In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (21 page)

I let myself go in telling him what my impressions had been. Often Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her arm. “Ah! the designer will be glad to hear that; he’s a real artist, and I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I must say, myself, that I don’t care for it much, it bathes everything in a sort of sea-green glow, little Phèdre standing there looks too like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. You will tell me, of course, that it brings out the cosmic aspect of the play. That’s quite true. All the same, it would be more appropriate if the scene were laid in the Court of Neptune. Oh yes, I know the Vengeance of Neptune does come into the play. I don’t suggest for a moment that we should think only of Port-Royal, but after all Racine isn’t telling us a story about love among the sea-urchins. Still, it’s what my friend wanted, and it’s very well done, right or wrong, and really quite pretty. Yes, so you liked it, did you; you understood what he was after. We feel the same about it, don’t we, really: it’s a bit crazy, what he’s done, you agree with me, but on the whole it’s very clever.” And when Bergotte’s opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were less valid than the Ambassador’s; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality.

Since Bergotte did not sweep aside my objections, I confessed to him that they had been treated with contempt by M. de Norpois. “But he’s an old goose!” was the answer. “He keeps on pecking at you because he imagines all the time that you’re a piece of cake, or a slice of cuttle-fish.” “What, you know Norpois?” asked Swann. “He’s as dull as a wet Sunday,” interrupted his wife, who had great faith in Bergotte’s judgment, and was no doubt afraid that M. de Norpois might have spoken ill of her to us. “I tried to make him talk after dinner; I don’t know if it’s his age or his digestion, but I found him too sticky for words. I really thought I should have to ‘dope’ him.” “Yes, isn’t he?” Bergotte chimed in. “You see, he has to keep his mouth shut half the time so as not to use up all the stock of inanities that keep his shirt-front starched and his waistcoat white.”

“I think that Bergotte and my wife are both very hard on him,” came from Swann, who took the “line,” in his own house, of being a plain, sensible man. “I quite see that Norpois cannot interest you very much, but from another point of view,” (for Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of “real life”) “he is quite remarkable, quite a remarkable instance of a ‘lover.’ When he was Counsellor in Rome,” he went on, after making sure that Gilberte could not hear him, “he had a mistress here in Paris with whom he was madly in love, and he found time to make the double journey twice a week to see her for a couple of hours. She was, as it happens, a most intelligent woman, and remarkably beautiful then; she’s a dowager now. And he has had any number of others since. I’m sure I should have gone stark mad if the woman I was in love with lived in Paris and I had to be in Rome. Highly strung people ought always to love, as the lower orders say, ‘beneath’ them, so that their women have a material inducement to be at their disposal.”

As he spoke, Swann realised that I might be applying this maxim to himself and Odette, and as, even among superior people, at the moment when they seem to be soaring with you above the plane of life, their personal pride is still basely human, he was overcome with profound irritation towards me. But it manifested itself only in the uneasiness of his glance. He said nothing to me at the time. Not that this need surprise us. When Racine (according to a story that is in fact apocryphal though its substance may be found recurring every day in Parisian life) made an allusion to Scarron in front of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said nothing to the poet that evening. It was on the following day that he fell from grace.

But since a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, completed his thought in these words, words which were to assume later on in my memory the importance of a prophetic warning which I had not had the sense to heed: “The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a while he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells are kept lighted day and night to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.”

I reverted to M. de Norpois. “You must never trust him; he has the most wicked tongue,” said Mme Swann in a tone which seemed to me to indicate that M. de Norpois had spoken ill of her, especially as Swann looked across at his wife with an air of rebuke, as though to stop her before she went too far.

Meanwhile Gilberte, who had twice been told to go and get ready to go out, remained listening to our conversation, sitting between her mother and her father, her head resting affectionately against the latter’s shoulder. Nothing, at first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme Swann, who was dark, than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But after a while one saw in Gilberte many of the features—for instance, the nose cut short with a sharp, unerring decision by the invisible sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive generations—the expression, the movements of her
mother; to take an illustration from another art, she recalled a portrait that was as yet a poor likeness of Mme Swann, whom the painter, from some colourist’s whim, had posed in a partial disguise, dressed to go out to a party in Venetian “character.” And since not only was she wearing a fair wig, but every atom of darkness had been evicted from her flesh which, stripped of its brown veils, seemed more naked, covered simply in rays shed by an internal sun, this “make-up” was not just superficial but incarnate: Gilberte had the air of embodying some fabulous animal or of having assumed a mythological fancy dress. This reddish skin was so exactly that of her father that nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was being created, to solve the problem of how to reconstruct Mme Swann piecemeal, without any material at its disposal save the skin of M. Swann. And nature had utilised this to perfection, like a master carver who makes a point of leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in evidence. On Gilberte’s face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette’s nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact M. Swann’s two moles. It was a new variety of Mme Swann that was thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree beside a purple. At the same time it would be wrong to imagine the line of demarcation between these two likenesses as absolutely clear-cut. Now and then, when Gilberte smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father’s cheek upon her mother’s face, as though they had been put together to see what would result from the blend; this oval took shape as an embryo forms; it lengthened obliquely, swelled, and a moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte’s eyes there was the frank and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when she gave me the agate marble and said “Keep it as a souvenir of our friendship.” But were one to question Gilberte about what she had been doing, then one saw in those same eyes the embarrassment, the uncertainty, the prevarication, the misery that Odette used in the old days to betray, when Swann asked her where she had been and she gave him one of those lying answers which in those days drove the lover to despair and now made him abruptly change the conversation as an incurious and prudent husband. Often, in the Champs-Elysées, I was disturbed to see this look in Gilberte’s eyes. But as a rule my fears were unfounded. For in her, a purely physical survival of her mother, this look (if no other) had ceased to have any meaning. It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go home for some lesson, that Gilberte’s pupils executed that movement which, in the past, in Odette’s eyes, had been caused by the fear of disclosing that she had opened the door that day to one of her lovers, or was at that moment in a hurry to get to some assignation. Thus did one see the two natures of M. and Mme Swann ripple and flow and overlap one upon the other in the body of this Mélusine.

It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the qualities and defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents, only one will be found in the child, and allied to the very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it. Indeed, the embodiment of a good moral quality in an incompatible physical blemish is often one of the laws of filial resemblance. Of two sisters, one will combine with the proud bearing of her father the mean little soul of her mother; the other, abundantly endowed with the paternal intelligence, will present it to the world in the aspect which her mother has made familiar; her mother’s shapeless nose and puckered belly and even her voice have become the bodily vestment of gifts which one had learned to recognise beneath a superb presence. With the result that of each of the sisters one can say with equal justification that it is she who takes more after one or other of her parents. It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father’s and her mother’s, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her—and even that would be not entirely accurate since it would give the impression that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering from being the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one and then the other, and at any given moment only one of the two, that is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering accordingly, the better Gilberte being unable at the time, on account of her momentary absence, to detect the other’s lapse from virtue. And so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of an ignoble kind. When the other spoke to you with her father’s heart she held broad and generous views, and you would have liked to engage with her upon a fine and beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as your arrangements were being completed, her mother’s heart would already have claimed its turn, and hers was the voice that answered; and you would be disappointed and vexed—almost baffled, as though by the substitution of one person for another—by a mean remark, a sly snigger, in which Gilberte would take delight, since they sprang from what she herself at that moment was. Indeed, the disparity was at times so great between the two Gilbertes that you asked yourself, though without finding an answer, what on earth you could have said or done to her to find her now so different. When she herself had suggested meeting you somewhere, not only would she fail to appear and would offer no excuse afterwards, but, whatever the influence might have been that had made her change her mind, she would appear so different that you might well have supposed that, taken in by a resemblance such as forms the plot of the
Menaechmi
, you were now talking to a different person from the one who had so sweetly expressed a desire to see you, had she not shown signs of an ill-humour which revealed that she felt herself to be in the wrong and wished to avoid entering into explanations.

“Now then, run along and get ready; you’re keeping us waiting,” her mother reminded her.

“I’m so happy here with my little Papa; I want to stay just for a minute,” replied Gilberte, burying her head beneath the arm of her father, who passed his fingers lovingly through her fair hair.

Swann was one of those men who, having lived for a long time amid the illusions of love, have seen the blessings they have brought to a number of women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to survive after their death. When there should no longer be any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle Swann, or a Mme X,
née
Swann, who would continue to love the vanished father. Indeed, to love him too well perhaps, Swann may have been thinking, for he acknowledged Gilberte’s caress with a “You’re a good girl,” in the tone softened by uneasiness to which, when we think of the future, we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a person who is destined to survive us. To conceal his emotion, he joined in our talk about Berma. He pointed out to me, but in a detached, bored tone, as though he wished to remain somehow detached from what he was saying, with what intelligence, with what an astonishing fitness the actress said to Oenone, “You knew it!” He was right. That intonation at least had a validity that was really intelligible, and might thereby have satisfied my desire to find incontestable reasons for admiring Berma. But it was because of its very clarity that it did not in the least satisfy me. Her intonation was so ingenious, so definite in intention and meaning, that it seemed to exist by itself, so that any intelligent actress might have acquired it. It was a fine idea; but whoever else might express it as fully must possess it equally. It remained to Berma’s credit that she had discovered it, but can one use the word “discover” when the object in question is something that would not be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one’s own nature since someone else may afterwards reproduce it?