Time Regained
Time RegainedCHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICopyright
Time Regained
Marcel Proust
CHAPTER I
TANSONVILLE
Tansonville seemed little more than a place to rest in
between two walks or a refuge during a shower. Rather too
countrified, it was one of those rural dwellings where every
sitting-room is a cabinet of greenery, and where the roses and the
birds out in the garden keep you company in the curtains; for they
were old and each rose stood out so clearly that it might have been
picked like a real one and each bird put in a cage, unlike those
pretentious modern decorations in which, against a silver
background, all the apple trees in Normandy are outlined in the
Japanese manner, to trick the hours you lie in bed. I spent the
whole day in my room, the windows of which opened upon the
beautiful verdure of the park, upon the lilacs of the entrance,
upon the green leaves of the great trees beside the water and in
the forest of Méséglise. It was a pleasure to contemplate all this,
I was saying to myself: "How charming to have all this greenery in
my window" until suddenly in the midst of the great green picture I
recognised the clock tower of the Church of Combray toned in
contrast to a sombre blue as though it were far distant, not a
reproduction of the clock tower but its very self which, defying
time and space, thrust itself into the midst of the luminous
greenery as if it were engraved upon my window-pane. And if I left
my room, at the end of the passage, set towards me like a band of
scarlet, I perceived the hangings of a little sitting-room which
though only made of muslin, were of a scarlet so vivid that they
would catch fire if a single sun-ray touched them.
During our walks Gilberte alluded to Robert as though he were
turning away from her but to other women. It was true that his life
was encumbered with women as masculine attachments encumber that of
women-loving men, both having that character of forbidden fruit, of
a place vainly usurped, which unwanted objects have in most
houses.
Once I left Gilberte early and in the middle of the night, while
still half-asleep, I called Albertine. I had not been thinking or
dreaming of her, nor had I mistaken her for Gilberte. My memory had
lost its love for Albertine but it seems there must be an
involuntary memory of the limbs, pale and sterile imitation of the
other, which lives longer as certain mindless animals or plants
live longer than man. The legs, the arms are full of blunted
memories; a reminiscence germinating in my arm had made me seek the
bell behind my back, as I used to in my room in Paris and I had
called Albertine, imagining my dead friend lying beside me as she
so often did at evening when we fell asleep together, counting the
time it would take Françoise to reach us, so that Albertine might
without imprudence pull the bell I could not find.
Robert came to Tansonville several times while I was there. He was
very different from the man I had known before. His life had not
coarsened him as it had M. de Charlus, but, on the contrary, had
given him more than ever the easy carriage of a cavalry officer
although at his marriage he had resigned his commission. As
gradually M. de Charlus had got heavier, Robert (of course he was
much younger, yet one felt he was bound to approximate to that type
with age like certain women who resolutely sacrifice their faces to
their figures and never abandon Marienbad, believing, as they
cannot hope to keep all their youthful charms, that of the outline
to represent best the others) had become slimmer, swifter, the
contrary effect of the same vice. This velocity had other
psychological causes; the fear of being seen, the desire not to
seem to have that fear, the feverishness born of dissatisfaction
with oneself and of boredom. He had the habit of going into certain
haunts of ill-fame, where as he did not wish to be seen entering or
coming out, he effaced himself so as to expose the least possible
surface to the malevolent gaze of hypothetical passers-by, and that
gust-like motion had remained and perhaps signified the apparent
intrepidity of one who wants to show he is unafraid and does not
take time to think.
To complete the picture one must reckon with the desire, the older
he got, to appear young, and also the impatience of those who are
always bored and blasés, yet being too intelligent for a
relatively idle life, do not sufficiently use their faculties.
Doubtless the very idleness of such people may display itself by
indifference but especially since idleness, owing to the favour now
accorded to physical exercise, has taken the form of sport, even
when the latter cannot be practised, feverish activity leaves
boredom neither time nor space to develop in.
He had become dried up and gave friends like myself no evidence of
sensibility. On the other hand, he affected with Gilberte an
unpleasant sensitiveness which he pushed to the point of comedy. It
was not that Robert was indifferent to Gilberte; no, he loved her.
But he always lied to her and this spirit of duplicity, if it was
not the actual source of his lies, was constantly emerging. At such
times he believed he could only extricate himself by exaggerating
to a ridiculous degree the real pain he felt in giving pain to her.
When he arrived at Tansonville he was obliged, he said, to leave
the next morning on business with a certain gentleman of those
parts, who was expecting him in Paris and who, encountered that
very evening near Combray, unhappily revealed the lie, Robert,
having failed to warn him, by the statement that he was back for a
month's holiday and would not be in Paris before. Robert blushed,
saw Gilberte's faint melancholy smile, and after revenging himself
on the unfortunate culprit by an insult, returned earlier than his
wife and sent her a desperate note telling her he had lied in order
not to pain her, for fear that when he left for a reason he could
not tell her, she should think that he had ceased to love her; and
all this, written as though it were a lie, was actually true. Then
he sent to ask if he could come to her room, and there, partly in
real sorrow, partly in disgust with the life he was living, partly
through the increasing audacity of his successive pretences, he
sobbed and talked of his approaching death, sometimes throwing
himself on the floor as though he were ill. Gilberte, not knowing
to what extent to believe him, thought him a liar on each occasion,
but, disquieted by the presentiment of his approaching death and
believing in a general way that he loved her, that perhaps he had
some illness she knew nothing about, did not dare to oppose him or
ask him to relinquish his journeys. I was unable to understand how
he came to have Morel received as though he were a son of the house
wherever the Saint-Loups were, whether in Paris or at
Tansonville.
Françoise, knowing all that M. de Charlus had done for Jupien and
Robert Saint-Loup for Morel, did not conclude that this was a trait
which reappeared in certain generations of the Guermantes, but
rather—seeing that Legrandin much loved Théodore—came to believe,
prudish and narrow-minded as she was, that it was a custom which
universality made respectable. She would say of a young man, were
it Morel or Théodore: "He is fond of the gentleman who is
interested in him and who has so much helped him." And as in such
cases it is the protectors who love, who suffer, who forgive,
Françoise did not hesitate between them and the youths they
debauched, to give the former the beau role, to discover they
had a "great deal of heart". She did not hesitate to blame Théodore
who had played a great many tricks on Legrandin, yet seemed to have
scarcely a doubt as to the nature of their relationship, for she
added, "The young man understands he's got to do his share as he
says: 'take me away with you, I will be fond of you and pet you,'
and, ma foi, the gentleman has so much heart that Théodore is
sure to find him kinder than he deserves, for he's a hot head while
the gentleman is so good that I often say to Jeannette (Theodore's
fiancée), 'My dear, if ever you're in trouble go and see that
gentleman, he would lie on the ground to give you his bed, he is
too fond of Théodore to throw him out and he will never abandon
him'." It was in the course of one of these colloquies that, having
inquired the name of the family with whom Théodore was living in
the south, I suddenly grasped that he was the person unknown to me
who had asked me to send him my article in the Figaro in
a letter the calligraphy of which was of the people but charmingly
expressed.
In the same fashion Françoise esteemed Saint-Loup more than Morel
and expressed the opinion, in spite of the ignoble behaviour of the
latter, that the marquis had too good a heart ever to desert him
unless great reverses happened to himself.
Saint-Loup insisted I should remain at Tansonville and once let
fall, although plainly he was not seeking to please me, that my
visit was so great a happiness for his wife that she had assured
him, though she had been wretched the whole day, that she was
transported with joy the evening I unexpectedly arrived, that, in
fact, I had miraculously saved her from despair, "perhaps from
something worse." He begged me to try and persuade her that he
loved her, assuring me that the other woman he loved was less to
him than Gilberte and that he intended to break with her very soon.
"And yet," he added, in such a feline way and with so great a
longing to confide that I expected the name of Charlie to pop out
at any moment, in spite of himself, like a lottery number, "I had
something to be proud of. This woman, who has proved her devotion
to me and whom I must sacrifice for Gilberte's sake, never accepted
attention from a man, she believed herself incapable of love; I am
the first. I knew she had refused herself to everyone, so much so
that when I received an adorable letter from her, telling me there
could be no happiness for her without me, I could not resist it.
Wouldn't it be natural for me to be infatuated with her, were it
not intolerable for me to see poor little Gilberte in tears? Don't
you think there is something of Rachel in her?" As a matter of
fact, it had struck me that there was a vague resemblance between
them. This may have been due to a certain similarity of feature,
owing to their common Jewish origin, which was little marked in
Gilberte, and yet when his family wanted him to marry, drew Robert
towards her. The likeness was perhaps due also to Gilberte coming
across photographs of Rachel and wanting to please Robert by
imitating certain of the actress's habits, such as always wearing
red bows in her hair, a black ribbon on her arm and dyeing her hair
to appear dark. Then, fearing her sorrows affected her appearance,
she tried to remedy it by occasionally exaggerating the artifice.
One day, when Robert was to come to Tansonville for twenty-four
hours, I was amazed to see her come to table looking so strangely
different from her present as well as from her former self, that I
was as bewildered as if I were facing an actress, a sort of
Theodora. I felt that in my curiosity to know what it was that was
changed about her, I was looking at her too fixedly. My curiosity
was soon satisfied when she blew her nose, for in spite of all her
precautions, the assortment of colours upon the handkerchief would
have constituted a varied palette and I saw that she was completely
painted. To this was due the bleeding appearance of her mouth which
she forced into a smile, thinking it suited her, while the
knowledge that the hour was approaching when her husband ought to
arrive without knowing whether or not he would send one of those
telegrams of which the model had been wittily invented by M. de
Guermantes: "Impossible to come, lie follows," paled her cheeks and
ringed her eyes.
"Ah, you see," Robert said to me with a deliberately tender accent
which contrasted with his former spontaneous affection, with an
alcoholic voice and the inflection of an actor. "To make Gilberte
happy! What wouldn't I do to secure that? You can never know how
much she has done for me." The most unpleasant of all was his
vanity, for Saint-Loup, flattered that Gilberte loved him, without
daring to say that he loved Morel, gave her details about the
devotion the violinist pretended to have for him, which he well
knew were exaggerated if not altogether invented seeing that Morel
demanded more money of him every day. Then confiding Gilberte to my
care, he left again for Paris. To anticipate somewhat (for I am
still at Tansonville), I had the opportunity of seeing him once
again in society, though at a distance, when his words, in spite of
all this, were so lively and charming that they enabled me to
recapture the past. I was struck to see how much he was changing.
He resembled his mother more and more, but the proud and well-bred
manner he inherited from her and which she possessed to perfection,
had become, owing to his highly accomplished education, exaggerated
and stilted; the penetrating look common to the Guermantes, gave
him, from a peculiar animal-like habit, a half-unconscious air of
inspecting every place he passed through. Even when motionless,
that colouring which was his even more than it was the other
Guermantes', a colouring which seemed to have a whole golden day's
sunshine in it, gave him so strange a plumage, made of him so rare
a creature, so unique, that one wanted to own him for an
ornithological collection; but when, besides, this bird of golden
sunlight put itself in motion, when, for instance, I saw Robert de
Saint-Loup at a party, he had a way of throwing back his head so
joyously and so proudly, under the golden plumage of his slightly
ruffled hair, the movement of his neck was so much more supple,
proud and charming than that of other men, that, between the
curiosity and the half-social, half-zoological admiration he
inspired, one asked oneself whether one had found him in the
Faubourg Saint-Germain or in the Jardin des Plantes and whether one
was looking at a grand seigneur crossing a drawing-room
or a marvellous bird walking about in its cage. With a little
imagination the warbling no less than the plumage lent itself to
that interpretation. He spoke in what he believed
the grand-siècle style and thus imitated the manners of
the Guermantes, but an indefinable trifle caused them to become
those of M. de Charlus. "I must leave you an instant," he said
during that party, when M. de Marsantes was some distance away, "to
pay court to my niece a moment." As to that love of which he never
ceased telling me, there were others besides Charlie, although he
was the only one that mattered to him. Whatever kind of love a man
may have, one is always wrong about the number of
his liaisons, because one interprets friendships
as liaisons, which is an error of addition, and also because
it is believed that one proved liaison excludes another,
which is a different sort of mistake. Two people may say, "I know
X's mistress," and each be pronouncing a different name, yet
neither be wrong. A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our
needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love. As to
the kind of love which Saint-Loup had inherited from M. de Charlus,
the husband who is inclined that way generally makes his wife
happy. This is a general law, to which the Guermantes were
exceptions, because those of them who had that taste wanted people
to believe they were women-lovers and, advertising themselves with
one or another, caused the despair of their wives. The Courvoisiers
acted more sensibly. The young Vicomte de Courvoisier believed
himself the only person on earth and since the beginning of the
world to be tempted by one of his own sex. Imagining that the
preference came to him from the devil, he fought against it and
married a charming woman by whom he had several children. Then one
of his cousins taught him that the practice was fairly common, even
went to the length of taking him to places where he could satisfy
it. M. de Courvoisier only loved his wife the more for this and
redoubled his uxorious zeal so that the couple were cited as the
best ménage in Paris. As much could not be said for
Saint-Loup, because Robert, not content with invertion, caused his
wife endless jealousy by running after mistresses without getting
any pleasure from them.
It is possible that Morel, being exceedingly dark, was necessary to
Saint-Loup, as shadow is to sunlight. In this ancient family, one
could well imagine a grand seigneur, blonde, golden,
intelligent, dowered with every prestige, acquiring and retaining
in the depths of his being, a secret taste, unknown to everyone,
for negroes. Robert, moreover, never allowed conversation to touch
his peculiar kind of love affair. If I said a word he would answer,
with a detachment that caused his eye-glass to fall, "Oh! I don't
know, I haven't an idea about such things. If you want information
about them, my dear fellow, I advise you to go to someone else. I
am a soldier, nothing more. I'm as indifferent to matters of that
kind as I am passionately interested in the Balkan Wars. Formerly
the history of battles interested you. In those days I told you we
should again witness typical battles, even though the conditions
were completely different, such, for instance, as the great attempt
of envelopment by the wing in the Battle of Ulm. Well, special as
those Balkan Wars may be, Lullé Burgas is again Ulm, envelopment by
the wing. Those are matters you can talk to me about. But I know no
more about the sort of thing you are alluding to than I do about
Sanscrit." On the other hand, when he had gone, Gilberte referred
voluntarily to the subjects Robert thus disdained when we talked
together. Certainly not in connection with her husband, for she was
unaware, or pretended to be unaware, of everything. But she
enlarged willingly upon them when they concerned other people,
whether because she saw in their case a sort of indirect excuse for
Robert or whether, divided like his uncle between a severe silence
on these subjects and an urge to pour himself out and to slander,
he had been able to instruct her very thoroughly about them.
Amongst those alluded to, no one was less spared than M. de
Charlus; doubtless this was because Robert, without talking to
Gilberte about Morel, could not help repeating to her in one form
or another what had been told him by the violinist who pursued his
former benefactor with his hatred. These conversations which
Gilberte affected, permitted me to ask her if in similar fashion
Albertine, whose name I had for the first time heard on her lips
when the two were school friends, had the same tastes. Gilberte
refused to give me this information. For that matter, it had for a
long time ceased to afford me the slightest interest. Yet I
continued to concern myself mechanically about it, just like an old
man who has lost his memory now and then wants news of his dead
son.
Another day I returned to the charge and asked Gilberte again if
Albertine loved women. "Oh, not at all," she answered. "But you
formerly said that she was very bad form." "I said that? You must
be mistaken. In any case, if I did say it—but you are mistaken—I
was on the contrary speaking of little love affairs with boys and,
at that age, those don't go very far."
Did Gilberte say this to hide that she herself, according to
Albertine, loved women and had made proposals to her, or (for
others are often better informed about our life than we think) did
Gilberte know that I had loved and been jealous of Albertine and
(others being apt to know more of the truth than we believe,
exaggerating it and so erring by excessive suppositions, while we
were hoping they were mistaken through lack of any supposition at
all) did she imagine that I was so still, and was she, out of
kindness, blind-folding me which one is always ready to do to
jealous people? In any case, Gilberte's words, since the "bad form"
of former days leading to the certificate of moral life and habits
of to-day, followed an inverse course to the affirmations of
Albertine, who had almost come to avowing half-relationship with
Gilberte herself. Albertine had astonished me in this, as had also
what Andrée told me, for, respecting the whole of that little band,
I had at first, before knowing its perversity, convinced myself
that my suspicions were unjustified, as happens so often when one
discovers an innocent girl, almost ignorant of the realities of
life, in a milieu which one had wrongly supposed the most depraved.
Afterwards I retraced my steps in the contrary sense, accepting my
original suspicions as true. And perhaps Albertine told me all this
so as to appear more experienced than she was and to astonish me
with the prestige of her perversity in Paris, as at first by the
prestige of her virtue at Balbec. So, quite simply, when I spoke to
her about women who loved women, she answered as she did, in order
not to seem to be unaware of what I meant, as in a conversation one
assumes an understanding air when somebody talks of Fourier or of
Tobolsk without even knowing what these names mean. She had perhaps
associated with the friend of Mlle. Vinteuil and with Andrée,
isolated from them by an air-tight partition and, while they
believed she was not one of them, she only informed herself
afterwards (as a woman who marries a man of letters seeks to
cultivate herself) in order to please me, by enabling herself to
answer my questions, until she realised that the questions were
inspired by jealousy when, unless Gilberte was lying to me, she
reversed the engine. The idea came to me, that it was because
Robert had learnt from her in the course of a flirtation of the
kind that interested him, that she, Gilberte, did not dislike
women, that he married her, hoping for pleasures which he ought not
to have looked for at home since he obtained them elsewhere. None
of these hypotheses were absurd, for in the case of women such as
Odette's daughter or of the girls of the little band there is such
a diversity, such an accumulation of alternating tastes, that if
they are not simultaneous, they pass easily from
a liaison with a woman to a passion for a man, so much so
that it becomes difficult to define their real and dominant taste.
Thus Albertine had sought to please me in order to make me marry
her but she had abandoned the project herself because of my
undecided and worrying disposition. It was in this too simple form
that I judged my affair with Albertine at a time when I only saw it
from the outside.
What is curious and what I am unable wholly to grasp, is that about
that period all those who had loved Albertine, all those who would
have been able to make her do what they wanted, asked, entreated, I
would even say, implored me, failing my friendship, at least, to
have some sort of relations with them. It would have been no longer
necessary to offer money to Mme. Bontemps to send me Albertine.
This return of life, coming when it was no longer any use,
profoundly saddened me, not on account of Albertine whom I would
have received without pleasure if she had been brought to me, not
only from Touraine but from the other world, but because of a young
woman whom I loved and whom I could not manage to see. I said to
myself that if she died or if I did not love her any more, all
those who would have been able to bring her to me would have fallen
at my feet. Meanwhile, I attempted in vain to work upon them, not
being cured by experience which ought to have taught me, if it ever
taught anyone anything, that to love is a bad fate like that in
fairy stories, against which nothing avails until the enchantment
has ceased.
"I've just reached a point," Gilberte continued, "in the book which
I have here where it speaks of these things. It's an old Balzac I'm
raking over to be on equal terms with my uncles, La Fille aux
yeux d'Or, but it's incredible, a beautiful nightmare. Maybe a
woman can be controlled in that way by another woman, but never by
a man." "You are mistaken, I knew a woman who was loved by a man
who veritably succeeded in isolating her; she could never see
anyone and only went out with trusted servants." "Indeed! How that
must have horrified you who are so kind. Just recently Robert and I
were saying you ought to get married, your wife would cure you and
make you happy." "No, I've got too bad a disposition." "What
nonsense." "I assure you I have. For that matter I have been
engaged, but I could not marry."
I did not want to borrow La Fille aux yeux d'Or from
Gilberte because she was reading it, but on the last evening that I
stayed with her, she lent me a book which produced a lively and
mingled impression upon me. It was a volume of the unpublished
diary of the Goncourts. I was sad that last evening, in going up to
my room, to think that I had never gone back one single time to see
the Church of Combray which seemed to be awaiting me in the midst
of greenery framed in the violet-hued window. I said to myself,
"Well, it must be another year, if I do not die between this and
then," seeing no other obstacle but my death and not imagining that
of the church, which, it seemed to me, must last long after my
death as it had lasted long before' my birth. When, before blowing
out my candle, I read the passage which I transcribe further on, my
lack of aptitude for writing—presaged formerly during my walks on
the Guermantes side, confirmed during the visit of which this was
the last evening, those eyes of departure, when the routine of
habits which are about to end is ceasing and one begins to judge
oneself—seemed to me less regrettable; it was as though literature
revealed no profound truth while at the same time it seemed sad
that it was not what I believed it. The infirm state which was to
confine me in a sanatorium seemed less regrettable to me if the
beautiful things of which books speak were no more beautiful than
those I had seen. But, by a strange contradiction, now that this
book spoke of them, I longed to see them. Here are the pages which
I read until fatigue closed my eyes.
"The day before yesterday, who should drop in here, to take me to
dinner with him but Verdurin, the former critic of the Revue,
author of that book on Whistler in which truly the doings, the
artistic atmosphere of that highly original American are often
rendered with great delicacy by that lover of all the refinements,
of all the prettinesses of the thing painted which Verdurin is. And
while I dress myself to follow him, every now and then, he gives
vent to a regular recitation, like the frightened spelling out of a
confession by Fromentin on his renunciation of writing immediately
after his marriage with 'Madeleine', a renunciation which was said
to be due to his habit of taking morphine, the result of which,
according to Verdurin, was that the majority of the habitués of his
wife's salon, not even knowing that her husband had ever written,
spoke to him of Charles Blanc, St. Victor, St. Beuve, and Burty, to
whom they believed him completely inferior. 'You Goncourt, you well
know, and Gautier knew also that my "Salons" was a very different
thing from those pitiable "Maîtres d'autrefois" believed to be
masterpieces in my wife's family.' Then, by twilight, while the
towers of the Trocadéro were lit up with the last gleams of the
setting sun which made them look just like those covered with
currant jelly of the old-style confectioners, the conversation
continues in the carriage on our way to the Quai Conti where their
mansion is, which its owner claims to be the ancient palace of the
Ambassadors of Venice and where there is said to be a smoking-room
of which Verdurin talks as though it were the drawing-room,
transported just as it was in the fashion of the Thousand and
One Nights, of a celebrated Palazzo, of which I forget the name, a
Palazzo with a well-head representing the crowning of the Virgin
which Verdurin asserts to be absolutely the finest of Sansovinos
and which is used by their guests to throw their cigar ashes into.
And, ma foi, when we arrive, the dull green diffusion of
moonlight, verily like that under which classical painting shelters
Venice and under which the silhouetted cupola of the Institute
makes one think of the Salute in the pictures of Guardi, I have
somewhat the illusion of being beside the Grand Canal, the illusion
reinforced by the construction of the mansion, where from the first
floor, one does not see the quay, and by the effective remark of
the master of the house, who affirms that the name of the Rue du
Bac—I am hanged if I had ever thought of it—came from the ferry
upon which the religious of former days, the Miramiones, went to
mass at Notre Dame. I took to reloving the whole quarter where I
wandered in my youth when my Aunt de Courmont lived there on
finding almost contiguous to the mansion of Verdurin, the sign of
'Petit Dunkerque', one of those rare shops surviving otherwise than
vignetted in the chalks and rubbings of Gabriel de St. Aubin in
which that curious eighteenth century individual came in and seated
himself during his moments of idleness to bargain about pretty
little French and foreign 'trifles' and the newest of everything
produced by Art as a bill-head of the 'Petit Dunkerque' has it, a
bill-head of which I believe we alone, Verdurin and I, possess an
example and which is one of those shuttle-cock masterpieces of
ornamented paper upon which, in the reign of Louis XV accounts were
delivered, with its title-head representing a raging sea swarming
with ships, a sea with waves which had the appearance of an
illustration in the Edition des Fermiers Généraux de l'Huître
et des Plaideurs. The mistress of the house, who places me beside
her, says amiably that she has decorated her table with nothing but
Japanese chrysanthemums but these chrysanthemums are disposed in
vases which are the rarest works of art, one of them of bronze upon
which petals of red copper seemed to be the living efflorescence of
the flower. There is Cottard the doctor, and his wife, the Polish
sculptor Viradobetski, Swann the collector, a Russian grande
dame, a Princess with a golden name which escapes me, and Cottard
whispers in my ear that it is she who had shot point blank at the
Archduke Rudolf. According to her I have an absolutely exceptional
literary position in Galicia and in the whole north of Poland, a
girl in those parts never consenting to promise her hand without
knowing if her betrothed is an admirer of La Faustin.
"'You cannot understand, you western people,' exclaims by way of
conclusion the princess who gives me the impression, ma foi,
of an altogether superior intelligence, 'that penetration by a
writer into the intimate life of a woman.' A man with shaven chin
and lips, with whiskers like a butler, beginning with that tone of
condescension of a secondary professor preparing first form boys
for the Saint-Charlemagne, that is Brichot, the university don.
When my name was mentioned by Verdurin he did not say a word to
show that he knew our books, which means for me anger,
discouragement aroused by this conspiracy the Sorbonne organises
against us, bringing contradiction and hostile silence even into
the charming house where I am being entertained. We proceed to
table and there is then an extraordinary procession of plates which
are simply masterpieces of the art of the porcelain-maker. The
connoisseur, whose attention is delicately tickled during the
dainty repast, listens all the more complacently to the artistic
chatter—while before him pass plates of Yung Tsching with their
nasturtium rims yielding to the bluish centre with its rich
flowering of the water-iris, a really decorative passage with its
dawn-flight of kingfishers and cranes, a dawn with just that
matutinal tone which I gaze at lazily when I awake daily at the
Boulevard Montmorency—Dresden plates more finical in the grace of
their fashioning, whether in the sleepy anemia of their roses
turning to violet in the crushed wine-lees of a tulip or with their
rococo design of carnation and myosotis. Plates of Sèvres
trellissed by the delicate vermiculation of their white fluting,
verticillated in gold or bound upon the creamy plane of
their pâte tendre by the gay relief of a golden ribbon,
finally a whole service of silver on which are displayed those
Lucinian myrtles which Dubarry would recognise. And what is perhaps
equally rare is the really altogether remarkable quality of the
things which are served in it, food delicately manipulated, a stew
such as the Parisians, one can shout that aloud, never have at
their grandest dinners and which reminds me of certain cordons
bleus of Jean d'Heurs. Even the foie gras has no
relation to the tasteless froth which is generally served under
that name, and I do not know many places where a simple potato
salad is thus made with potatoes having the firmness of a Japanese
ivory button and the patina of those little ivory spoons with which
the Chinese pour water on the fish that they have just caught. A
rich red bejewelling is given to the Venetian goblet which stands
before me by an amazing Léoville bought at the sale of M.
Montalivet and it is a delight for the imagination and for the eye,
I do not fear to say it, for the imagination of what one formerly
called the jaw, to have served to one a brill which has nothing in
common with that kind of stale brill served on the most luxurious
tables which has received on its back the imprint of its bones
during the delay of the journey, a brill not accompanied by that
sticky glue generally called sauce blanche by so many of
the chefs in great houses, but by a veritable sauce
blanche made out of butter at five francs the pound; to see
this brill in a wonderful Tching Hon dish graced by the purple rays
of a setting sun on a sea which an amusing band of lobsters is
navigating, their rough tentacles so realistically pictured that
they seem to have been modelled upon the living carapace, a dish of
which the handle is a little Chinaman catching with his line a fish
which makes the silvery azure of his stomach an enchantment of
mother o' pearl. As I speak to Verdurin of the delicate
satisfaction it must be for him to have this refined repast amidst
a collection which no prince possesses at the present time, the
mistress of the house throws me the melancholy remark: 'One sees
how little you know him,' and she speaks of her husband as a
whimsical oddity, indifferent to all these beauties, 'an oddity'
she repeats, 'that's the word, who has more gusto for a bottle of
cider drunk in the rough coolness of a Norman farm.' And the
charming woman, in a tone which is really in love with the colours
of the country, speaks to us with overflowing enthusiasm of that
Normandy where they have lived, a Normandy which must be like an
enormous English park, with the fragrance of its high
woodlands à la Lawrence, with its velvet cryptomeria in
their enamelled borders of pink hortensia, with its natural lawns
diversified by sulphur-coloured roses falling over a rustic gateway
flanked by two intertwined pear-trees resembling with its
free-falling and flowering branches the highly ornamental insignia
of a bronze applique by Gauthier, a Normandy which must be
absolutely unsuspected by Parisians on holiday, protected as it is
by the barrier of each of its enclosures, barriers which the
Verdurins confess to me they did not commit the crime of removing.
At the close of day, as the riot of colour was sleepily
extinguished and light only came from the sea curdled almost to a
skim-milk blue. 'Ah! Not the sea you know—' protests my hostess
energetically in answer to my remark that Flaubert had taken my
brother and me to Trouville, 'That is nothing, absolutely nothing.
You must come with me, without that you will never know'—they would
go back through real forests of pink-tulle flowers of the
rhododendrons, intoxicated with the scent of the gardens, which
gave her husband abominable attacks of asthma. 'Yes,' she insisted,
'it is true, real crises of asthma.' Afterwards, the following
summer, they returned, housing a whole colony of artists in an
admirable dwelling of the Middle Ages, an ancient cloister leased
by them for nothing, and ma foi, listening to this woman who
after moving in so many distinguished circles, had yet kept some of
that freedom of speech of a woman of the people, a speech which
shows you things with the colour imagination gives to them, my
mouth watered at the thought of the life which she confessed to
living down there, each one working in his cell or in the salon
which was so large that it had two fireplaces. Everyone came in
before luncheon for altogether superior conversation interspersed
with parlour games, reminding me of those evoked by that
masterpiece of Diderot, his letters to Mlle. Volland. Then after
luncheon everyone went out, even on days of sunny showers, when the
sparkling of the raindrops luminously filtering through the knots
of a magnificent avenue of centenarian beechtrees which offered in
front of the gates the vista of growth dear to the eighteenth
century, and shrubs bearing drops of rain on their flowering buds
suspended on their boughs, lingering to watch the delicate dabbling
of a bullfinch enamoured of coolness, bathing itself in the tiny
nymphembourg basin shaped like the corolla of a white rose. And as
I talk to Mme. Verdurin of the landscapes and of the flowers down
there, so delicately pastelled by Elstir: 'But it is I who made all
that known to him,' she exclaims with an indignant lifting of the
head, 'everything, you understand; wonder-provoking nooks, all his
themes; I threw them in his face when he left us, didn't I,
Auguste? All those themes he has painted. Objects he always knew,
to be fair, one must admit that. But flowers he had never seen; no,
he did not know the difference between a marsh-mallow and a
hollyhock. It was I who taught him, you will hardly believe me, to
recognise the jasmine.' And it is, one must admit, a strange
reflection that the painter of flowers, whom the connoisseurs of
to-day cite to us as the greatest, superior even to Fantin-Latour,
would perhaps never have known how to paint jasmine without the
woman who was beside me. 'Yes, upon my word, the jasmine; all the
roses he produced were painted while he was staying with me, if I
did not bring them to him myself. At our house we just called him
"M. Tiche". Ask Cottard or Brichot or any of them if he was ever
treated here as a great man. He would have laughed at it himself. I
taught him how to arrange his flowers; at the beginning he had no
idea of it. He never knew how to make a bouquet. He had no natural
taste for selection. I had to say to him, "No, do not paint that;
it is not worth while, paint this." Oh! If he had listened to us
for the arrangement of his life as he did for the arrangement of
his flowers, and if he had not made that horrible marriage!' And
abruptly, with eyes fevered by their absorption in a reverie of the
past, with a nerve-racked gesture, she stretched forth her arms
with a frenzied cracking of the joints from the silk sleeves of her
bodice, and twisted her body into a suffering pose like some
admirable picture which I believe has never been painted, wherein
all the pent-up revolt, all the enraged susceptibilities of a
friend outraged in her delicacy and in her womanly modesty can be
read. Upon that she talks to us about the admirable portrait which
Elstir made for her, a portrait of the Collard family, a portrait
given by her to the Luxembourg when she quarrelled with the
painter, confessing that it was she who had given him the idea of
painting the man in evening dress in order to obtain that beautiful
expanse of linen, and she who chose the velvet dress of the woman,
a dress offering support in the midst of all the fluttering of the
light shades of the curtains, of the flowers, of the fruit, of the
gauze dresses of the little girls like ballet-dancers' skirts. It
was she, too, who gave him the idea of painting her in the act of
arranging her hair, an idea for which the artist was afterwards
honoured, which consisted, in short, in painting the woman, not as
though on show, but surprised in the intimacy of her everyday life.
'I said to him, "When a woman is doing her hair or wiping her face,
or warming her feet, she knows she is not being seen, she executes
a number of interesting movements, movements of an altogether
Leonardo-like grace."' But upon a sign from Verdurin, indicating
that the arousing of this state of indignation was unhealthy for
that highly-strung creature which his wife was, Swann drew my
admiring attention to the necklace of black pearls worn by the
mistress of the house and bought by her quite white at the sale of
a descendant of Mme. de La Fayette to whom they had been given by
Henrietta of England, pearls which had become black as the result
of a fire which destroyed part of the house in which the Verdurins
were living in a street the name of which I can no longer remember,
a fire after which the casket containing the pearls was found but
they had become entirely black. 'And I know the portrait of those
pearls on the very shoulders of Mme. de La Fayette, yes, exactly
so, their portrait,' insisted Swann in the face of the somewhat
wonderstruck exclamations of the guests. 'Their authentic portrait,
in the collection of the Duc de Guermantes. A collection which has
not its equal in the world,' he asserts and that I ought to go and
see it, a collection inherited by the celebrated Duc who was the
favourite nephew of Mme. de Beausergent his aunt, of that Mme. de
Beausergent who afterwards became Mme. d'Hayfeld, sister of the
Marquise de Villeparisis and of the Princess of Hanover. My brother
and I used to be so fond of him in old days when he was a charming
boy called Basin, which as a matter of fact, is the first name of
the Duc. Upon that, Doctor Cottard, with that delicacy which
reveals the man of distinction, returns to the history of the
pearls and informs us that catastrophes of that kind produce in the
mind of people distortions similar to those one remarks in organic
matter and relates in really more philosophical terms than most
physicians can command, how the footman of Mme. Verdurin herself,
through the horror of this fire where he nearly perished, had
become a different man, his hand-writing having so changed that on
seeing the first letter which his masters, then in Normandy,
received from him, announcing the event, they believed it was the
invention of a practical joker. And not only was his handwriting
different, Cottard asserts that from having been a completely sober
man he had become an abominable drunkard whom Mme. Verdurin had
been obliged to discharge. This suggestive dissertation continued,
on a gracious sign from the mistress of the house, from the
dining-room into the Venetian smoking-room where Cottard told me he
had witnessed actual duplications of personality, giving as example
the case of one of his patients whom he amiably offers to bring to
see me, in whose case Cottard has merely to touch his temples to
usher him into a second life, a life in which he remembers nothing
of the other, so much so that, a very honest man in this one, he
had actually been arrested several times for thefts committed in
the other during which he had been nothing less than a disgraceful
scamp. Upon which Mme. Verdurin acutely remarks that medicine could
furnish subjects truer than a theatre where the humour of an
imbroglio is founded upon pathological mistakes, which from thread
to needle brought Mme. Cottard to relate that a similar notion had
been made use of by an amateur who is the prime favourite at her
children's evening parties, the Scotchman Stevenson, a name which
forced from Swann the peremptory affirmation: 'But Stevenson is a
great writer, I can assure you, M. de Goncourt, a very great one,
equal to the greatest.' And upon my marvelling at the escutcheoned
panels of the ceiling in the room where we are smoking, panels
which came from the ancient Palazzo Barberini, I express my regret
at the progressive darkening of a certain vase through the ashes of
our londrès, Swann having recounted that similar stains on the
leaves of certain books attest their having belonged to Napoleon I,
books owned, despite his anti-Bonapartist opinions by the Duc de
Guermantes, owing to the fact that the Emperor chewed tobacco,
Cottard, who reveals himself as a man of penetrating curiosity in
all matters, declares that these stains do not come at all from
that: 'Believe me, not at all,' he insists with authority, 'but
from his habit of having always near at hand, even on the field of
battle, some pastilles of Spanish liquorice to calm his liver
pains. For he had a disease of the liver and it is of that he
died,' concluded the doctor."
I stopped my reading there for I was leaving the following day,
moreover, it was an hour when the other master claimed me, he under
whose orders we are for half our time. We accomplish the task to
which he obliges us with our eyes closed. Every morning he
surrenders us to our other master knowing that otherwise we should
be unable to yield ourselves to his service. It would be curious,
when our spirit has reopened its eyes, to know what we could have
been doing under that master who clouds the minds of his slaves
before putting them to his immediate business. The most cunning,
before their task is finished, try to peep out surreptitiously. But
slumber speedily struggles to efface the traces of what they long
to see. And, after all these centuries we know little about it. So
I closed the Goncourt journal. Glamour of literature! I wanted to
see the Cottards again, to ask them so many details about Elstir, I
wanted to go and see if the "Petit Dunkerque" shop still existed,
to ask permission to visit that mansion of the Verdurins where I
had dined. But I experienced a vague apprehension. Certainly I did
not disguise from myself that I had never known how to listen nor,
when I was with others, to observe; to my eyes no old woman
exhibited a pearl necklace and my ears heard nothing that was said
about it. Nevertheless, I had known these people in my ordinary
life, I had often dined with them; whether it was the Verdurins, or
the Guermantes, or the Cottards, each had seemed to me as
commonplace as did that Basin to my grandmother who little supposed
he was the beloved nephew, the charming young hero, of Mme. de
Beausergent. All had seemed to me insipid; I remembered the
numberless vulgarities of which each one was
composed. . . .
"Et que tout cela fît un astre dans la nuit!"
I resolved to put aside provisionally the objections against
literature which these pages of Goncourt had aroused in me. Apart
from the peculiarly striking naïvete of the memoir-writer, I was
able to reassure myself from different points of view. To begin
with, in regard to myself, the inability to observe and to listen
of which the journal I have quoted had so painfully reminded me was
not complete. There was in me a personage who more or less knew how
to observe but he was an intermittent personage who only came to
life when some general essence common to many things which are its
nourishment and its delight, manifested itself. Then the personage
remarked and listened, but only at a certain depth and in such a
manner that observation did not profit. Like a geometrician who in
divesting things of their material qualities, only sees their
linear substratum, what people said escaped me, for that which
interested me was not what they wanted to say but the manner in
which they said it in so far as it revealed their characters or
their absurdities. Or rather that was an object which had always
been my particular aim because I derived specific pleasure from
identifying the denominator common to one person and another. It
was only when I perceived it that my mind—until then dozing even
behind the apparent activity of my conversation the animation of
which masked to the outside world a complete mental torpor—started
all at once joyously in chase, but that which it then pursued—for
example the identity of the Verdurin's salon at diverse places and
periods—was situated at half-depth, beyond actual appearance, in a
zone somewhat withdrawn. Also the obvious transferable charm of
people escaped me because I no longer retained the faculty of
confining myself to it, like the surgeon who, beneath the lustre of
a female abdomen, sees the internal disease which is consuming it.
It was all very well for me to go out to dinner. I did not see the
guests because when I thought I was observing them I was
radiographing them. From that it resulted that in collating all the
observations I had been able to make about the guests in the course
of a dinner, the design of the lines traced by me would form a
unity of psychological laws in which the interest pertaining to the
discourse of a particular guest occupied no place whatever. But
were my portraits denuded of all merit because I did not compose
them merely as portraits? If in the domain of painting one portrait
represents truths relative to volume, to light, to movement, does
that necessarily make it inferior to another quite dissimilar
portrait of the same person in which, a thousand details omitted in
the first will be minutely related to each other, a second portrait
from which it would be concluded that the model was beautiful while
that of the first would be considered ugly, which might have a
documentary and even historical importance but might not
necessarily be an artistic truth. Again my frivolity the moment
when I was with others, made me anxious to please and I desired
more to amuse people with my chatter than to learn from listening
unless I went out to interrogate someone upon a point of art or
unless some jealous suspicion preoccupied me. But I was incapable
of seeing a thing unless a desire to do so had been aroused in me
by reading; unless it was a thing of which I wanted a previous
sketch to confront later with reality. Even had that page of the
Goncourts not enlightened me, I knew how often I had been unable to
give my attention to things or to people, whom afterwards, once
their image had been presented to me in solitude by an artist, I
would have gone leagues and risked death to rediscover. Then my
imagination started to work, had begun to paint. And the very thing
I had yawned at the year before I desired when I again contemplated
it and with anguish said to myself, "Can I never see it again? What
would I not give for it?" When one reads articles about people,
even about mere society people, qualifying them as "the last
representatives of a society of which there is no other living
witness", doubtless some may exclaim, "to think that he says so
much about so insignificant a person and praises him as he does",
but it is precisely such a man I should have deplored not having
known if I had only read papers and reviews and if I had never seen
the man himself and I was more inclined, in reading such passages
in the papers, to think, "What a pity! And all I cared about then
was getting hold of Gilberte and Albertine and I paid no attention
to that gentleman whom I simply took for a society bore, for a pure
façade, a marionnette." The pages of the Goncourt Journal that I
had read made me regret that attitude. For perhaps I might have
concluded from them that life teaches one to minimise the value of
reading and shows us that what the writer exalts for us is not
worth much; but I could equally well conclude the contrary, that
reading enhances the value of life, a value we have not realised
until books make us aware of how great that value is. Strictly, we
can console ourselves for not having much enjoyed the society of a
Vinteuil or of a Bergotte, because the awkward middleclassness of
the one, the unbearable defects of the other prove nothing against
them, since their genius is manifested by their works; and the same
applies to the pretentious vulgarity of an Elstir in early days.
Thus the journal of the Goncourts made me discover that Elstir was
none other than the "M. Tiche" who had once inflicted upon Swann
such exasperating lectures at the Verdurins. But what man of genius
has not adopted the irritating conversational manner of artists of
his own circle before acquiring (as Elstir did, though it happens
rarely) superior taste. Are not the letters of Balzac, for
instance, smeared with vulgar terms which Swann would rather have
died than use? And yet, it is probable that Swann, so sensitive, so
completely exempt from every dislikeable idiosyncrasy, would have
been incapable of writing Cousine Bette and Le Curé
de Tours. Therefore, whether or no memoirs are wrong to endow with
charm a society which has displeased us, is a problem of small
importance, since, even if the writer of these memoirs is mistaken,
that proves nothing against the value of a society which produces
such genius and which existed no less in the works of Vinteuil, of
Elstir and of Bergotte.
Quite at the other extremity of experience, when I remarked that
the very curious anecdotes which are the inexhaustible material of
the journal of the Goncourts and a diversion for solitary evenings,
had been related to him by those guests whom in reading his pages
we should have envied him knowing, it was not so very difficult to
explain why they had left no trace of interesting memory in my
mind. In spite of the ingenuousness of Goncourt, who supposed that
the interest of these anecdotes lay in the distinction of the man
who told them, it can very well be that mediocre people might have
experienced during their lives or heard tell of curious things
which they related in their turn. Goncourt knew how to listen as he
knew how to observe, and I do not. Moreover, it was necessary to
judge all these happenings one by one. M. de Guermantes certainly
had not given me the impression of that adorable model of juvenile
grace whom my grandmother so much wanted to know and set before my
eyes as inimitable according to the Mémoires of Mme. de
Beausergent. One must remember that Basin was at that time seven
years old, that the writer was his aunt and that even husbands who
are going to divorce their wives a few months later are loud in
praise of them. One of the most charming poems of Sainte-Beuve is
consecrated to the apparition beside a fountain of a young child
crowned with gifts and graces, the youthful Mlle. de Champlâtreux
who was not more than ten years old. In spite of all the tender
veneration felt by that poet of genius, the Comtesse de Noailles,
for her mother-in-law the Duchesse de Noailles, born Champlâtreux,
it is possible, if she were to paint her portrait, that it would
contrast rather piquantly with the one Sainte-Beuve drew fifty
years earlier.
What may perhaps be regarded as more disturbing, is something in
between, personages in whose case what is said implies more than a
memory which is able to retain a curious anecdote yet without one's
having, as in the case of the Vinteuils, the Bergottes, the
resource of judging them by their work; they have not created, they
have only—to our great astonishment, for we found them so
mediocre—inspired. Again it happens that the salon which, in public
galleries, gives the greatest impression of elegance in great
paintings of the Renaissance and onwards, is that of a little
ridiculous bourgeoise whom after seeing the picture, I might, if I
had not known her, have yearned to approach in the flesh, hoping to
learn from her precious secrets that the painter's art did not
reveal to me in his canvas, though her majestic velvet train and
laces formed a passage of painting comparable to the most splendid
of Titians. If only in bygone days I had understood that it is not
the wittiest man, the best educated, the man with the best social
relationships who becomes a Bergotte but he who knows how to become
a mirror and is thereby enabled to reflect his own life, however
commonplace, (though his contemporaries might consider him less
gifted than Swann and less erudite than Bréauté) and one can say
the same, with still more reason, of an artist's models. The
awakening of love of beauty in the artist who can paint everything
may be stimulated, the elegance in which he could find such
beautiful motifs may be supplied, by people rather richer than
himself—at whose houses he would find what he was not accustomed to
in his studio of an unknown genius selling his canvases for fifty
francs; for instance, a drawing-room upholstered in old silk, many
lamps, beautiful flowers and fruit, handsome dresses—relatively
modest folk, (or who would appear that to people of fashion who are
not even aware of the others' existence) who for that very reason
are more in a position to make the acquaintance of an obscure
artist, to appreciate him, to invite him and buy his pictures, than
aristocrats who get themselves painted like a Pope or a Prime
Minister by academic painters. Would not the poetry of an elegant
interior and of the beautiful dresses of our period be discovered
by posterity in the drawing-room of the publisher Charpentier by
Renoir rather than in the portrait of the Princesse de Sagan or of
the Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld by Cotte or Chaplin? The artists
who have given us the most resplendent visions of elegance have
collected the elements at the homes of people who were rarely the
leaders of fashion of their period; for the latter are seldom
painted by the unknown depositary of a beauty they are unable to
distinguish on his canvases, disguised as it is by the
interposition of a vulgar burlesque of superannuated grace which
floats before the public eye in the same way as the subjective
visions which an invalid believes are actually before him. But that
these mediocre models whom I had known could have inspired, advised
certain arrangements which had enchanted me, that the presence of
such an one of them in the picture was less that of a model, than
of a friend whom a painter wishes to figure in his canvas, was like
asking oneself whether we regret not having known all these
personages because Balzac painted them in his books or dedicated
his books to them as the homage of his admiration, to whom
Sainte-Beuve or Baudelaire wrote their loveliest verses, still more
if all the Récamiers, all the Pompadours would not have seemed to
me insignificant people, whether owing to a temperamental defect
which made me resent being ill and unable to return and see the
people I had misjudged, or because they might only owe their
prestige to the illusory magic of literature which forced me to
change my standard of values and consoled me for being obliged from
one day to the other, on account of the progress which my illness
was making, to break with society, renounce travel and going to
galleries and museums in order that I could be nursed in a
sanatorium. Perhaps, however, this deceptive side, this artificial
illumination, only exists in memoirs when they are too recent, too
close to reputations, whether intellectual or fashionable, which
will quickly vanish, (and if erudition then tries to react against
this burial, will it succeed in dispelling one out of a thousand of
these oblivions which keep on accumulating?)
These ideas tending some to diminish, others to increase my regret
that I had no gift for literature, no longer occupied my mind
during the long years I spent as an invalid in a sanatorium far
from Paris and I had altogether renounced the project of writing
until the sanatorium was unable to find a medical staff at the
beginning of 1916. I then returned, as will be seen, to a very
different Paris from the Paris where I returned in August, 1914,
when I underwent medical examination, after which I went back to
the sanatorium.
CHAPTER II
M. DE CHARLUS DURING THE WAR, HIS OPINIONS, HIS PLEASURES
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