In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (31 page)

But, little by little, every refusal to see her grieved me less. And as she became less dear to me, my painful memories were no longer strong enough to destroy by their incessant return the growing pleasure which I found in thinking of Florence or of Venice. I regretted, at such moments, that I had abandoned the idea of diplomacy and had condemned myself to a sedentary existence, in order not to be separated from a girl whom I should never see again and had already almost forgotten. We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her. If Venice seemed to my parents to be too far away and its climate too treacherous for me, it would be at least quite easy and not too tiring to go and settle down at Balbec. But to do that I should have had to leave Paris, to forgo those visits thanks to which, infrequent as they were, I might sometimes hear Mme Swann talk to me about her daughter. Besides, I was beginning to find in them various pleasures in which Gilberte had no part.

When spring arrived, and with it the cold weather, during an icy Lent and the hailstorms of Holy Week, as Mme Swann declared that it was freezing in her house, I used often to see her entertaining her guests in her furs, her shivering hands and shoulders buried beneath the gleaming white carpets of an immense rectangular muff and a cape, both of ermine, which she had not taken off on coming in from her drive, and which suggested the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest, which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had succeeded in melting. And the all-embracing truth about these glacial but already flowering weeks was suggested to me in this drawing-room, which soon I should be entering no more, by other more intoxicating forms of whiteness, that for example of the guelder-roses clustering, at the summits of their tall bare stalks, like the rectilinear trees in pre-Raphaelite paintings, their balls of blossom, divided yet composite, white as annunciating angels and exhaling a fragrance as of lemons. For the mistress of Tansonville knew that April, even an ice-bound April, is not barren of flowers, that winter, spring, summer are not held apart by barriers as hermetic as might be supposed by the town-dweller who, until the first hot day, imagines the world as containing nothing but houses that stand naked in the rain. That Mme Swann was content with the consignments furnished by her Combray gardener, that she did not, through the medium of her own “regular” florist, fill the gaps in an inadequate display with borrowings from a precocious Mediterranean shore, I do not for a moment suggest, nor did it worry me at the time. It was enough to fill me with longing for country scenes that, overhanging the loose snowdrifts of the muff in which Mme Swann kept her hands, the guelder-rose snow-balls (which served very possibly in the mind of my hostess no other purpose than to compose, on the advice of Bergotte, a “Symphony in White” with her furniture and her garments) should remind me that the Good Friday music in
Parsifal
symbolises a natural miracle which one could see performed every year if one had the sense to look for it, and, assisted by the acid and heady perfume of other kinds of blossom which, although their names were unknown to me, had brought me so often to a standstill on my walks round Combray, should make Mme Swann’s drawing-room as virginal, as candidly in blossom without the least trace of verdure, as overladen with genuine scents of flowers, as was the little lane by Tansonville.

But it was still too much for me that these memories should be revived. There was a risk of their fostering what little remained of my love for Gilberte. And so, though I no longer felt the least distress during these visits to Mme Swann, I spaced them out even more and endeavoured to see as little of her as possible. At most, since I continued not to go out of Paris, I allowed myself an occasional walk with her. The fine weather had come at last, and the sun was hot. As I knew that before luncheon Mme Swann used to go out every day for an hour’s stroll in the Avenue du Bois, near the Etoile—a spot which at that time, because of the people who used to collect there to gaze at the “swells” whom they knew only by name, was known as the “Down-and-outs Club”—I persuaded my parents, on Sunday (for on weekdays I was busy all morning) to let me postpone my lunch until long after theirs, until a quarter past one, and go for a walk before it. During that month of May I never missed a Sunday, Gilberte having gone to stay with friends in the country. I used to arrive at the Arc-de-Triomphe about noon. I kept watch at the entrance to the Avenue, never taking my eyes off the corner of the side-street along which Mme Swann, who had only a few yards to walk, would come from her house. Since by this time many of the people who had been strolling there were going home to lunch, those who remained were few in number and, for the most part, fashionably dressed. Suddenly, on the gravelled path, unhurrying, cool, luxuriant, Mme Swann would appear, blossoming out in a costume which was never twice the same but which I remember as being typically mauve; then she would hoist and unfurl at the end of its long stalk, just at the moment when her radiance was at its zenith, the silken banner of a wide parasol of a shade that matched the showering petals of her dress. A whole troop of people escorted her; Swann himself, four or five clubmen who had been to call upon her that morning or whom she had met in the street: and their black or grey agglomeration, obedient to her every gesture, performing the almost mechanical movements of a lifeless setting in which Odette was framed, gave to this woman, in whose eyes alone was there any intensity, the air of looking out in front of her, from among all those men, as from a window behind which she had taken her stand, and made her loom there, frail but fearless, in the nudity of her delicate colours, like the apparition of a creature of a different species, of an unknown race, and of almost martial power, by virtue of which she seemed by herself a match for all her multiple escort. Smiling, rejoicing in the fine weather, in the sunshine which had not yet become trying, with the air of a calm assurance of a creator who has accomplished his task and takes no thought for anything besides, certain that her clothes—even though the vulgar herd should fail to appreciate them—were the most elegant of all, wearing them for herself and for her friends, naturally, without exaggerated attention to them but also without absolute detachment, not preventing the little bows of ribbon on her bodice and skirt from floating buoyantly upon the air before her like creatures of whose presence she was not unaware and whom she indulgently permitted to disport themselves in accordance with their own rhythm, provided that they followed where she led, and even upon her mauve parasol, which, as often as not, she still held closed when she appeared on the scene, letting fall now and then, as though upon a bunch of Parma violets, her happy gaze, so kindly that, when it was fastened no longer upon her friends but on some inanimate object, it still seemed to smile. She thus reserved, kept open for her wardrobe, this interval of elegance of which the men with whom she was on the most familiar terms respected both the extent and the necessity, not without a certain deference, as of profane visitors to a shrine, an admission of their own ignorance, and over which they acknowledged (as to an invalid over the special precautions that he has to take, or a mother over the bringing up of her children) their friend’s competence and jurisdiction. No less than by the court which encircled her and seemed not to observe the passers-by, Mme Swann, by the belatedness of her appearance, evoked those rooms in which she had spent so long, so leisurely a morning and to which she must presently return for luncheon; she seemed to indicate their proximity by the sauntering ease of her progress, like the stroll one takes up and down one’s own garden; of those rooms one would have said that she carried about her still the cool, the indoor shade. But for that very reason the sight of her made me feel the more strongly a sensation of open air and warmth—all the more so because, already persuaded as I was that, by virtue of the liturgy and ritual in which Mme Swann was so profoundly versed, her clothes were connected with the season and the hour by a bond both necessary and unique, the flowers on the flexible straw brim of her hat, the ribbons on her dress, seemed to me to spring from the month of May even more naturally than the flowers of garden or woodland; and to learn what latest change there was in weather or season, I did not raise my eyes higher than to her parasol, open and outstretched like another, a nearer sky, round, clement, mobile and blue. For these rites, sovereign though they were, subjugated their glory (and, consequently, Mme Swann her own) in condescending obedience to the day, the spring, the sun, none of which struck me as being sufficiently flattered that so elegant a woman had deigned not to ignore their existence, and had chosen on their account a dress of a brighter, thinner fabric, suggesting to me, by a splaying at the collar and sleeves, the moist warmness of the throat and wrists that they exposed—in a word, had taken for them all the pains of a great lady who, having gaily condescended to pay a visit to common folk in the country, and whom everyone, even the most plebeian, knows, yet makes a point of donning for the occasion suitably pastoral attire. On her arrival I would greet Mme Swann, and she would stop me and say (in English) “
Good morning
” with a smile. We would walk a little way together. And I realised that it was for herself that she obeyed these canons in accordance with which she dressed, as though yielding to a superior wisdom of which she herself was the high priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep buttoned up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unobserved, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer has devoted infinite labour although they may never reach the ears of the public: or, in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, and would lengthily gaze at, for my own pleasure or from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strap, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like those Gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as the bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, overlooking the whole town, between the soaring towers.

What enhanced this impression that Mme Swann walked in the Avenue du Bois as though along the paths of her own garden, was—for people ignorant of her habit of taking a “constitutional”—the fact that she had come there on foot, without any carriage following, she whom, once May had begun, they were accustomed to see, behind the most brilliant “turn-out,” the smartest liveries in Paris, indolently and majestically seated, like a goddess, in the balmy open air of an immense victoria on eight springs. On foot, Mme Swann had the appearance—especially when her step was slowed by the heat of the sun—of having yielded to curiosity, of committing an elegant breach of the rules of protocol, like those crowned heads who, without consulting anyone, accompanied by the slightly scandalised admiration of a suite which dares not venture any criticism, step out of their boxes during a gala performance and visit the lobby of the theatre, mingling for a moment or two with the rest of the audience. So between Mme Swann and themselves the crowd felt that there existed those barriers of a certain kind of opulence which seem to them the most insurmountable of all. The Faubourg Saint-Germain may have its barriers too, but these are less telling to the eyes and imagination of the “down-and-out.” These latter, in the presence of an aristocratic lady who is simpler, more easily mistaken for an ordinary middle-class woman, less remote from the people, will not feel the same sense of inequality, almost of unworthiness, as they do before a Mme Swann. Of course women of this sort are not themselves dazed, as the crowd are, by the splendour in which they are surrounded; they have ceased to pay any attention to it, but only because they have grown used to it, that is to say have come to look upon it more and more as natural and necessary, to judge their fellow creatures according as they are more or less initiated into these luxurious ways: so that (the grandeur which they allow themselves to display or discover in others being wholly material, easily verified, slowly acquired, the lack of it hard to compensate) if such women place a passer-by in the lowest rank, it is by the same process that has made them appear to him as in the highest, that is to say instinctively, at first sight, and without possibility of appeal. Perhaps that social class which included in those days women like Lady Israels, who mixed with the women of the aristocracy, and Mme Swann, who was to get to know them later on, that intermediate class, inferior to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, since it courted the latter, but superior to everything that was not of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, possessing this peculiarity that, while already detached from the world of the merely rich, it was riches still that it represented, but riches that had become ductile, obedient to a conscious artistic purpose, malleable gold, chased with a poetic design and taught to smile; perhaps that class—in the same form, at least, and with the same charm—exists no longer. In any event, the women who were its members would not satisfy today what was the primary condition on which they reigned, since with advancing age they have lost—almost all of them—their beauty. Whereas it was from the glorious zenith of her ripe and still so fragrant summer as much as from the pinnacle of her noble wealth that Mme Swann, majestic, smiling, benign, advancing along the Avenue du Bois, saw, like Hypatia, worlds revolving beneath the slow tread of her feet. Young men as they passed looked at her anxiously, not knowing whether their vague acquaintance with her (especially since, having been introduced only once, at the most, to Swann, they were afraid that he might not remember them) was sufficient excuse for their venturing to doff their hats. And they trembled to think of the consequences as they made up their minds to do so, wondering whether this audaciously provocative and sacrilegious gesture, challenging the inviolable supremacy of a caste, would not let loose the catastrophic forces of nature or bring down upon them the vengeance of a jealous god. It provoked only, like the winding of a piece of clockwork, a series of gesticulations from little, bowing figures, who were none other than Odette’s escort, beginning with Swann himself, who raised his tall hat lined in green leather with a smiling courtesy which he had acquired in the Faubourg Saint-Germain but to which was no longer wedded the indifference that he would at one time have shown. Its place was now taken (for he had been to some extent permeated by Odette’s prejudices) at once by irritation at having to acknowledge the salute of a person who was none too well dressed and by satisfaction at his wife’s knowing so many people, a mixed sensation to which he gave expression by saying to the smart friends who walked by his side: “What, another one! Upon my word, I can’t imagine where my wife picks all these fellows up!” Meanwhile, having acknowledged with a nod the greeting of some terrified young man who had already passed out of sight though his heart was still beating furiously, Mme Swann turned to me: “Then it’s all over?” she said. “You aren’t ever coming to see Gilberte again? I’m glad you make an exception of me, and are not going to
drop
me completely. I like seeing you, but I also liked the influence you had over my daughter. I’m sure she’s very sorry about it, too. However, I mustn’t bully you, or you’ll make up your mind at once that you never want to set eyes on me again.” “Odette, there’s Sagan saying good-day to you,” Swann pointed out to his wife. And there indeed was the Prince, as in some grand finale at the theatre or the circus or in an old painting, wheeling his horse round so as to face her, and doffing his hat with a sweeping theatrical and, as it were, allegorical flourish in which he displayed all the chivalrous courtesy of the great nobleman bowing in token of respect for Womanhood, even if it was embodied in a woman whom it was impossible for his mother or his sister to know. And in fact at every turn, recognised in the depths of the liquid transparency and of the luminous glaze of the shadow which her parasol cast over her, Mme Swann received the salutations of the last belated horsemen, who passed as though filmed at the gallop in the blinding glare of the Avenue, clubmen whose names, those of celebrities for the public—Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency and the rest—were for Mme Swann the familiar names of friends. And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our memories of what the heart has suffered, now that the sorrows that I once felt on Gilberte’s account have long since faded and vanished, there has survived them the pleasure that I still derive—whenever I close my eyes and read, as it were upon the face of a sundial, the minutes that are recorded between a quarter past twelve and one o’clock in the month of May—from seeing myself once again strolling and talking thus with Mme Swann, beneath her parasol, as though in the coloured shade of a wistaria bower.