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proust.txt
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proust.txt
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For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say I’m going to sleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.
This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
I would ask myself what o’clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.
I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some one will come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help.
I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle’s pulling my curls, which was effectually dispelled on the day–the dawn of a new era to me–on which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle’s fingers; still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake.
The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.
Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country.
But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness.
And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.
The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night! for I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt’s house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly denned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.
Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in another direction; I was in my room in Mme.
de Saint-Loup’s house in the country; good heavens, it must be ten o’clock, they will have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes of my bedroom window.
It is a very different kind of existence at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope.
But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold–or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam–or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors.
But it was no good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.
But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable.
For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern.
It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle.
The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot.
And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo’s horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed’s, overcame all material obstacles–everything that seemed to bar his way–by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself.
The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo.
And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held that It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country, and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors.
That is not the way to make him strong and active, she would say sadly, especially this little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get. My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind.
But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked–you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain.
She would say, At last one can breathe! and would run up and down the soaking paths–too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve–with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair.
When these walks of my grandmother’s took place after dinner there was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if (at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her: Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy! For, simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my father’s family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses.
The torments inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother’s vain entreaties, of her in her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass–all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor’s side with a.
happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt.
And yet, as soon as I heard her Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy! in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root, and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window.
Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door Ï was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire.
Alas! I little knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother’s mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband, during those endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear.
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow.
So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared.
Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her Kiss me just once again, but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold.
And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep.
But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our ’guests’ were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited.
On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in ’without ringing,’ but the double peal–timid, oval, gilded–of the visitors’ bell, everyone would at once exclaim A visitor! Who in the world can it be? but they knew quite well that it could only be M.
Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run her hand through her boy’s hair, after the barber had smoothed it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.
And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall from my grandmother’s lips when she brought us back her report of the enemy, as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of possible invaders, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: I can hear Swann’s voice. And, indeed, one could tell him only by his voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes, under a high forehead fringed with fair, almost red hair, dressed in the Bressant style, because in the garden we used as little light as possible, so as not to attract mosquitoes: and I would slip away as though not going for anything in particular, to tell them to bring out the syrups; for my grandmother made a great point, thinking it ’nicer/ of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the ordinary, which we kept for visitors only.
Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann’s father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M.
Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns’ family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M.
Swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried, Oh, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking here together on such a charming day! Don’t you see how pretty they are, all these trees–my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you have never congratulated me? You look as glum as a night-cap. Don’t you feel this little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it’s good to be alive all the same, my dear Amédée! And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes, and wiped his glasses.
And he could never be consoled for the loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for which he survived her, It’s a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time. Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann, became one of my grandfather’s favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of things.
And I should have assumed that this father of Swann’s had been a monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than myself, and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to pardon offences which I should have been inclined to condemn, had not gone on to exclaim, But, after all, he had a heart of gold.
For many years, albeit–and especially before his marriage–M. Swann the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society which his family had frequented, or that, under the sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring–with the complete innocence of a family of honest innkeepers who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know it–one of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and nothing, except the chance of a brilliant career or of a ’good’ marriage, could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior caste. M. Swann, the father, had been a stockbroker; and so ’young Swann’ found himself immured for life in a caste where one’s fortune, as in a list of taxpayers, varied between such and such limits of income.
We knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so we knew his own associates, the people with whom he was ’in a position to mix.’ If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on whom the old friends of the family, like my relatives, shut their eyes all the more good-naturedly that Swann himself, after he was left an orphan, still came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat, had he met them while he was walking with ourselves.
Had there been such a thing as a determination to apply to Swann a social coefficient peculiar to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his father’s position, his coefficient would have been rather lower than theirs, because, leading a very simple life, and having always had a craze for ’antiques’ and pictures, he now lived and piled up his collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit, but which stood on the Quai d’Orléans, a neighbourhood in which my great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered. Are you really a connoisseur, now? she would say to him; I ask for your own sake, as you are likely to have ’fakes’ palmed off on you by the dealers, for she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no great opinion of the intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would avoid serious topics and shewed a very dull preciseness, not only when he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details, but even when my grandmother’s sisters were talking to him about art.
When challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost impolitely silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been painted. But as a rule he would content himself with trying to amuse us by telling us the story of his latest adventure–and he would have a fresh story for us on every occasion–with some one whom we ourselves knew, such as the Combray chemist, or our cook, or our coachman. These stories certainly used to make my great-aunt laugh, but she could never tell whether that was on account of the absurd parts which Swann invariably made himself play in the adventures, or of the wit that he shewed in telling us of them. It is easy to see that you are a regular ’character,’ M. Swann!
As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle ’common,’ she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, if he had wished to, have lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l’Opéra, and that he was the son of old M.
Swann who must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann called on New Year’s Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: Well, M.
Swann, and do you still live next door to the Bonded Vaults, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to Lyons? and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her glasses, at the other visitors.
But if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this Swann, who, in his capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was ’fully qualified’ to be received by any of the ’upper middle class,’ the most respected barristers and solicitors of Paris (though he was perhaps a trifle inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance), had another almost secret existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and be off to some drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers had ever set eyes–that would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being herself on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus, of knowing that he would, when he had finished his conversation with her, plunge deep into the realms of Thetis, into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or–to be content with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray–as the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.
And then--oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the
human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray,
alone, as far as it may choose--while Mme. de Guermantes sat in the
chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze lingered here
and wandered there, rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested
upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but a ray
of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared
conscious of where it fell. As for Mme. de Guermantes herself, since
she remained there motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to
notice the rude or awkward conduct of her children who, in the course
of their play, are speaking to people whom she does not know, it was
impossible for me to determine whether she approved or condemned the
vagrancy of her eyes in the careless detachment of her heart.
I felt it to be important that she should not leave the church before
I had been able to look long enough upon her, reminding myself that for
years past I had regarded the sight of her as a thing eminently to be
desired, and I kept my eyes fixed on her, as though by gazing at her
I should be able to carry away and incorporate, to store up, for later
reference, in myself the memory of that prominent nose, those red
cheeks, of all those details which struck me as so much precious,
authentic, unparalleled information with regard to her face. And now
that, whenever I brought my mind to bear upon that face--and
especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the instinct
of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in
ourselves, not to admit that I had been in any way deceived--I found
only beauty there; setting her once again (since they were one and the
same person, this lady who sat before me and that Duchesse de Guermantes
whom, until then, I had been used to conjure into an imagined shape)
apart from and above that common run of humanity with which the sight,
pure and simple, of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound
her, I grew indignant when I heard people saying, in the congregation
round me: She is better looking than Mme. Sazerat or than Mlle.
Vinteuil, as though she had been in any way comparable with them. And
my gaze resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her
neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of
the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, as I admired this
deliberately unfinished sketch: How lovely she is! What true nobility!
it is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant,
that I have before me! And the care which I took to focus all my
attention upon her face succeeded in isolating it so completely that
to-day, when I call that marriage ceremony to mind, I find it impossible
to visualise any single person who was present except her, and the
beadle who answered me in the affirmative when I inquired whether the
lady was, indeed, Mme. de Guermantes. But her, I can see her still quite
clearly, especially at the moment when the procession filed into the
sacristy, lighted by the intermittent, hot sunshine of a windy and rainy
day, where Mme. de Guermantes found herself in the midst of all
those Combray people whose names, even, she did not know, but whose
inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud that she must, in
return, feel for them a genuine, pitying sympathy, and whom she might
count on impressing even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and
natural charm. And then, too, since she could not bring into play the
deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs,
in a crowd, towards people whom one knows, but must allow her vague
thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of blue light
which she was powerless to control, she was anxious not to distress in
any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over whom
that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see
again to-day, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, the gentle
astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to
address it to anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his
share of it, the almost timid smile of a sovereign lady who seems to
be making an apology for her presence among the vassals whom she loves.
This smile rested upon myself, who had never ceased to follow her with
my eyes. And I, remembering the glance which she had let fall upon me
during the service, blue as a ray of sunlight that had penetrated the
window of Gilbert the Bad, said to myself, Of course, she is thinking
about me. I fancied that I had found favour in her sight, that she
would continue to think of me after she had left the church, and would,
perhaps, grow pensive again, that evening, at Guermantes, on my account.
And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to
make us love a woman that she looks on us with contempt, as I supposed
Mlle. Swann to have done, while we imagine that she cannot ever be ours,
it is enough, also, sometimes that she looks on us kindly, as Mme. de
Guermantes did then, while we think of her as almost ours already. Her
eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond my reach, yet
dedicated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from behind
a threatening cloud and darting the full force of its rays on to the
Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the red carpet
laid down for the wedding, along which Mme. de Guermantes smilingly
advanced, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a
bloom of light, giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness
in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterises certain pages
of _Lohengrin_, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and makes us understand
how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet
'delicious.'
How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the
'Guermantes way,' and with what an intensified melancholy did I reflect
on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and that I must
abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regret that I
felt for this, while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself,
made me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of
its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the instant of pain, ceased
entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on
which my want of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite apart
from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment
to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a
stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the
special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they
appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something
which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which,
despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover. As I felt that the
mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front
of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with
my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I had then to hasten
after my grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to
recover my sense of them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate upon
recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which,
without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming,
ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were
themselves no more than the outer coverings. It was certainly not any
impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost
of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them
was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual
value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an
unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and
in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own
impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme
for some great literary work. So urgent was the task imposed on my
conscience by these impressions of form or perfume or colour--to strive
for a perception of what lay hidden beneath them, that I was never
long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an
effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved. As good luck
would have it, my parents called me; I felt that I had not, for the
moment, the calm environment necessary for a successful pursuit of my
researches, and that it would be better to think no more of the matter
until I reached home, and not to exhaust myself in the meantime to no
purpose. And so I concerned myself no longer with the mystery that lay
hidden in a form or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind, since I was
taking it home with me, protected by its visible and tangible covering,
beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which, on days
when I had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my
basket, buried in a couch of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Once
in the house again I would begin to think of something else, and so my
mind would become littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had
gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me)
with a stone from the surface of which the sunlight was reflected, a
roof, the sound of a bell, the smell of fallen leaves, a confused mass
of different images, under which must have perished long ago the reality
of which I used to have some foreboding, but which I never had the
energy to discover and bring to light. Once, however, when we had
prolonged our walk far beyond its ordinary limits, and so had been very
glad to encounter, half way home, as afternoon darkened into evening,
Dr. Percepied, who drove past us at full speed in his carriage, saw and
recognised us, stopped, and made us jump in beside him, I received an
impression of this sort which I did not abandon without having first
subjected it to an examination a little more thorough. I had been set
on the box beside the coachman, we were going like the wind because
the Doctor had still, before returning to Combray, to call at
Martinville-le-Sec, at the house of a patient, at whose door he asked
us to wait for him. At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that
special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught
sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was
playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road
seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a
third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them
by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the
distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.
In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes
of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not
penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay
behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at
once to contain and to conceal.
The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves seemed to come so
little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we
drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for
the pleasure which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and
the business of trying to find out what that reason was seemed to me
irksome; I wished only to keep in reserve in my brain those converging
lines, moving in the sunshine, and, for the time being, to think of
them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples
would have vanished for ever, in a great medley of trees and roofs and
scents and sounds which I had noticed and set apart on account of the
obscure sense of pleasure which they gave me, but without ever exploring
them more fully. I got down from the box to talk to my parents while we
were waiting for the Doctor to reappear. Then it was time to start; I
climbed up again to my place, turning my head to look back, once more,
at my steeples, of which, a little later, I caught a farewell glimpse
at a turn in the road. The coachman, who seemed little inclined for
conversation, having barely acknowledged my remarks, I was obliged,
in default of other society, to fall back on my own, and to attempt to
recapture the vision of my steeples. And presently their outlines and
their sunlit surface, as though they had been a sort of rind, were
stripped apart; a little of what they had concealed from me became
apparent; an idea came into my mind which had not existed for me a
moment earlier, framed itself in words in my head; and the pleasure
with which the first sight of them, just now, had filled me was so much
enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer
think of anything but them. At this point, although we had now travelled
a long way from Martinville, I turned my head and caught sight of them
again, quite black this time, for the sun had meanwhile set. Every few
minutes a turn in the road would sweep them out of sight; then they
shewed themselves for the last time, and so I saw them no more.
Without admitting to myself that what lay buried within the steeples of
Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it
was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to
me, I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the Doctor, and composed,
in spite of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience and to
satisfy my enthusiasm, the following little fragment, which I have since
discovered, and now reproduce, with only a slight revision here and
there.
Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in
that expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of
Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting
them by a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq,
was come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and
yet the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like
three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in
the sunlight. Then the steeple of Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper
distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by
the light of the setting sun, which, even at that distance, I could
see playing and smiling upon their sloped sides. We had been so long in
approaching them that I was thinking of the time that must still elapse
before we could reach them when, of a sudden, the carriage, having
turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had flung
themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop
before being dashed against the porch of the church.
We resumed our course; we had left Martinville some little time, and
the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already
disappeared, when, lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight,
its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of
farewell, their sun-bathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw,
so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; then the road
changed direction, they veered in the light like three golden pivots,
and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already
close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them
for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers
painted upon the sky above the low line of fields. They made me think,
too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over
which night had begun to fall; and while we drew away from them at a
gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and, after some
awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close
to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more,
now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and
resigned, and so vanishing in the night.
I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my
corner of the box-seat, where the Doctor's coachman was in the habit
of placing, in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville
market, I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness,
felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the
steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I
myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top
of my voice.
All day long, during these walks, I had been able to muse upon the
pleasure that there would be in the friendship of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the
Vivonne; and, greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in
such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous
afternoons. But when, on our way home, I had caught sight of a farm, on
the left of the road, at some distance from two other farms which were
themselves close together, and from which, to return to Combray, we need
only turn down an avenue of oaks, bordered on one side by a series of
orchard-closes, each one planted at regular intervals with apple-trees
which cast upon the ground, when they were lighted by the setting sun,
the Japanese stencil of their shadows; then, sharply, my heart would
begin to beat, I would know that in half an hour we should be at
home, and that there, as was the rule on days when we had taken the
'Guermantes way' and dinner was, in consequence, served later than
usual, I should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup, so
that my mother, kept at table, just as though there had been company to
dinner, would not come upstairs to say good night to me in bed. The zone
of melancholy which I then entered was totally distinct from that other
zone, in which I had been bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as
sometimes in the sky a band of pink is separated, as though by a line
invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird
flying across the pink; it draws near the border-line, touches it,
enters and is lost upon the black. The longings by which I had just
now been absorbed, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of
happiness--I was now so remote from them that their fulfilment would
have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them
all, just to be able to cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma!
Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my
mother's face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom where
I could see myself already lying, in imagination; and wished only that
I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when,
the rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might
lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which
clambered up it as far as my window-sill, I would leap out of bed to run
down at once into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening
must return, and with it the hour when I must leave my mother. And so
it was from the 'Guermantes way' that I learned to distinguish between
these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain
periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one
returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and
ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means
of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to
myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the
other.
So the 'Méséglise way' and the 'Guermantes way' remain for me linked
with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives
along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in
sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of
the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the
truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have
opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for
their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us
those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became
apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water
which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as
environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still
with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were
slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming
child--as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the
crowd--that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose
that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in
all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which
strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the
dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no
echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by
the current, and formed only to burst--my exaltation of mind has borne
them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these
successive years, while all around them the one-trodden ways have
vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of
those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead. Sometimes the fragment
of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in
such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my
mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from
what place, from what time--perhaps, quite simply, from which of my
dreams--it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my
mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard
the Méséglise and Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I used to think of
certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that
the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone,
I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith
which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape
in the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the
first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Méséglise way'
with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its
apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its
water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time
the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my
only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat,
see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among
the cornfields--as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden--an old church,
monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers,
the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to
encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on
the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart. And
yet, because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am
seized with a desire to see again the 'Guermantes way,' it would not
be satisfied were I led to the banks of a river in which were lilies
as fair, or even fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my
return home in the evening, at the hour when there awakened in me that
anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of
love, and may even become its inseparable companion, I should have
wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me,
though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No:
just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented (in that
untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able
to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes
in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her
kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation,
unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it should be my
mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which
there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish,
and which I loved as much as all the rest--so what I want to see again
is the 'Guermantes way' as I knew it, with the farm that stood a little
apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together, at the
entrance to the oak avenue; those meadows upon whose surface, when it
is polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are outlined
the leaves of the apple-trees; that whole landscape whose individuality
sometimes, at night, in my dreams, binds me with a power that is almost
fantastic, of which I can discover no trace when I awake.
No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in
me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had
made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Méséglise
and Guermantes 'ways' left me exposed, in later life, to much
disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to
see a person again without realising that it was simply because that
person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been
led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an aftermath of
affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by
the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions,
to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two 'ways' give to
those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the
rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for
me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a
tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the
'Méséglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling,
through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent
lilac-trees.
And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at
Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there; of other days
besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the
taste--by what would have been called at Combray the 'perfume'---of a
cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many
years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love
affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that
accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are
studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when
we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an
accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible
to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance
by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories,
following one after another, were condensed into a single substance,
but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the
three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others,
inspired more recently by a taste or 'perfume,' and those which were
actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at
second hand--no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least
those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain
marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.
It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the
brief uncertainty of my waking dream, I would know in what room I
was actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in
the darkness, and--fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the
assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed
the curtains and the window--would have reconstructed it complete and
with its furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working
upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have
replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed
site. 'But scarcely had daylight itself--and no longer the gleam from
a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for
daylight--traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across
a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with
its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had
erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table,
which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would
hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and
sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would
be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had
lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the
darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I
had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight
by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted
forefinger of day.
SWANN IN LOVE
To admit you to the 'little nucleus,' the 'little group,' the 'little
clan' at the Verdurins', one condition sufficed, but that one was
indispensable; you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose
articles was that the young pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under
her patronage that year, and of whom she said Really, it oughtn't to
be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that! left both Planté
and Rubinstein 'sitting'; while Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant
diagnostician than Potain. Each 'new recruit' whom the Verdurins failed
to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in other houses
than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished
forthwith. Women being in this respect more rebellious than men, more
reluctant to lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out
for themselves whether other drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as
entertaining, and the Verdurins feeling, moreover, that this critical
spirit and this demon of frivolity might, by their contagion, prove
fatal to the orthodoxy of the little church, they had been obliged to
expel, one after another, all those of the 'faithful' who were of the
female sex.
Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively
that season (for all that Mme. Verdurin herself was a thoroughly 'good'
woman, and came of a respectable middle-class family, excessively rich
and wholly undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her own
accord severed all connection) to a young woman almost of a 'certain
class,' a Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her Christian
name, Odette, and pronounced a 'love,' and to the pianist's aunt, who
looked as though she had, at one period, 'answered the bell': ladies
quite ignorant of the world, who in their social simplicity were so
easily led to believe that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse
de Guermantes were obliged to pay large sums of money to other poor
wretches, in order to have anyone at their dinner-parties, that if
somebody had offered to procure them an invitation to the house of
either of those great dames, the old doorkeeper and the woman of 'easy
virtue' would have contemptuously declined.
The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid'
there. There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment.
The young pianist would play, but only if he felt inclined, for no one
was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: We're all
friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!
If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the
Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was
displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an
impression. Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know
quite well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm
in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up--nothing doing! If he was not
going to play they talked, and one of the friends--usually the painter
who was in favour there that year--would spin, as M. Verdurin put
it, a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter, and
especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom--so strong was her habit of taking
literally the figurative accounts of her emotions--Dr. Cottard, who was
then just starting in general practice, would really have to come one
day and set her jaw, which she had dislocated with laughing too much.
Evening dress was barred, because you were all 'good pals,' and didn't
want to look like the 'boring people' who were to be avoided like the
plague, and only asked to the big evenings, which were given as seldom
as possible, and then only if it would amuse the painter or make the
musician better known. The rest of the time you were quite happy playing
charades and having supper in fancy dress, and there was no need to
mingle any strange element with the little 'clan.'
But just as the 'good pals' came to take a more and more prominent place
in Mme. Verdurin's life, so the 'bores,' the 'nuisances' grew to include
everybody and everything that kept her friends away from her, that made
them sometimes plead 'previous engagements,' the mother of one, the
professional duties of another, the 'little place in the country' of a
third. If Dr. Cottard felt bound to say good night as soon as they rose
from table, so as to go back to some patient who was seriously ill; I
don't know, Mme. Verdurin would say, I'm sure it will do him far more
good if you don't go disturbing him again this evening; he will have a
good night without you; to-morrow morning you can go round early and you
will find him cured. From the beginning of December it would make her
quite ill to think that the 'faithful' might fail her on Christmas and
New Year's Days. The pianist's aunt insisted that he must accompany her,
on the latter, to a family dinner at her mother's.
You don't suppose she'll die, your mother, exclaimed Mme. Verdurin
bitterly, if you don't have dinner with her on New Year's Day, like
people in the _provinces_!
Her uneasiness was kindled again in Holy Week: Now you, Doctor, you're
a sensible, broad-minded man; you'll come, of course, on Good Friday,
just like any other day? she said to Cottard in the first year of the
little 'nucleus,' in a loud and confident voice, as though there could
be no doubt of his answer. But she trembled as she waited for it, for if
he did not come she might find herself condemned to dine alone.
I shall come on Good Friday--to say good-bye to you, for we are going
to spend the holidays in Auvergne.
In Auvergne? To be eaten by fleas and all sorts of creatures! A fine
lot of good that will do you! And after a solemn pause: If you had
only told us, we would have tried to get up a party, and all gone there
together, comfortably.
And so, too, if one of the 'faithful' had a friend, or one of the ladies
a young man, who was liable, now and then, to make them miss an evening,
the Verdurins, who were not in the least afraid of a woman's having a
lover, provided that she had him in their company, loved him in their
company and did not prefer him to their company, would say: Very well,
then, bring your friend along. And he would be put to the test, to see
whether he was willing to have no secrets from Mme. Verdurin, whether he
was susceptible of being enrolled in the 'little clan.' If he failed
to pass, the faithful one who had introduced him would be taken on one
side, and would be tactfully assisted to quarrel with the friend or
mistress. But if the test proved satisfactory, the newcomer would in
turn be numbered among the 'faithful.' And so when, in the course of
this same year, the courtesan told M. Verdurin that she had made the
acquaintance of such a charming gentleman, M. Swann, and hinted that
he would very much like to be allowed to come, M. Verdurin carried the
request at once to his wife. He never formed an opinion on any subject
until she had formed hers, his special duty being to carry out her
wishes and those of the 'faithful' generally, which he did with
boundless ingenuity.
My dear, Mme. de Crécy has something to say to you. She would like to
bring one of her friends here, a M. Swann. What do you say?
Why, as if anybody could refuse anything to a little piece of
perfection like that. Be quiet; no one asked your opinion. I tell you
that you are a piece of perfection.
Just as you like, replied Odette, in an affected tone, and then went
on: You know I'm not fishing for compliments.
Very well; bring your friend, if he's nice.
Now there was no connection whatsoever between the 'little nucleus' and
the society which Swann frequented, and a purely worldly man would
have thought it hardly worth his while, when occupying so exceptional
a position in the world, to seek an introduction to the Verdurins. But
Swann was so ardent a lover that, once he had got to know almost all the
women of the aristocracy, once they had taught him all that there was
to learn, he had ceased to regard those naturalisation papers, almost a
patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon
him, save as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no
intrinsic value, which allowed him to improvise a status for himself in
some little hole in the country, or in some obscure quarter of Paris,
where the good-looking daughter of a local squire or solicitor had taken
his fancy. For at such times desire, or love itself, would revive in
him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday
life, although it was, no doubt, the same feeling which had originally
prompted him towards that career as a man of fashion in which he had
squandered his intellectual gifts upon frivolous amusements, and had
made use of his erudition in matters of art only to advise society
ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses; and this
vanity it was which made him eager to shine, in the sight of any fair
unknown who had captivated him for the moment, with a brilliance which
the name of Swann by itself did not emit. And he was most eager when the
fair unknown was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by other
men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought
a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders'
that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated.
Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social
falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people
whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at
inferiors. And Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when
with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would
instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace's maid.
Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a
resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur
to remain moored like houseboats to a certain point on the bank of the
stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them
above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will
remain fixed until the day of their death, and are content, in the
end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre
distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there
with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the
women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom
he had already found to be beautiful and charming. And these were, as
often as not, women whose beauty was of a distinctly 'common' type, for
the physical qualities which attracted him instinctively, and without
reason, were the direct opposite of those that he admired in the women
painted or sculptured by his favourite masters. Depth of character, or
a melancholy expression on a woman's face would freeze his senses, which
would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy
human flesh.
If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct
for him to make no attempt to know, but among whom a woman caught his
eye, adorned with a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his
'high horse' and to cheat the desire that she had kindled in him, to
substitute a pleasure different from that which he might have tasted in
her company by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come
and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication in the
face of life, as stupid a renunciation of a new form of happiness as if,
instead of visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in
his own rooms and looked at 'views' of Paris. He did not immure himself
in the solid structure of his social relations, but had made of them, so
as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations wherever a woman
might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers
carry about with them. Any part of it which was not portable or could
not be adapted to some fresh pleasure he would discard as valueless,
however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit
with a duchess, built up of the yearly accumulation of her desire to
do him some favour for which she had never found an opportunity, been
squandered in a moment by his calling upon her, in an indiscreetly
worded message, for a recommendation by telegraph which would put him
in touch at once with one of her agents whose daughter he had noticed in
the country, just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust
of bread. Indeed, when it was too late, he would laugh at himself for
it, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare refinements, an
element of clownishness. Then he belonged to that class of intelligent
men who have led a life of idleness, and who seek consolation and,
perhaps, an excuse in the idea, which their idleness offers to their
intelligence, of objects as worthy of their interest as any that could
be attained by art or learning, the idea that 'Life' contains situations
more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
So, at least, he would assure and had no difficulty in persuading the
more subtle among his friends in the fashionable world, notably the
Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to amuse with stories of the startling
adventures that had befallen him, such as when he had met a woman in the
train, and had taken her home with him, before discovering that she was
the sister of a reigning monarch, in whose hands were gathered, at that
moment, all the threads of European politics, of which he found himself
kept informed in the most delightful fashion, or when, in the complexity
of circumstances, it depended upon the choice which the Conclave
was about to make whether he might or might not become the lover of
somebody's cook.
It was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals
and academicians, to whom he was bound by such close ties, that Swann
compelled with so much cynicism to serve him as panders. All his friends
were accustomed to receive, from time to time, letters which called on
them for a word of recommendation or introduction, with a diplomatic
adroitness which, persisting throughout all his successive 'affairs'
and using different pretexts, revealed more glaringly than the clumsiest
indiscretion, a permanent trait in his character and an unvarying quest.
I used often to recall to myself when, many years later, I began to
take an interest in his character because of the similarities which, in
wholly different respects, it offered to my own, how, when he used to
write to my grandfather (though not at the time we are now considering,
for it was about the date of my own birth that Swann's great 'affair'
began, and made a long interruption in his amatory practices) the
latter, recognising his friend's handwriting on the envelope, would
exclaim: Here is Swann asking for something; on guard! And, either
from distrust or from the unconscious spirit of devilry which urges us
to offer a thing only to those who do not want it, my grandparents would
meet with an obstinate refusal the most easily satisfied of his prayers,
as when he begged them for an introduction to a girl who dined with us
every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, whenever Swann mentioned her,
to pretend that they no longer saw, although they would be wondering,
all through the week, whom they could invite to meet her, and often
failed, in the end, to find anyone, sooner than make a sign to him who
would so gladly have accepted.
Occasionally a couple of my grandparents' acquaintance, who had been
complaining for some time that they never saw Swann now, would announce
with satisfaction, and perhaps with a slight inclination to make my
grandparents envious of them, that he had suddenly become as charming as
he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My grandfather
would not care to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look at my
grandmother, as he hummed the air of:
What is this mystery?
I cannot understand it;
or of:
Vision fugitive...;
In matters such as this
'Tis best to close one's eyes.
A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann's new friend What
about Swann? Do you still see as much of him as ever? the other's face
would lengthen: Never mention his name to me again!
But I thought that you were such friends...
He had been intimate in this way for several months with some cousins
of my grandmother, dining almost every evening at their house. Suddenly,
and without any warning, he ceased to appear. They supposed him to be
ill, and the lady of the house was going to send to inquire for him
when, in her kitchen, she found a letter in his hand, which her cook had
left by accident in the housekeeping book. In this he announced that he
was leaving Paris and would not be able to come to the house again. The
cook had been his mistress, and at the moment of breaking off relations
she was the only one of the household whom he had thought it necessary
to inform.
But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at
least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position so irregular
that he was unable to arrange for her reception in 'society,' then for
her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in
which she moved or into which he had drawn her. No good depending on
Swann for this evening, people would say; don't you remember, it's his
American's night at the Opera? He would secure invitations for her to
the most exclusive drawing-rooms, to those houses where he himself
went regularly, for weekly dinners or for poker; every evening, after
a slight 'wave' imparted to his stiffly brushed red locks had tempered
with a certain softness the ardour of his bold green eyes, he would
select a flower for his buttonhole and set out to meet his mistress at
the house of one or other of the women of his circle; and then, thinking
of the affection and admiration which the fashionable folk, whom he
always treated exactly as he pleased, would, when he met them there,
lavish upon him in the presence of the woman whom he loved, he would
find a fresh charm in that worldly existence of which he had grown
weary, but whose substance, pervaded and warmly coloured by the
flickering light which he had slipped into its midst, seemed to him
beautiful and rare, now that he had incorporated in it a fresh love.
But while each of these attachments, each of these flirtations had been
the realisation, more or less complete, of a dream born of the sight of
a face or a form which Swann had spontaneously, and without effort on
his part, found charming, it was quite another matter when, one day at
the theatre, he was introduced to Odette de Crécy by an old friend of
his own, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature with whom
he might very possibly come to an understanding; but had made her out
to be harder of conquest than she actually was, so as to appear to be
conferring a special favour by the introduction. She had struck Swann
not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a style
of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire,
which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion; as one of those
women of whom every man can name some, and each will name different
examples, who are the converse of the type which our senses demand. To
give him any pleasure her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate,
her cheek-bones too prominent, her features too tightly drawn. Her eyes
were fine, but so large that they seemed to be bending beneath their own
weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell
or in an ill humour. Some time after this introduction at the theatre
she had written to ask Swann whether she might see his collections,
which would interest her so much, she, an ignorant woman with a taste
for beautiful things, saying that she would know him better when
once she had seen him in his 'home,' where she imagined him to be so
comfortable with his tea and his books; although she had not concealed
her surprise at his being in that part of the town, which must be so
depressing, and was not nearly smart enough for such a very smart man.
And when he allowed her to come she had said to him as she left how
sorry she was to have stayed so short a time in a house into which she
was so glad to have found her way at last, speaking of him as though he
had meant something more to her than the rest of the people she knew,
and appearing to unite their two selves with a kind of romantic bond
which had made him smile. But at the time of life, tinged already with
disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, when a man can content
himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting
too much in return, this linking of hearts, if it is no longer, as in
early youth, the goal towards which love, of necessity, tends, still
is bound to love by so strong an association of ideas that it may well
become the cause of love if it presents itself first. In his younger
days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves;
later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough
to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would
appear--since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective
pleasure--that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part
in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical
order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has
already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer
evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws,
before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify
it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we
recall and recreate the rest. Since we possess its hymn, engraved on
our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the
opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for
us to remember all that follows. And if she begin in the middle, where
it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only, we are
well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow
our partner, without hesitation, at the first pause in her voice.
Odette de Crécy came again to see Swann; her visits grew more frequent,
and doubtless each visit revived the sense of disappointment which he
felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in
the interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite
of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to
him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he
spontaneously admired. It must be remarked that Odette's face appeared
thinner and more prominent than it actually was, because her forehead
and the upper part of her cheeks, a single and almost plane surface,
were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period,
drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray
locks over her ears; while as for her figure, and she was admirably
built, it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of
the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the
best-dressed women in Paris) for the corset, jetting forwards in an
arch, as though over an imaginary stomach, and ending in a sharp point,
beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, gave a woman,
that year, the appearance of being composed of different sections badly
fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the
inner bodice follow, in complete independence, controlled only by the
fancy of their designer or the rigidity of their material, the line
which led them to the knots of ribbon, falls of lace, fringes of
vertically hanging jet, or carried them along the bust, but nowhere
attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the
architecture of their fripperies drew them towards or away from her
own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely
buried.
But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her
telling him how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again;
he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him
that it might not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at
him then, fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, which gave her
a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in
the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with strings of black
velvet. And won't you, she had ventured, come just once and take tea
with me? He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay--which, in reality,
he had abandoned years ago--on Vermeer of Delft. I know that I am quite
useless, she had replied, a little wild thing like me beside a learned
great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I
should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun
it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of
old papers! she had gone on, with that self-satisfied air which a smart
woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is to give herself
up, without fear of soiling her fingers, to some unclean task, such as
cooking the dinner, with her hands right in the dish itself. You will
only laugh at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me, she
meant Vermeer, I have never even heard of him; is he alive still? Can I
see any of his things in Paris, so as to have some idea of what is going
on behind that great brow which works so hard, that head which I feel
sure is always puzzling away about things; just to be able to say
'There, that's what he's thinking about!' What a dream it would be to be
able to help you with your work.
He had sought an excuse in his fear of forming new friendships, which he
gallantly described as his fear of a hopeless passion. You are afraid
of falling in love? How funny that is, when I go about seeking nothing
else, and would give my soul just to find a little love somewhere! she
had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had
been genuinely touched. Some woman must have made you suffer. And you
think that the rest are all like her. She can't have understood you: you
are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about
you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody
else.
And then, besides, there's yourself---- he had continued, I know what