In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (10 page)

I returned home. I had just spent the New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte. I was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

When I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged on this festive evening, kept me awake. I thought of all the people who would end the night in pleasure, of the lover, the troop of debauchees perhaps, who would be going to meet Berma at the stage-door after the performance that I had seen announced for this evening. I was not even able, to calm the agitation which
this idea engendered in me during my sleepless night, to assure myself that Berma was not, perhaps, thinking about love, since the lines that she recited, which she had long and carefully rehearsed, reminded her at every moment that love is an exquisite thing, as of course she already knew, and knew so well that she displayed its familiar pangs—only enriched with a new violence and an unsuspected sweetness—to her astonished audience, each member of which had felt them for himself. I lighted my candle again, to look at her face once more. At the thought that it was no doubt at that very moment being caressed by those men whom I could not prevent from giving to Berma and receiving from her joys superhuman but vague, I felt an emotion more cruel than voluptuous, a longing that was presently intensified by the sound of the horn, as one hears it on the nights of the mid-Lent festival and often of other public holidays, which, because it then lacks all poetry, is more saddening, coming from a tavern, than “at evening, in the depths of the woods.” At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

I continued to go to the Champs-Elysées on fine days, along streets whose elegant pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of water-colours were then the height of fashion) in a lightly floating atmosphere. It would be untrue to say that in those days the palaces of Gabriel struck me as being of greater beauty than, or even of another period from, the neighbouring houses. I found more style and should have supposed more antiquity if not in the Palais de l’Industrie at any rate in the Trocadéro. Plunged in a restless sleep, my adolescence embraced in one uniform vision the whole of the quarter through which it guided it, and I had never dreamed that there could be an eighteenth-century building in the Rue Royale, just as I should have been astonished to learn that the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte Saint-Denis, those glories of the age of Louis XIV, were not contemporary with the most recently built tenements in the sordid districts that bore their names. Once only one of Gabriel’s palaces made me stop for more than a moment; this was because, night having fallen, its columns, dematerialised by the moonlight, had the appearance of having been cut out in pasteboard, and by reminding me of a set from the operetta
Orphée aux Enfers
, gave me for the first time an impression of beauty.

Meanwhile Gilberte never came to the Champs-Elysées. And yet it was imperative that I should see her, for I could not so much as remember her face. The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which yet endeavours to discover with the eyes alone what lies beyond them is over-indulgent to the myriad forms, to the different savours, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we immobilise. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of it are always blurred. I no longer really knew how Gilberte’s features were composed, except in the heavenly moments when she unfolded them to me: I could remember nothing but her smile. And being unable to visualise that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture it, I was disgusted to find, etched on my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost a loved one whom they never see again in sleep, are enraged at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable people whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their inability to form an image of the object of their grief they are almost led to accuse themselves of feeling no grief. And I was not far from believing that, since I could not recall Gilberte’s features, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her.

At last she returned to play there almost every day, setting before me fresh pleasures to desire, to demand of her for the morrow, in this sense indeed making my love for her each day a new love. But an incident was to change once again, and abruptly, the manner in which, at about two o’clock every afternoon, the problem of my love confronted me. Had M. Swann intercepted the letter that I had written to his daughter, or was Gilberte merely confessing to me long after the event, and so that I should be more prudent in future, a state of affairs already long established? As I was telling her how greatly I admired her father and mother, she assumed that vague air, full of reticence and secrecy, which she invariably wore when one spoke to her of what she was going to do, her walks, drives, visits, then suddenly said to me: “You know, they
can’t stand you!” and, slipping from me like the watersprite that she was, burst out laughing. Often her laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed, as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane. M. and Mme Swann did not require Gilberte to give up playing with me, but they would have been just as well pleased, she thought, if we had never begun. They did not look upon our relations with a kindly eye, believed me to be a person of low moral standard and imagined that I could only be a bad influence on their daughter. This type of unscrupulous youth whom Swann thought I resembled, I pictured to myself as detesting the parents of the girl he loves, flattering them to their faces but, when he is alone with her, making fun of them, urging her on to disobey them and, when once he has completed his conquest, preventing them even from seeing her. With these characteristics (though they are never those under which the basest of scoundrels recognises himself) how vehemently did my heart contrast the sentiments by which it was animated with regard to Swann, so passionate, on the contrary, that I had no doubt that had he had an inkling of them he would have repented of his judgment of me as of a judicial error. All that I felt towards him I made bold to express to him in a long letter which I entrusted to Gilberte with the request that she deliver it to him. She agreed to do so. Alas! he must have seen in me an even greater impostor than I had feared; he must have suspected the sentiments which I had supposed myself to be portraying, in sixteen pages, with such conviction and truth: in short, the letter that I wrote to him, as ardent and as sincere as the words that I had uttered to M. de Norpois, met with no more success. Gilberte told me next day, after taking me aside behind a clump of laurels, on a little path where we sat down on a couple of chairs, that as he read my letter, which she had now brought back to me, her father had shrugged his shoulders and said: “All this means nothing; it only goes to prove how right I was.” I who knew the purity of my intentions, the goodness of my soul, was furious that my words should not even have impinged upon the surface of Swann’s ridiculous error. For it was an error; of that I had then no doubt. I felt that I had described with such accuracy certain irrefutable characteristics of my generous sentiments that, if Swann had not at once recognised their authenticity, had not come to ask my forgiveness and to admit that he had been mistaken, it must be because he himself had never experienced these noble sentiments, and this would make him incapable of understanding their existence in other people.

But perhaps it was simply that Swann knew that nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them. Perhaps he had recognised in the regard that I expressed for him simply an effect—and the strongest possible proof—of my love for Gilberte, by which—and not by my secondary veneration for himself—my subsequent actions would be inevitably controlled. I was unable to share his predictions, since I had not succeeded in abstracting my love from myself, in fitting it into the common experience of humanity and computing, experimentally, its consequences; I was in despair. I was obliged to leave Gilberte for a moment; Françoise had called me. I had to accompany her into a little pavilion covered in a green trellis, not unlike one of the disused toll-houses of old Paris, in which had recently been installed what in England they call a lavatory but in France, by an ill-judged piece of Anglomania, “water-closets.” The old, damp walls of the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, emitted a cool, fusty smell which, relieving me at once of the anxieties that Swann’s words, as reported by Gilberte, had just awakened in me, filled me with a pleasure of a different kind from other pleasures, which leave one more unstable, incapable of grasping them, of possessing them, a pleasure that was solid and consistent, on which I could lean for support, delicious, soothing, rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and sure. I should have liked, as, long ago, in my walks along the Guermantes way, to endeavour to penetrate the charm of this impression which had seized hold of me, and, remaining there motionless, to explore this antiquated emanation which invited me not to enjoy the pleasure which it was offering me only as a bonus, but to descend into the underlying reality which it had not yet disclosed to me. But the keeper of the establishment, an elderly dame with painted cheeks and an auburn wig, began to talk to me. Françoise thought her “a proper lady.” Her young “missy” had married what Françoise called “a young man of family,” which meant that he differed more, in her eyes, from a workman than, in Saint-Simon’s, a duke did from a man “risen from the dregs of the people.” No doubt the keeper, before entering upon her tenancy, had suffered setbacks. But Françoise was positive that she was a “marquise,” and belonged to the Saint-Ferréol family. This “marquise” now warned me not to stand outside in the cold, and even opened one of her doors for me, saying: “Won’t you go inside for a minute? Look, here’s a nice clean one, and I shan’t charge
you
anything.” Perhaps she made this offer simply in the spirit in which the young ladies at Gouache’s, when we went in there to order something, used to offer me one of the sweets which they kept on the counter under glass bells, and which, alas, Mamma would never allow me to accept; perhaps, less innocently, like the old florist whom Mamma used to have in to replenish her flower-stands, who rolled languishing eyes at me as she handed me a rose. In any event, if the “marquise” had a weakness for little boys, when she threw open to them the hypogean doors of those cubicles of stone in which men crouch like sphinxes, she must have been moved to that generosity less by the hope of corrupting them than by the pleasure which all of us feel in displaying a needless prodigality to those whom we love, for I never saw her with any other visitor except an old park-keeper.

A moment later I said good-bye to the “marquise,” and went out accompanied by Françoise, whom I left to return to Gilberte. I caught sight of her at once, on a chair, behind the clump of laurels. She was there so as not to be seen by her friends: they were playing hide-and-seek. I went and sat down beside her. She had on a flat cap which came low over her eyes, giving her the same “underhand,” brooding, sly look which I had remarked in her that first time at Combray. I asked her if there was not some way for me to have it out with her father face to face. Gilberte said that she had suggested that to him, but that he had thought it pointless. “Here,” she went on, “don’t go away without your letter. I must run along to the others, as they haven’t found me.”

Had Swann appeared on the scene then before I had recovered this letter by the sincerity of which I felt that he had been so unreasonable in not letting himself be convinced, perhaps he would have seen that it was he who had been in the right. For, approaching Gilberte, who, leaning back in her chair, told me to take the letter but did not hold it out to me, I felt myself so irresistibly attracted by her body that I said to her: “I say, why don’t you try to stop me from getting it; we’ll see who’s the stronger.”

She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders, either because she was still of an age for it or because her mother chose to make her look a child for a little longer so as to make herself seem younger; and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse; immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon Gilberte said good-naturedly: “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling a bit longer.”