
of us have scarcely set eyes on them outside the pages of certain of
Henry Gréville's tales. Odette had, at this time, in her drawing-room,
when winter began, chrysanthemums of enormous size and of a variety of
colours such as Swann, in the old days, certainly never saw in her
drawing-room in the Rue La Pérouse. My admiration for them--when I went
to pay Mme. Swann one of those melancholy visits during which, prompted
by my sorrow, I discovered in her all the mystical poetry of her
character as the mother of that Gilberte to whom she would say on the
morrow: "Your friend came to see me yesterday,"--sprang, no doubt, from
my sense that, rose-pale like the Louis XIV silk that covered her
chairs, snow white like her _crêpe-de-Chine_ wrapper, or of a metallic
red like her samovar, they superimposed upon the decoration of the room
another, a supplementary scheme of decoration, as rich, as delicate in
its colouring, but one which was alive and would last for a few days
only. But I was touched to find that these chrysanthemums appeared less
ephemeral than, one might almost say, lasting, when I compared them with
the tones, as pink, as coppery, which the setting sun so gorgeously
displays amid the mists of a November afternoon, and which, after seeing
them, before I had entered the house, fade from the sky, I found again
inside, prolonged, transposed on to the flaming palette of the flowers.
Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the
impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter
and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to
put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that
"tea-time" the too fleeting joys of November, of which they set ablaze
all around me the intimate and mystical glory. Alas, it was not in the
conversations to which I must listen that I could hope to attain to that
glory; they had but little in common with it. Even with Mme. Cottard,
and although it was growing late, Mme. Swann would assume her most
caressing manner to say: "Oh, no, it's not late, really; you mustn't
look at the clock; that's not the right time; it's stopped; you can't
possibly have anything else to do now, why be in such a hurry?" as she
pressed a final tartlet upon the Professor's wife, who was gripping her
card-case in readiness for flight.
"One simply can't tear oneself away from this house!" observed Mme.
Bontemps to Mme. Swann, while Mme. Cottard, in her astonishment at
hearing her own thought put into words, exclaimed: "Why, that's just
what I always say myself, what I tell my own little judge, in the court
of conscience!" winning the applause of the gentlemen from the Jockey
Club, who had been profuse in their salutations, as though confounded at
such an honour's being done them, when Mme. Swann had introduced them to
this common and by no means attractive little woman, who kept herself,
when confronted with Odette's brilliant friends, in reserve, if not on
what she herself called "the defensive", for she always used stately
language to describe the simplest happenings. "I should never have
suspected it," was Mme. Swann's comment, "three Wednesdays running
you've played me false." "That's quite true, Odette; it's simply ages,
it's an eternity since I saw you last. You see, I plead guilty; but I
must tell you," she went on with a vague suggestion of outraged modesty,
for although a doctor's wife she would never have dared to speak without
periphrasis of rheumatism or of a chill on the kidneys, "that I have had
a lot of little troubles. As we all have, I dare say. And besides that
I've had a crisis among my masculine domestics. I'm sure, I'm no more
imbued with a sense of my own authority than most ladies; still I've
been obliged, just to make an example you know, to give my Vatel notice;
I believe he was looking out anyhow for a more remunerative place. But
his departure nearly brought about the resignation of my entire
ministry. My own maid refused to stay in the house a moment longer; oh,
we have had some Homeric scenes. However I held fast to the reins
through thick and thin; the whole affair's been a perfect lesson, which
won't be lost on me, I can tell you. I'm afraid I'm boring you with all
these stories about servants, but you know as well as I do what a
business it is when one is obliged to set about rearranging one's
household.
"Aren't we to see anything of your delicious child?" she wound up. "No,
my delicious child is dining with a friend," replied Mme. Swann, and
then, turning to me: "I believe she's written to you, asking you to come
and see her to-morrow. And your babies?" she went on to Mme. Cottard. I
breathed a sigh of relief. These words by which Mme. Swann proved to me
that I could see Gilberte whenever I chose gave me precisely the comfort
which I had come to seek, and which at that time made my visits to Mme.
Swann so necessary. "No, I'm afraid not; I shall write to her, anyhow,
this evening. Gilberte and I never seem to see one another now," I
added, pretending to attribute our separation to some mysterious agency,
which gave me a further illusion of being in love, supported as well by
the affectionate way in which I spoke of Gilberte and she of me. "You
know, she's simply devoted to you," said Mme. Swann. "Really, you won't
come to-morrow?" Suddenly my heart rose on wings; the thought had just
struck me--"After all, why shouldn't I, since it's her own mother who
suggests it?" But with the thought I fell back into my old depression. I
was afraid now lest, when she saw me again, Gilberte might think that my
indifference of late had been feigned, and it seemed wiser to prolong
our separation. During these asides Mme. Bontemps had been complaining
of the insufferable dulness of politicians' wives, for she pretended to
find everyone too deadly or too stupid for words, and to deplore her
husband's official position. "Do you mean to say you can shake hands
with fifty doctors' wives, like that, one after the other?" she
exclaimed to Mme. Cottard, who, unlike her, was full of the kindest
feelings for everybody and of determination to do her duty in every
respect. "Ah! you're a law-abiding woman! You see, in my case, at the
Ministry, don't you know, I simply have to keep it up, of course. It's
too much for me, I can tell you; you know what those officials' wives
are like, it's all I can do not to put my tongue out at them. And my
niece Albertine is just like me. You really wouldn't believe the
impudence that girl has. Last week, on my 'day', I had the wife of the
Under Secretary of State for Finance, who told us that she knew nothing
at all about cooking. 'But surely, ma'am,' my niece chipped in with her
most winning smile, 'you ought to know everything about it, after all
the dishes your father had to wash.'" "Oh, I do love that story; I think
it's simply exquisite!" cried Mme. Swann. "But certainly on the Doctor's
consultation days you should make a point of being 'at home', among your
flowers and books and all your pretty things," she urged Mme. Cottard.
"Straight out like that! Bang! Right in the face; bang! She made no
bones about it, I can tell you! And she'd never said a word to me about
it, the little wretch; she's as cunning as a monkey. You are lucky to be
able to control yourself; I do envy people who can hide what is in their
minds." "But I've no need to do that, Mme. Bontemps, I'm not so hard to
please," Mme. Cottard gently expostulated. "For one thing, I'm not in
such a privileged position," she went on, slightly raising her voice as
was her custom, as though she were underlining the point of her remark,
whenever she slipped into the conversation any of those delicate
courtesies, those skilful flatteries which won her the admiration and
assisted the career of her husband. "And besides I'm only too glad to do
anything that can be of use to the Professor."
"But, my dear, it isn't what one's glad to do; it's what one is able to
do! I expect you're not nervous. Do you know, whenever I see the War
Minister's wife making faces, I start copying her at once. It's a
dreadful thing to have a temperament like mine."
"To be sure, yes," said Mme. Cottard, "I've heard people say that she
had a twitch; my husband knows someone else who occupies a very high
position, and it's only natural, when gentlemen get talking together..."
"And then, don't you know, it's just the same with the Chief of the
Registry; he's a hunchback. Whenever he comes to see me, before he's
been in the room five minutes my fingers are itching to stroke his hump.
My husband says I'll cost him his place. What if I do! A fig for the
Ministry! Yes, a fig for the Ministry! I should like to have that
printed as a motto on my note-paper. I can see I am shocking you; you're
so frightfully proper, but I must say there's nothing amuses me like a
little devilry now and then. Life would be dreadfully monotonous without
it."
And she went on talking about the Ministry all the time, as though it
had been Mount Olympus. To change the conversation, Mme. Swann turned to
Mme. Cottard: "But you're looking very smart to-day. Redfern _fecit_?"
"No, you know, I always swear by Rauthnitz. Besides, it's only an old
thing I've had done up." "Not really! It's charming!"
"Guess how much. . . . No, change the first figure!"
"You don't say so! Why, that's nothing; it's given away! Three times
that at least, I should have said." "You see how history comes to be
written," apostrophised the doctor's wife. And pointing to a neck-ribbon
which had been a present from Mme. Swann; "Look, Odette! Do you
recognise this?"
Through the gap between a pair of curtains a head peeped with
ceremonious deference, making a playful pretence of being afraid of
disturbing the party; it was Swann. "Odette, the Prince d'Agrigente is
with me in the study. He wants to know if he may pay his respects to
you. What am I to tell him?" "Why, that I shall be delighted," Odette
would reply, secretly flattered, but without losing anything of the
composure which came to her all the more easily since she had always,
even in her "fast" days, been accustomed to entertain men of fashion.
Swann disappeared to deliver the message, and would presently return
with the Prince, unless in the meantime Mme. Verdurin had arrived. When
he married Odette Swann had insisted on her ceasing to frequent the
little clan. (He had several good reasons for this stipulation, though,
had he had none, he would have made it just the same in obedience to a
law of ingratitude which admits no exception, and proves that every
"go-between" is either lacking in foresight or else singularly
disinterested.) He had conceded only that Odette and Mme. Verdurin might
exchange visits once a year, and even this seemed excessive to some of
the "faithful", indignant at the insult offered to the "Mistress" who
for so many years had treated Odette and even Swann himself as the
spoiled children of her house. For if it contained false brethren who
"failed" upon certain evenings in order that they might secretly accept
an invitation from Odette, ready, in the event of discovery, with the
excuse that they were curious to meet Bergotte (although the Mistress
assured them that he never went to the Swanns', and even if he did had
no vestige of talent, really--in spite of which she was making the most
strenuous efforts, to quote one of her favourite expressions, to
"attract" him), the little group had its "die-hards" also. And these,
though ignorant of those conventional refinements which often dissuade
people from the extreme attitude one would have liked to see them adopt
in order to annoy some one else, would have wished Mme. Verdurin, but
had never managed to prevail upon her to sever all connexion with
Odette, and thus deprive her of the satisfaction of saying, with a
mocking laugh: "We go to the Mistress's very seldom now, since the
Schism. It was all very well while my husband was still a bachelor, but
when one is married, you know, it isn't always so easy. . . . If you
must know, M. Swann can't abide old Ma Verdurin, and he wouldn't much
like the idea of my going there regularly, as I used to. And I, as a
dutiful spouse, don't you see . . .?" Swann would accompany his wife to
their annual evening there but would take care not to be in the room
when Mme. Verdurin came to call. And so, if the "Mistress" was in the
drawing-room, the Prince d'Agrigente would enter it alone. Alone, too,
he was presented to her by Odette, who preferred that Mme. Verdurin
should be left in ignorance of the names of her humbler guests, and so
might, seeing more than one strange face in the room, be led to believe
that she was mixing with the cream of the aristocracy, a device which
proved so far successful that Mme. Verdurin said to her husband, that
evening, with profound contempt: "Charming people, her friends! I met
all the fine flower of the Reaction!" Odette was living, with respect to
Mme. Verdurin, under a converse illusion. Not that the latter's salon
had ever begun, at that time, to develop into what we shall one day see
it to have become. Mme. Verdurin had not yet reached the period of
incubation in which one dispenses with one's big parties, where the few
brilliant specimens recently acquired would be lost in too numerous a
crowd, and prefers to wait until the generative force of the ten
righteous whom one has succeeded in attracting shall have multiplied
those ten seventy-fold. As Odette was not to be long now in doing, Mme.
Verdurin did indeed entertain the idea of "Society" as her final
objective, but her zone of attack was as yet so restricted, and moreover
so remote from that in which Odette had some chance of arriving at an
identical goal, of breaking the line of defence, that the latter
remained absolutely ignorant of the strategic plans which the "Mistress"
was elaborating. And it was with the most perfect sincerity that Odette,
when anyone spoke to her of Mme. Verdurin as a snob, would answer,
laughing, "Oh, no, quite the opposite! For one thing, she never gets a
chance of being a snob; she doesn't know anyone. And then, to do her
justice, I must say that she seems quite pleased not to know anyone. No,
what she likes are her Wednesdays, and people who talk well." And in her
hearts of hearts she envied Mme. Verdurin (for all that she did not
despair of having herself, in so eminent a school, succeeded in
acquiring them) those arts to which the "Mistress" attached such
paramount importance, albeit they did but discriminate between shades of
the Non-existent, sculpture the void, and were, properly speaking, the
Arts of Nonentity: to wit those, in the lady of a house, of knowing how
to "bring people together", how to "group", to "draw out", to "keep in
the background", to act as a "connecting link".
In any case, Mme. Swann's friends were impressed when they saw in her
house a lady of whom they were accustomed to think only as in her own,
in an inseparable setting of her guests, amid the whole of her little
group which they were astonished to behold thus suggested, summarised,
assembled, packed into a single armchair in the bodily form of the
"Mistress", the hostess turned visitor, muffled in her cloak with its
grebe trimming, as shaggy as the white skins that carpeted that
drawing-room embowered in which Mme. Verdurin was a drawing-room in
herself. The more timid among the women thought it prudent to retire,
and using the plural, as people do when they mean to hint to the rest of
the room that it is wiser not to tire a convalescent who is out of bed
for the first time: "Odette," they murmured, "we are going to leave
you." They envied Mme. Cottard, whom the "Mistress" called by her
Christian name. "Can I drop you anywhere?" Mme. Verdurin asked her,
unable to bear the thought that one of the faithful was going to remain
behind instead of following her from the room. "Oh, but this lady has
been so very kind as to say, she'll take me," replied Mme. Cottard, not
wishing to appear to be forgetting, when approached by a more
illustrious personage, that she had accepted the offer which Mme.
Bontemps had made of driving her home behind her cockaded coachman. "I
must say that I am always specially grateful to the friends who are so
kind as to take me with them in their vehicles. It is a regular godsend
to me, who have no Automedon." "Especially," broke in the "Mistress",
who felt that she must say something, since she knew Mme. Bontemps
slightly and had just invited her to her Wednesdays, "as at Mme. de
Crécy's house you're not very near home. Oh, good gracious, I shall
never get into the way of saying Mme. Swann!" It was a recognised
pleasantry in the little clan, among those who were not over endowed
with wit, to pretend that they could never grow used to saying "Mme.
Swann." "I have been so accustomed to saying Mme. de Crécy that I
nearly went wrong again!" Only Mme. Verdurin, when she spoke to Odette,
was not content with the nearly, but went wrong on purpose. "Don't you
feel afraid, Odette, living out in the wilds like this? I'm sure I
shouldn't feel at all comfortable, coming home after dark. Besides, it's
so damp. It can't be at all good for your husband's eczema. You haven't
rats in the house, I hope!" "Oh, dear no. What a horrid idea!" "That's a
good thing; I was told you had. I'm glad to know it's not true, because
I have a perfect horror of the creatures, and I should never have come
to see you again. Good-bye, my dear child, we shall meet again soon; you
know what a pleasure it is to me to see you. You don't know how to put
your chrysanthemums in water," she went on, as she prepared to leave the
room, Mme. Swann having risen to escort her. "They are Japanese flowers;
you must arrange them the same way as the Japanese." "I do not agree
with Mme. Verdurin, although she is the Law and the Prophets to me in
all things! There's no one like you, Odette, for finding such lovely
chrysanthemums, or chrysanthema rather, for it seems that's what we
ought to call them now," declared Mme. Cottard as soon as the "Mistress"
had shut the door behind her. "Dear Mme. Verdurin is not always very
kind about other people's flowers," said Odette sweetly. "Whom do you go
to, Odette," asked Mme. Cottard, to forestall any further criticism of
the "Mistress". "Lemaître? I must confess, the other day in Lemaître's
window I saw a huge, great pink bush which made me do something quite
mad." But modesty forbade her to give any more precise details as to the
price of the bush, and she said merely that the Professor, "and you
know, he's not at all a quick-tempered man," had "waved his sword in the
air" and told her that she "didn't know what money meant." "No, no, I've
no regular florist except Debac." "Nor have I," said Mme. Cottard, "but
I confess that I am unfaithful to him now and then with Lachaume." "Oh,
you forsake him for Lachaume, do you; I must tell Debac that," retorted
Odette, always anxious to shew her wit, and to lead the conversation in
her own house, where she felt more at her ease than in the little clan.
"Besides, Lachaume is really becoming too dear; his prices are quite
excessive, don't you know; I find his prices impossible!" she added,
laughing.
Meanwhile Mme. Bontemps, who had been heard a hundred times to declare
that nothing would induce her to go to the Verdurins', delighted at
being asked to the famous Wednesdays, was planning in her own mind how
she could manage to attend as many of them as possible. She was not
aware that Mme. Verdurin liked people not to miss a single one; also she
was one of those people whose company is but little sought, who, when a
hostess invites them to a series of parties, do not accept and go to
them without more ado, like those who know that if is always a pleasure
to see them, whenever they have a moment to spare and feel inclined to
go out; people of her type deny themselves it may be the first evening
and the third, imagining that their absence will be noticed, and save
themselves up for the second and fourth, unless it should happen that,
having heard from a trustworthy source that the third is to be a
particularly brilliant party, they reverse the original order, assuring
their hostess that "most unfortunately, we had another engagement last
week." So Mme. Bontemps was calculating how many Wednesdays there could
still be left before Easter, and by what means she might manage to
secure one extra, and yet not appear to be thrusting herself upon her
hostess. She relied upon Mme. Cottard, whom she would have with her in
the carriage going home, to give her a few hints. "Oh, Mme. Bontemps, I
see you getting up to go; it is very bad of you to give the signal for
flight like that! You owe me some compensation for not turning up last
Thursday. . . . Come, sit down again, just for a minute. You can't
possibly be going anywhere else before dinner. Really, you won't let
yourself be tempted?" went on Mme. Swann, and, as she held out a plate
of cakes, "You know, they're not at all bad, these little horrors. They
don't look nice, but just taste one, I know you'll like it." "On the
contrary, they look quite delicious," broke in Mme. Cottard. "In your
house, Odette, one is never short of victuals. I have no need to ask to
see the trade-mark; I know you get everything from Rebattet. I must say
that I am more eclectic. For sweet biscuits and everything of that sort
I repair, as often as not, to Bourbonneux. But I agree that they simply
don't know what an ice means. Rebattet for everything iced, and syrups
and sorbets; they're past-masters. As my husband would say, they're the
_ne plus ultra,_" "Oh, but we just make these in the house. You won't,
really?" "I shan't be able to eat a scrap of dinner," pleaded Mme.
Bontemps, "but I will just sit down again for a moment; you know, I
adore talking to a clever woman like you." "You will think me highly
indiscreet, Odette, but I should so like to know what you thought of the
hat Mme. Trombert had on. I know, of course, that big hats are the
fashion just now. All the same, wasn't it just the least little bit
exaggerated? And compared to the hat she came to see me in the other
day, the one she had on just now was microscopic!" "Oh no, I am not at
all clever," said Odette, thinking that this sounded well. "I am a
perfect simpleton, I believe everything people say, and worry myself to
death over the least thing." And she insinuated that she had, just at
first, suffered terribly from the thought of having married a man like
Swann, who had a separate life of his own and was unfaithful to her.
Meanwhile the Prince d'Agrigente, having caught the words "I am not at
all clever", thought it incumbent on him to protest; unfortunately he
had not the knack of repartee. "Tut, tut, tut, tut!" cried Mme.
Bontemps, "Not clever; you!" "That's just what I was saying to
myself--'What do I hear?'," the Prince clutched at this straw, "My ears
must have played me false!" "No, I assure you," went on Odette, "I am
really just an ordinary woman, very easily shocked, full of prejudices,
living in my own little groove and dreadfully ignorant." And then, in
case he had any news of the Baron de Charlus, "Have you seen our dear
Baronet?" she asked him. "You, ignorant!" cried Mme. Bontemps. "Then I
wonder what you'd say of the official world, all those wives of
Excellencies who can talk of nothing but their frocks. . . . Listen to
this, my friend; not more than a week ago I happened to mention
_Lohengrin_ to the Education Minister's wife. She stared at me, and said
'_Lohengrin?_ Oh, yes, the new review at the Folies-Bergères. I hear
it's a perfect scream!' What do you say to that, eh? You can't help
yourself; when people say things like that it makes your blood boil. I
could have struck her. Because I have a bit of a temper of my own. What
do you say, sir;" she turned to me, "was I not right?" "Listen," said
Mme. Cottard, "people can't help answering a little off the mark when
they're asked a thing like that point blank, without any warning. I know
something about it, because Mme. Verdurin also has a habit of putting a
pistol to your head." "Speaking of Mme. Verdurin," Mme. Bontemps asked
Mme. Cottard, "do you know who will be there on Wednesday? Oh, I've just
remembered that we've accepted an invitation for next Wednesday. You
wouldn't care to dine with us on Wednesday week? We could go on together
to Mme. Verdurin's. I should never dare to go there by myself; I don't
know why it is, that great lady always terrifies me." "I'll tell you
what it is," replied Mme. Cottard, "what frightens you about Mme.
Verdurin is her organ. But you see everyone can't have such a charming
organ as Mme. Swann. Once you've found your tongue, as the 'Mistress'
says, the ice will soon be broken. For she's a very easy person, really,
to get on with. But I can quite understand what you feel; it's never
pleasant to find oneself for the first time in a strange country."
"Won't you dine with us, too?" said Mme. Bontemps to Mme. Swann. "After
dinner we could all go to the Verdurins together, 'do a Verdurin'; and
even if it means that the 'Mistress' will stare me out of countenance
and never ask me to the house again, once we are there we'll just sit by
ourselves and have a quiet talk, I'm sure that's what I should like
best." But this assertion can hardly have been quite truthful, for Mme.
Bontemps went on to ask: "Who do you think will be there on Wednesday
week? What will they be doing? There won't be too big a crowd, I hope!"
"I certainly shan't be there," said Odette. "We shall just look in for
a minute on the last Wednesday of all. If you don't mind waiting till
then----" But Mme. Bontemps did not appear to be tempted by the
proposal.
Granted that the intellectual distinction of a house and its smartness
are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio, one must suppose,
since Swann found Mme. Bontemps attractive, that any forfeiture of
position once accepted has the consequence of making us less particular
with regard to the people among whom we have resigned ourselves to
finding entertainment, less particular with regard to their intelligence
as to everything else about them. And if this be true, men, like
nations, must see their culture and even their language disappear with
their independence. One of the effects of this indulgence is to
aggravate the tendency which after a certain age we have towards finding
pleasure in speeches that are a homage to our own turn of mind, to our
weaknesses, an encouragement to us to yield to them; that is the age at
which a great artist prefers to the company of original minds that of
pupils who have nothing in common with him save the letter of his
doctrine, who listen to him and offer incense; at which a man or woman
of mark, who is living entirely for love, will find that the most
intelligent person in a gathering is one perhaps of no distinction, but
one who has shewn by some utterance that he can understand and approve
what is meant by an existence devoted to gallantry, and has thus
pleasantly excited the voluptuous instincts of the lover or mistress; it
was the age, too, at which Swann, in so far as he had become the husband
of Odette, enjoyed hearing Mme. Bontemps say how silly it was to have
nobody in one's house but duchesses (concluding from that, quite the
contrary of what he would have decided in the old days at the
Verdurins', that she was a good creature, extremely sensible and not at
all a snob) and telling her stories which made her "die, laughing"
because she had not heard them before, although she always "saw the
point" at once, liked flattering her for his own amusement. "Then the
Doctor is not mad about flowers, like you?" Mme. Swann asked Mme.
Cottard. "Oh, well, you know, my husband is a sage; he practises
moderation in all things. Yes, I must admit, he has a passion." Her eye
aflame with malice, joy, curiosity, "And what is that, pray?" inquired
Mme. Bontemps. Quite simply Mme. Cottard answered her, "Reading." "Oh,
that's a very restful passion in a husband!" cried Mme. Bontemps
suppressing an impish laugh. "When the Doctor gets a book in his hands,
you know!" "Well, that needn't alarm you much . . ." "But it does, for
his eyesight. I must go now and look after him, Odette, and I shall come
back on the very first opportunity and knock at your door. Talking of
eyesight, have you heard that the new house Mme. Verdurin has just
bought is to be lighted by electricity? I didn't get that from my own
little secret service, you know, but from quite a different source; it
was the electrician himself, Mildé, who told me. You see, I quote my
authorities! Even the bedrooms, he says, are to have electric lamps with
shades which will filter the light. It is evidently a charming luxury,
for those who can afford it. But it seems that our contemporaries must
absolutely have the newest thing if it's the only one of its kind in the
world. Just fancy, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine has had the
telephone installed in her house! She can order things from her
tradesmen without having to go out of doors! I confess that I've made
the most bare-faced stratagems to get permission to go there one day,
just to speak into the instrument. It's very tempting, but more in a
friend's house than at home. I don't think I should like to have the
telephone in my establishment. Once the first excitement is over, it
must be a perfect racket going on all the time. Now, Odette, I must be
off; you're not to keep Mme. Bontemps any longer, she's looking after
me. I must absolutely tear myself away; you're making me behave in a
nice way, I shall be getting home after my husband!"
And for myself also it was time to return home, before I had tasted
those wintry delights of which the chrysanthemums had seemed to me to be
the brilliant envelope. These pleasures had not appeared, and yet Mme.
Swann did not look as though she expected anything more. She allowed the
servants to carry away the tea-things, as who should say "Time, please,
gentlemen!" And at last she did say to me: "Really, must you go? Very
well; good-bye!" I felt that I might have stayed there without
encountering those unknown pleasures, and that my unhappiness was not
the cause of my having to forego them. Were they to be found, then,
situated not upon that beaten track of hours which leads one always to
the moment of departure, but rather upon some cross-road unknown to me
along which I ought to have digressed? At least, the object of my visit
had been attained; Gilberte would know that I had come to see her
parents when she was not at home, and that I had, as Mme. Cottard had
incessantly assured me, "made a complete conquest, first shot, of Mme.
Verdurin," whom, she added, she had never seen "make so much" of anyone.
("You and she must have hooked atoms.") She would know that I had spoken
of her as was fitting, with affection, but that I had not that
incapacity for living without our seeing one another which I believed to
be at the root of the boredom that she had shewn at our last meetings. I
had told Mme. Swann that I should not be able to see Gilberte again. I
had said this as though I had finally decided not to see her any more.
And the letter which I was going to send Gilberte would be framed on
those lines. Only to myself, to fortify my courage, I proposed no more
than a supreme and concentrated effort, lasting a few days only. I said
to myself: "This is the last time that I shall refuse to meet her; I
shall accept the next invitation." To make our separation less difficult
to realise, I did not picture it to myself as final. But I knew very
well that it would be.
The first of January was exceptionally painful to me that winter. So, no
doubt, is everything that marks a date and an anniversary when we are
unhappy. But if our unhappiness is due to the loss of some dear friend,
our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the
present with the past. There was added to this, in my case, the
unexpressed hope that Gilberte, having intended to leave me to take the
first steps towards a reconciliation, and discovering that I had not
taken them, had been waiting only for the excuse of New Year's Day to
write to me, saying: "What is the matter? I am madly in love with you;
come, and let us explain things properly; I cannot live without seeing
you." As the last days of the old year went by, such a letter began to
seem probable. It was, perhaps, nothing of the sort, but to make us
believe that such a thing is probable the desire, the need that we have
for it suffices. The soldier is convinced that a certain interval of
time, capable of being indefinitely prolonged, will be allowed him
before the bullet finds him, the thief before he is taken, men in
general before they have to die. That is the amulet which preserves
people--and sometimes peoples--not from danger but from the fear of
danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain cases
allows them to brave it without their actually needing to be brave. It
is confidence of this sort, and with as little foundation, that sustains
the lover who is counting upon a reconciliation, upon a letter. For me
to cease to expect a letter it would have sufficed that I should have
ceased to wish for one. However unimportant one may know that one is in
the eyes of her whom one still loves, one attributes to her a series of
thoughts (though their sum total be indifference) the intention to
express those thoughts, a complication of her inner life in which one is
the constant object possibly of her antipathy but certainly of her
attention. But to imagine what was going on in Gilberte's mind I should
have required simply the power to anticipate on that New Year's Day what
I should feel on the first day of any of the years to come, when the
attention or the silence or the affection or the coldness of Gilberte
would pass almost unnoticed by me and I should not dream, should not
even be able to dream of seeking a solution of problems which would have
ceased to perplex me. When we are in love, our love is too big a thing
for us to be able altogether to contain it within us. It radiates
towards the beloved object, finds in her a surface which arrests it,
forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this shock of the
repercussion of our own affection which we call the other's regard for
ourselves, and which pleases us more then than on its outward journey
because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves. New
Year's Day rang out all its hours without there coming to me that letter
from Gilberte. And as I received a few others containing greetings tardy
or retarded by the overburdening of the mails at that season, on the
third and fourth of January I hoped still, but my hope grew hourly more
faint. Upon the days that followed I gazed through a mist of tears. This
undoubtedly meant that, having been less sincere than I thought in my
renunciation of Gilberte, I had kept the hope of a letter from her for
the New Year. And seeing that hope exhausted before I had had time to
shelter myself behind another, I suffered as would an invalid who had
emptied his phial of morphia without having another within his reach.
But perhaps also in my case--and these two explanations are not mutually
exclusive, for a single feeling is often made up of contrary
elements--the hope that I entertained of ultimately receiving a letter
had brought to my mind's eye once again the image of Gilberte, had
reawakened the emotions which the expectation of finding myself in her
presence, the sight of her, her way of treating me had aroused in me
before. The immediate possibility of a reconciliation had suppressed in
me that faculty the immense importance of which we are apt to overlook:
the faculty of resignation. Neurasthenics find it impossible to believe
the friends who assure them that they will gradually recover their peace
of mind if they will stay in bed and receive no letters, read no
newspapers. They imagine that such a course will only exasperate their
twitching nerves. And similarly lovers, who look upon it from their
enclosure in a contrary state of mind, who have not begun yet to make
trial of it, are unable to believe in the healing power of renunciation.
In consequence of the violence of my palpitations, my doses of caffeine
were reduced; the palpitations ceased. Whereupon I asked myself whether
it was not to some extent the drug that had been responsible for the
anguish that I had felt when I came near to quarrelling with Gilberte,
an anguish which I had attributed, on every recurrence of it, to the
distressing prospect of never seeing my friend again or of running the
risk of seeing her only when she was a prey to the same ill-humour. But
if this medicine had been at the root of the sufferings which my
imagination must in that case have interpreted wrongly (not that there
would be anything extraordinary in that, seeing that, among lovers, the
most acute mental suffering assumes often the physical identity of the
woman with whom they are living), it had been, in that sense, like the
philtre which, long after they have drunk of it, continues to bind
Tristan to Isolde. For the physical improvement which the reduction of
my caffeine effected almost at once did not arrest the evolution of that
grief which my absorption of the toxin had perhaps--if it had not
created it--at any rate contrived to render more acute.
Only, as the middle of the month of January approached, once my hopes of
a letter on New Year's Day had been disappointed, once the additional
disturbance that had come with their disappointment had grown calm, it
was my old sorrow, that of "before the holidays", which began again.
What was perhaps the most cruel thing about it was that I myself was its
architect, unconscious, wilful, merciless and patient. The one thing
that mattered, my relations with Gilberte, it was I who was labouring to
make them impossible by gradually creating out of this prolonged
separation from my friend, not indeed her indifference, but what would
come to the same thing in the end, my own. It was to a slow and painful
suicide of that part of me which was Gilberte's lover that I was goading
myself with untiring energy, with a clear sense not only of what I was
presently doing but of what must result from it in the future; I knew
not only that after a certain time I should cease to love Gilberte, but
also that she herself would regret it and that the attempts which she
would then make to see me would be as vain as those that she was making
now, no longer because I loved her too well but because I should
certainly be in love with some other woman whom I should continue to
desire, to wait for, through hours of which I should not dare to divert
any particle of a second to Gilberte who would be nothing to me then.
And no doubt at that very moment in which (since I was determined not to
see her again, unless after a formal request for an explanation or a
full confession of love on her part, neither of which was in the least
degree likely to come to me now) I had already lost Gilberte, and loved
her more than ever, and could feel all that she was to me better than in
the previous year when, spending all my afternoons in her company, or as
many as I chose, I believed that no peril threatened our friendship,--no
doubt at that moment the idea that I should one day entertain identical
feelings for another was odious to me, for that idea carried me away
beyond the range of Gilberte, my love and my sufferings. My love, my
sufferings in which through my tears I attempted to discern precisely
what Gilberte was, and was obliged to recognise that they did not
pertain exclusively to her but would, sooner or later, be some other
woman's portion. So that--or such, at least, was my way of thinking
then--we are always detached from our fellow-creatures; when a man loves
one of them he feels that his love is not labelled with their two names,
but may be born again in the future, may have been born already in the
past for another and not for her. And in the time when he is not in
love, if he makes up his mind philosophically as to what it is that is
inconsistent in love, he will find that the love of which he can speak
unmoved he did not, at the moment of speaking, feel, and therefore did
not know, knowledge in these matters being intermittent and not
outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment. That future in which I
should not love Gilberte, which my sufferings helped me to divine
although my imagination was not yet able to form a clear picture of it,
certainly there would still have been time to warn Gilberte that it was
gradually taking shape, that its coming was, if not imminent, at least
inevitable, if she herself, Gilberte, did not come to my rescue and
destroy in the germ my nascent indifference. How often was I not on the
point of writing, or of going to Gilberte to tell her: "Take care. My
mind is made up. What I am doing now is my supreme effort. I am seeing
you now for the last time. Very soon I shall have ceased to love you."
But to what end? By what authority should I have reproached Gilberte for
an indifference which, not that I considered myself guilty on that
count, I too manifested towards everything that was not herself? The
last time! To me, that appeared as something of immense significance,
because I was in love with Gilberte. On her it would doubtless have made
just as much impression as those letters in which our friends ask
whether they may pay us a visit before they finally leave the country,
an offer which, like those made by tiresome women who are in love with
us, we decline because we have pleasures of our own in prospect. The
time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions
that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit
fills up what remains.