In Search of Lost Time (15 page)

‘Oh! he would add, with his own particular smile, gently ironical, disappointed and slightly distracted, of course my house contains every useless thing in the world. It lacks only the one essential, a large piece of sky like this one. Always try to keep a piece of sky over your life, little boy, he would add, turning to me. You have a lovely soul, of a
rare quality, an artist's nature, don't ever let it go without what it needs.'

When we returned home and my aunt sent to ask us if Mme Goupil had been late coming in to Mass, we could not give her any information. Instead, we increased her disturbance by telling her there was a painter at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert the Bad. Françoise, sent immediately to the grocery, came back empty-handed owing to the absence of Théodore, whose two professions, that of chorister with a part in the upkeep of the church and of grocer's assistant, gave him connections in all worlds and therefore knowledge that was universal.

‘Ah! sighed my aunt, I wish it were time for Eulalie. She's really the only one who will be able to tell me.'

Eulalie was a deaf and energetic spinster with a limp who had ‘retired' after the death of Mme de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in service since her childhood, and had then taken a room next to the church, descending from it constantly either for the services or, when there was no service, to say a little prayer or give Théodore a hand; the rest of the time she visited sick people like my Aunt Léonie, to whom she would describe what had happened at Mass or at Vespers. She was not above adding some revenue to the small pension paid her by the family of her former employers by going from time to time to look after the curé's linen or that of some other prominent personality in Combray's clerical world. Above a cloak of black cloth she wore a small white hood almost like a nun's, and a skin disease gave parts of her cheeks and her hooked nose the bright pink tones of an impatience flower. Her visits were the great diversion of my Aunt Léonie, who hardly received anyone else now, apart from M. le Curé. My aunt had gradually eliminated all the other visitors because they all made the mistake, in her eyes, of belonging to one or the other of two categories of people whom she detested. One group, the worst, whom she had got rid of first, were the ones who advised her not to ‘coddle' herself and subscribed, if only negatively and showing it only by certain disapproving silences or by certain dubious smiles, to the subversive doctrine that a little walk in the sun and a good rare beefsteak (whereas two wretched sips of Vichy water would lie on her stomach for fourteen
hours!) would do her more good than her bed and her medicines. The other category was made up of the people who seemed to believe she was more seriously ill than she thought, that she was as seriously ill as she said she was. And so, those she had allowed to come up after some hesitation and upon Françoise's kindly meant entreaties and who, in the course of their visit, had shown how very unworthy they were of the favour being done them by timidly risking a ‘Don't you think that if you were to move about a little when the weather's fine,' or who, on the contrary, when she said to them: ‘I'm very low, very low, this is the end, my poor friends,' answered her: ‘Ah! when our health fails us! Still, you may last a while longer yet as you are' – these, the former as well as the latter, were certain never to be received again. And if Françoise was amused by my aunt's horrified look when from her bed she saw one of these people in the rue du Saint-Esprit appearing to come towards her house or when she heard the doorbell ring, she would laugh more heartily still, and as though at a good trick, at my aunt's ever-victorious ruses for managing to have them turned away, and at their discomfited expressions as they went off without having seen her, and at heart admired her mistress, whom she felt to be superior to all these people since she did not want to receive them. In short, my aunt required that her visitors at the same time commend her on her regimen, commiserate with her for her sufferings and encourage her as to her future.

This was where Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in a minute: ‘This is the end, my poor Eulalie,' twenty times Eulalie would answer: ‘Knowing your illness as you know it, Madame Octave, you will live to be a hundred, as Mme Sazerin was saying to me just yesterday.' (One of Eulalie's firmest beliefs, which the impressive number of denials contributed by experience had not been enough to shake, was that Mme Sazerat's name was Mme Sazerin.)

‘I am not asking to live to a hundred,' answered my aunt, who preferred not to see her days assigned a precise term.

And since along with this Eulalie knew better than anyone else how to distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place regularly every Sunday, barring an unforeseen obstacle, were for my aunt a pleasure, the prospect of which kept her on those days in a state
that was at first pleasant, but quite soon painful like an excessive hunger, if Eulalie was even a little late. Too prolonged, this ecstasy of waiting for Eulalie became a torment, my aunt looked constantly at the time, yawned, felt faint. The sound of Eulalie's ring, if it came at the very end of the day, when she no longer expected it, would almost make her ill. The fact was that on Sunday, she thought only of this visit and, as soon as lunch was finished, Françoise would be in a hurry for us to leave the dining-room so that she could go up and ‘occupy' my aunt. But (especially once the fine weather settled in at Combray) a good long time would go by after the haughty hour of noon, descending from the Saint-Hilaire steeple, which it had emblazoned with the twelve momentary rosettes of its sonorous crown, had echoed around our table close to the consecrated bread which had also come in, familiarly, after church, and we would still be sitting in front of the
Thousand and One Nights
plates, oppressed by the heat and especially by the meal. For, upon a permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, jams, biscuits which she no longer even announced to us, Françoise would add – depending on the labours in the fields and orchards, the fruit of the tide, the luck of the market-place, the kindness of neighbours and her own genius, and with the result that our menu, like the quatrefoils carved on the portals of cathedrals in the thirteenth century, reflected somewhat the rhythm of the seasons and the incidents of daily life –: a brill because the monger had guaranteed her that it was fresh, a turkey hen because she had seen a large one at the Roussainville-le-Pin market, cardoons with marrow because she had not made them for us that way before, a roast leg of mutton because fresh air whets the appetite and it would have plenty of time to ‘descend' in the next seven hours, spinach for a change, apricots because they were still uncommon, gooseberries because in two weeks there would not be any more, raspberries that M. Swann had brought especially, cherries, the first that had come from the cherry tree in the garden after two years in which it had not given any, cream cheese, which I liked very much at one time, an almond cake because she had ordered it the day before, a brioche because it was our turn to present it. When all of that was finished, there came a work of art composed expressly for us, but more particularly dedicated to my father who was
so fond of it, a chocolate custard, the product of Françoise's personal inspiration and attention, ephemeral and light as an occasional piece into which she had put all her talent. If anyone had refused to taste it, saying: ‘I'm finished, I'm not hungry any more,' that person would immediately have been relegated to the rank of those barbarians who, even in a gift an artist makes them of one of his works, scrutinize its weight and its material when the only things of value in it are its intention and its signature. To leave even a single drop of it on the plate would have been to display the same impoliteness as to stand up before the end of a piece under the very nose of the composer.

At last my mother would say to me: ‘Now, don't stay here all day, go up to your room if you're too hot outdoors, but get a little fresh air first so that you don't start reading right after leaving the table.' I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, often ornamented, like a Gothic font, with a salamander which sculpted on the rough stone the mobile relief of its allegorical tapering body, on the backless bench shaded by a lilac, in the little corner of the garden that opened through a service gate on to the rue du Saint-Esprit and from whose untended earth the scullery rose by two steps, projecting from the house like an independent structure. One could see its red paving-stones gleaming like porphyry. It looked not so much like Françoise's lair as a little temple of Venus. It overflowed with the offerings of the dairyman, the fruit man, the vegetable monger, who had come sometimes from fairly remote hamlets to dedicate to it the first fruits of their fields. And its roof was forever crowned with the coocooing of a dove.

In earlier years I did not linger in the sacred grove surrounding it, since, before going upstairs to read, I would enter the little sitting-room that my Uncle Adolphe, a brother of my grandfather's and a veteran who had retired with the rank of major, occupied on the ground floor, and which, even when its open windows let in the heat, if not the rays of the sun, which seldom reached that far, gave off inexhaustibly that dark cool smell, of both forest and
ancien régime
, that makes your nostrils linger in a daydream when you venture into certain abandoned hunting lodges. But for a number of years now I had not gone into my Uncle Adolphe's room, since he no longer came to Combray
because of a quarrel that had occurred between him and my family, through my fault, in the following circumstances:

Once or twice a month, in Paris, I used to be sent to pay him a visit, as he was finishing lunch, dressed in a plain jacket, waited on by his servant dressed in a work jacket of violet-and-white-striped drill. He would complain that I had not come for a long time, grumble that we were abandoning him; he would offer me a marzipan cake or a tangerine, we would pass through a drawing-room in which no one ever stopped, where no one ever made a fire, whose walls were ornamented with gilded mouldings, its ceilings painted with a blue that was meant to imitate the sky and its furniture upholstered in satin as at my grandparents', but yellow; then we would go on into what he called his ‘study', whose walls were hung with some of those engravings depicting, against a dark background, a fleshy pink goddess driving a chariot, standing on a globe, or wearing a star on her forehead, which were admired during the Second Empire
⁵
because they were felt to have a Pompeiian look about them, were then hated, and are beginning to be admired again for one reason and one only, despite the others that are given, and that is that they have such a Second-Empire look about them. And I would stay with my uncle until his valet came to him from the coachman to ask what time the latter should harness up. My uncle would then sink into a deep meditation while his admiring valet, afraid of disturbing him by the slightest movement, waited curiously for the result, which was always identical. At last, after the greatest hesitation, my uncle would unfailingly utter these words: ‘At quarter past two,' which the valet would repeat with surprise, but without disputing them: ‘At quarter past two? Very good… I'll go and tell him…'

In those days I loved the theatre, with a platonic love, for my parents had not yet allowed me to enter a theatre, and I pictured to myself so inaccurately the pleasures one might experience there that I was not far from believing that each spectator looked as though into a stereoscope at a scene that was for him alone, though similar to the thousand others being looked at, each one for himself, by the rest of the spectators.

Every morning I would run to the Morris column
⁶
to see what shows
were being announced. Nothing could have been more disinterested or happier than the daydreams inspired in my imagination by each play that was announced, daydreams conditioned by the images inseparable from the words that made up its title and also by the colour of the posters, still damp and blistered with paste, against which the title appeared. Except for those strange works like
Le Testament de César Girodot
or
Oedipe-Roi
, which were inscribed, not on the green poster of the Opéra-Comique, but on the wine-red poster of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed to me more different from the sparkling white plume of
Les Diamants de la Couronne
than the smooth, mysterious satin of
Le Domino Noir
,
⁷
and, since my parents had told me that when I went to the theatre for the first time I would have to choose between these two plays, as I tried to study exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title of the other, since this was all I knew of them, so as to attempt to discern the pleasure each one promised me and compare it to the pleasure that lay concealed within the other, I managed to picture to myself so forcefully, on the one hand a play that was dazzling and proud, on the other a play that was soft and velvety, that I was as incapable of deciding which I would prefer as if, for dessert, I had been given the choice between rice
à l'Impératrice
and chocolate custard.

All my conversations with my friends concerned these actors whose art, though unknown to me, was the first form, of all those it assumes, in which Art allowed me a presentiment of what it was. Between the manner in which one actor and another delivered, nuanced a declamatory speech, the tiniest differences seemed to me to have an incalculable importance. And I would rank them in order of talent, according to what I had been told about them, in lists that I recited to myself all day long, and that in the end hardened in my brain and obstructed it with their immovability.

Later, when I was in school, each time I wrote to a new friend during class as soon as the teacher' head was turned, my first question was always whether he had been to the theatre yet and whether he thought the greatest actor really was Got, the second-best Delaunay, etc. And if, in his opinion, Febvre came only after Thiron, or Delaunay only after Coquelin, the sudden mobility that Coquelin, losing his stony rigidity, would develop in my mind in order to pass to second place, and the miraculous agility, the fecund animation with which Delaunay would be endowed in order to withdraw to fourth, would restore the sensation of flowering and life to my newly supple and fertilized brain.