In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (22 page)

“Upon my soul, your presence among us does raise the tone of the conversation!” Swann observed to me, as though to excuse himself to Bergotte; for he had formed the habit, in the Guermantes set, of entertaining great artists as if they were just ordinary friends whom one seeks only to provide with the opportunity to eat the dishes or play the games they like, or, in the country, indulge in whatever form of sport they please. “It seems to me that we’re talking a great deal about
art
,” he went on. “But it’s so nice, I do love it!” said Mme Swann, throwing me a look of gratitude, from good nature as well as because she had not abandoned her old aspirations towards intellectual conversation. After this it was to others of the party, and principally to Gilberte, that Bergotte addressed himself. I had told him everything that I felt with a freedom which had astonished me and which was due to the fact that, having acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those hours of solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better part of myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence, I found him less intimidating than a person with whom I was talking for the first time. And yet, for the same reason, I was very uneasy about the impression that I must have been making on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for my ideas dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant time in which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray. I ought perhaps to have reminded myself nevertheless that since it was in all sincerity, abandoning myself to the train of my thoughts, that I had felt on the one hand so intensely in sympathy with the work of Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theatre, a disappointment the reasons for which I did not know, those two instinctive impulses could not be so very different from one another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of Bergotte’s which I had loved in his books could not be entirely alien and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to express it. For my intelligence must be one—perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage. Doubtless the ideas which I was tempted to seek to disentangle were not those which Bergotte usually explored in his books. But if it was one and the same intelligence which we had, he and I, at our disposal, he must, when he heard me express those ideas, be reminded of them, cherish them, smile upon them, keeping probably, in spite of what I supposed, before his mind’s eye, quite a different part of his intelligence than that of which an excerpt had passed into his books, an excerpt upon which I had based my notion of his whole mental universe. Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works. I ought to have told myself all this (though in fact it is none too consoling a thought, for the benevolent condescension of great minds has as a corollary the incomprehension and hostility of small; and one derives far less happiness from the amiability of a great writer, which one can find after all in his books, than suffering from the hostility of a woman whom one did not choose for her intelligence but cannot help loving). I ought to have told myself all this, but I did not; I was convinced that I had appeared a fool to Bergotte, when Gilberte whispered in my ear:

“You can’t think how overjoyed I am, because you’ve made a conquest of my great friend Bergotte. He’s been telling Mamma that he found you extremely intelligent.”

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“Oh, wherever you like. You know it’s all the same to me.”

But since the incident that had occurred on the anniversary of her grandfather’s death I had begun to wonder whether Gilberte’s character was not other than I had supposed, whether that indifference to what was to be done, that docility, that calm, that gentle and constant submissiveness did not indeed conceal passionate longings which her pride would not allow her to reveal and which she disclosed only by her sudden resistance whenever by any chance they were thwarted.

As Bergotte lived in the same neighbourhood as my parents, we left the house together. In the carriage he spoke to me of my health: “Our friends were telling me that you had been ill. I’m very sorry. And yet, after all, I’m not too sorry, because I can see quite well that you are able to enjoy the pleasures of the mind, and they are probably what means most to you, as to everyone who has known them.”

Alas, how little I felt that what he was saying applied to me, whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and well. I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect. As I made no distinction among my pleasures between those that came to me from different sources, of varying depth and permanence, I thought, when the moment came to answer him, that I should have liked an existence in which I was on intimate terms with the Duchesse de Guermantes and often came across, as in the old toll-house in the Champs-Elysées, a fusty coolness that would remind me of Combray. And in this ideal existence which I dared not confide to him, the pleasures of the mind found no place.

“No, Monsieur, the pleasures of the mind count for very little with me; it is not them that I seek after; indeed I don’t even know that I have ever tasted them.”

“You really think not?” he replied. “Well, you know, after all, that must be what you like best—at least that’s my guess, that’s what I think.”

He did not convince me, of course, and yet I already felt happier, less constricted. After what M. de Norpois had said to me, I had regarded my moments of day-dreaming, of enthusiasm, of self-confidence as purely subjective and false. But according to Bergotte, who appeared to understand my case, it seemed that it was quite the contrary, that the symptom I ought to disregard was, in fact, my doubts, my disgust with myself. Moreover, what he had said about M. de Norpois took most of the sting out of a sentence from which I had supposed that no appeal was possible.

“Are you being properly looked after?” Bergotte asked me. “Who is treating you?” I told him that I had seen, and should probably go on seeing, Cottard. “But that’s not at all the sort of man you want!” he told me. “I know nothing about him as a doctor. But I’ve met him at Mme Swann’s. The man’s an imbecile. Even supposing that that doesn’t prevent his being a good doctor, which I hesitate to believe, it does prevent his being a good doctor for artists, for intelligent people. People like you must have suitable doctors, I would almost go so far as to say treatment and medicines specially adapted to themselves. Cottard will bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from having any effect. Besides, the proper course of treatment cannot possibly be the same for you as for any Tom, Dick or Harry. Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands
that
disease. How do you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare. So that his calculations are inaccurate in your case, the balance is upset; you see, always the little bottle-imp bobbing up again. He will find that you have a distended stomach; he has no need to examine you for it, since he has it already in his eye. You can see it there, reflected in his glasses.”

This manner of speaking tired me greatly. I said to myself with the stupidity of common sense: “There’s no more a distended stomach reflected in Professor Cottard’s glasses than there are inanities stored behind M. de Norpois’s white waistcoat.”

“I should recommend you, instead,” went on Bergotte, “to consult Dr du Boulbon, who is an extremely intelligent man.” “He’s a great admirer of your books,” I replied.

I saw that Bergotte knew this, and I concluded that kindred spirits soon come together, that one has few really “unknown friends.” What Bergotte had said to me with respect to Cottard impressed me, while running contrary to everything that I myself believed. I was in no way disturbed at finding my doctor a bore; what I expected of him was that, thanks to an art whose laws escaped me, he should pronounce on the subject of my health an infallible oracle after consultation of my entrails. And I did not at all require that, with the aid of an intelligence in which I could compete with him, he should seek to understand mine, which I pictured to myself merely as a means, of no importance in itself, of trying to attain to certain external verities. I very much doubted whether intelligent people required a different form of hygiene from imbeciles, and I was quite prepared to submit myself to the latter.

“I’ll tell you who does need a good doctor, and that’s our friend Swann,” said Bergotte. And on my asking whether he was ill, “Well, don’t you see, he’s typical of the man who has married a whore, and has to pocket a dozen insults a day from women who refuse to meet his wife or men who have slept with her. Just look, one day when you’re there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes in, to see who’s in the room.”

The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had for so long been received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost tender tone he invariably adopted towards them in their presence. Certainly a person like my great-aunt, for instance, would have been incapable of treating any of us to the blandishments which I had heard Bergotte lavishing upon Swann. Even to the people whom she liked, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things. But behind their backs she would never have uttered a word to which they might not have listened. There was nothing less like the social world than our society at Combray. The Swanns’ was already a step on the way to it, towards its inconstant waters. If they had not yet reached the open sea, they were certainly in the estuary. “This is all between ourselves,” said Bergotte as he left me outside my own door. A few years later I should have answered: “I never repeat things.” That is the ritual phrase of society people, from which the slanderer always derives a false reassurance. It is what I would have said then and there to Bergotte—for one does not invent everything one says, especially when one is acting merely as a social being—but I did not yet know the formula. What my great-aunt, on the other hand, would have said on a similar occasion was: “If you don’t wish it to be repeated, why do you say it?” That is the answer of the unsociable, of the dissenter. I was nothing of that sort: I bowed my head in silence.

Men of letters who were in my eyes persons of considerable importance had to intrigue for years before they succeeded in forming with Bergotte relations which remained always dimly literary and never emerged beyond the four walls of his study, whereas I had now been installed among the friends of the great writer, straight off and without any effort, like someone who, instead of standing in a queue for hours in order to secure a bad seat in a theatre, is shown in at once to the best, having entered by a door that is closed to the public. If Swann had thus opened such a door to me, it was doubtless because, just as a king finds himself naturally inviting his children’s friends into the royal box, or on board the royal yacht, so Gilberte’s parents received their daughter’s friends among all the precious things that they had in their house and the even more precious intimacies that were enshrined there. But at the time I thought, and perhaps was right in thinking, that this friendliness on Swann’s part was aimed indirectly at my parents. I seemed to remember having heard once at Combray that he had suggested to them that, in view of my admiration for Bergotte, he should take me to dine with him, and that my parents had declined, saying that I was too young and too highly strung to “go out.” My parents doubtless represented to certain other people (precisely those who seemed to me the most wonderful) something quite different from what they were to me, so that, just as when the lady in pink had paid my father a tribute of which he had shown himself so unworthy, I should have wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just received and, to show their gratitude to that generous and courteous Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without seeming any more conscious of its value than the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair in Luini’s fresco, to whom, it was said, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance.

Unfortunately, this favour that Swann had done me, which, on returning home, before I had even taken off my greatcoat, I reported to my parents in the hope that it would awaken in their hearts an emotion equal to my own and would determine them upon some immense and decisive gesture towards the Swanns, did not appear to be greatly appreciated by them. “Swann introduced you to Bergotte? An excellent acquaintance, a charming relationship!” exclaimed my father sarcastically: “That really does crown it all!” Alas, when I went on to say that Bergotte was by no means inclined to admire M. de Norpois:

“I dare say!” retorted my father. “That simply proves that he’s a false and malevolent fellow. My poor boy, you never had much common sense, but I’m sorry to see that you’ve fallen among people who will send you off the rails altogether.”

Already the mere fact of my associating with the Swanns had far from delighted my parents. This introduction to Bergotte seemed to them a fatal but natural consequence of an original mistake, namely their own weakness, which my grandfather would have called a “want of circumspection.” I felt that in order to put the finishing touch to their ill humour, it only remained for me to tell them that this perverse fellow who did not appreciate M. de Norpois had found me extremely intelligent. For I had observed that whenever my father decided that anyone, one of my school friends for instance, was going astray—as I was at that moment—if that person had the approval of somebody whom my father did not respect, he would see in this testimony the confirmation of his own stern judgment. The evil merely seemed to him the greater. Already I could hear him exclaiming, “Of course, it all hangs together,” an expression that terrified me by the vagueness and vastness of the reforms the introduction of which into my quiet life it seemed to threaten. But since, even if I did not tell them what Bergotte had said of me, nothing could anyhow efface the impression my parents had already formed, that it should be made slightly worse mattered little. Besides, they seemed to me so unfair, so completely mistaken, that not only had I no hope, I had scarcely any desire to bring them to a more equitable point of view. However, sensing, as the words were passing my lips, how alarmed my parents would be at the thought that I had found favour in the sight of a person who dismissed clever men as fools, who had earned the contempt of all decent people, and praise from whom, since it seemed to me a thing to be desired, would only encourage me in wrongdoing, it was in faltering tones and with a slightly shamefaced air that I reached the coda: “He told the Swanns that he had found me extremely intelligent.” Just as a poisoned dog in a field flings itself without knowing why at the grass which is precisely the antidote to the toxin that it has swallowed, so I, without in the least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best arguments that I could have put forward, all the tributes that I could have paid him, must have proved powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed.