In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (37 page)

To a certain extent—and this, at Balbec, gave to the population, as a rule monotonously rich and cosmopolitan, of that sort of “grand” hotel a quite distinctive local character—they were composed of eminent persons from the departmental capitals of that region of France, a senior judge from Caen, a president of the Cherbourg bar, a notary public from Le Mans, who annually, when the holidays came round, starting from the various points over which, throughout the working year, they were scattered like snipers on a battlefield or draughtsmen upon a board, concentrated their forces in this hotel. They always reserved the same rooms, and with their wives, who had pretensions to aristocracy, formed a little group which was joined by a leading barrister and a leading doctor from Paris, who on the day of their departure would say to the others: “Oh, yes, of course; you don’t go by our train. You’re privileged, you’ll be home in time for lunch.”

“Privileged, you say? You who live in the capital, in Paris, while I have to live in a wretched county town of a hundred thousand souls (it’s true we managed to muster a hundred and two thousand at the last census, but what is that compared to your two and a half millions?), going back, too, to asphalt streets and all the glamour of Paris life.”

They said this with a rustic burring of their “r”s, without acrimony, for they were leading lights each in his own province, who could like others have gone to Paris had they chosen—the senior judge from Caen had several times been offered a seat on the Court of Appeal—but had preferred to stay where they were, from love of their native towns, or of obscurity, or of fame, or because they were reactionaries, and enjoyed being on friendly terms with the country houses of the neighbourhood. Besides, several of them were not going back at once to their county towns.

For—inasmuch as the Bay of Balbec was a little world apart in the midst of the great, a basketful of the seasons in which good days and bad, and the successive months, were clustered in a ring, so that not only on days when one could make out Rivebelle, which was a sign of storm, could one see the sunlight on the houses there while Balbec was plunged in darkness, but later on, when the cold weather had reached Balbec, one could be certain of finding on that opposite shore two or three supplementary months of warmth—those of the regular visitors to the Grand Hotel whose holidays began late or lasted long gave orders, when the rains and the mists came and autumn was in the air, for their boxes to be packed and loaded on to a boat, and set sail across the bay to find the summer again at Rivebelle or Costedor. This little group in the Balbec hotel looked at each new arrival with suspicion, and, while affecting to take not the least interest in him, hastened, all of them, to interrogate their friend the head waiter about him. For it was the same head waiter—Aimé—who returned every year for the season, and kept their tables for them; and their lady-wives, having heard that his wife was expecting a baby, would sit after meals each working on a part of the layette, while weighing up through their lorgnettes my grandmother and myself because we were eating hard-boiled eggs in salad, which was considered common and was not done in the best society of Alençon. They affected an attitude of contemptuous irony with regard to a Frenchman who was called “His Majesty” and who had indeed proclaimed himself king of a small island in the South Seas peopled only by a few savages. He was staying in the hotel with his pretty mistress, whom, as she crossed the beach to bathe, the little boys would greet with “Long live the Queen!” because she would reward them with a shower of small silver. The judge and the president went so far as to pretend not to see her, and if any of their friends happened to look at her, felt bound to warn him that she was only a little shop-girl.

“But I was told that at Ostend they used the royal bathing-hut.”

“Well, and why not? It’s on hire for twenty francs. You can take it yourself, if you care for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I know for a fact that the fellow asked for an audience with the King, who sent back word that he wasn’t interested in pantomime princes.”

“Really, that’s interesting! What queer people there are in the world, to be sure!”

And no doubt all this was true; but it was also from resentment of the thought that, to many of their fellow-visitors, they were themselves simply solid middle-class citizens who did not know this king and queen who were so prodigal with their small change, that the notary, the judge, the president, when what they were pleased to call the “Carnival” went by, felt so much annoyance and expressed aloud an indignation that was quite understood by their friend the head waiter who, obliged to show proper civility to these generous if not authentic sovereigns, would nevertheless, as he took their orders, glance across the room at his old patrons and give them a meaningful wink. Perhaps there was also something of the same resentment at being erroneously supposed to be less “smart” and unable to explain that they were more, at the bottom of the “Fine specimen!” with which they referred to a young toff, the consumptive and dissipated son of an industrial magnate, who appeared every day in a new suit of clothes with an orchid in his buttonhole, drank champagne at luncheon, and then went off to the Casino, pale, impassive, a smile of complete indifference on his lips, to throw away at the baccarat table enormous sums “which he could ill afford to lose,” as the notary said with a knowing air to the senior judge, whose wife had it “on good authority” that this “decadent” young man was bringing his parents’ grey hair in sorrow to the grave.

Furthermore, the president and his friends were inexhaustibly sarcastic on the subject of a wealthy old lady of title, because she never moved anywhere without taking her whole household with her. Whenever the wives of the notary and the judge saw her in the dining-room at meal-times, they put up their lorgnettes and gave her an insolent scrutiny, as meticulous and distrustful as if she had been some dish with a pretentious name but a suspicious appearance which, after the adverse result of a systematic study, is sent away with a lofty wave of the hand and a grimace of disgust.

No doubt by this behaviour they meant only to show that, if there were things in the world which they themselves lacked—in this instance, certain prerogatives which the old lady enjoyed, and the privilege of her acquaintance—it was not because they could not, but because they did not choose to acquire them. But they had ended up by convincing themselves that this really was what they felt; and the suppression of all desire for, of all curiosity about, ways of life which are unfamiliar, of all hope of endearing oneself to new people, for which, in these women, had been substituted a feigned contempt, a spurious jubilation, had the disagreeable effect of obliging them to label their discontent satisfaction and to lie ever-lastingly to themselves, two reasons why they were unhappy. But everyone else in the hotel was no doubt behaving in a similar fashion, though under different forms, and sacrificing, if not to self-esteem, at any rate to certain inculcated principles or mental habits, the disturbing thrill of being involved in an unfamiliar way of life. Of course the microcosm in which the old lady isolated herself was not poisoned with virulent rancour, as was the group in which the wives of the notary and the judge sat sneering with rage. It was indeed embalmed with a delicate and old-world fragrance which, however, was no less artificial. For at heart the old lady would probably have discovered, in attracting, in attaching to herself (and, in doing so, renewing herself) the mysterious sympathy of new people, a charm which is altogether lacking from the pleasure that is to be derived from mixing only with the people of one’s own world, and reminding oneself that, this being the best of all possible worlds, the ill-informed contempt of others may be disregarded. Perhaps she felt that if she arrived incognito at the Grand Hotel, Balbec, she would, in her black woollen dress and old-fashioned bonnet, bring a smile to the lips of some old reprobate, who from the depths of his rocking chair would glance up and murmur, “What a scarecrow!” or, still worse, to those of some worthy man who had, like the judge, kept between his pepper-and-salt whiskers a fresh complexion and a pair of sparkling eyes such as she liked to see, and who would at once bring the magnifying lens of the conjugal glasses to bear upon so quaint a phenomenon; and perhaps it was in unconscious apprehension of those first few minutes which one knows will be brief but which are none the less dreaded—like one’s first header into the sea—that this lady sent a servant down in advance to inform the hotel of the personality and habits of his mistress, and, cutting short the manager’s greetings with an abruptness in which there was more shyness than pride, made straight for her room, where her own curtains, replacing those that draped the hotel windows, her own screens and photographs, set up so effectively between her and the outside world, to which otherwise she would have had to adapt herself, the barrier of her private life and habits, that it was her home (in the cocoon of which she had remained) that travelled rather than herself.

Thenceforward, having placed, between herself on the one hand and the hotel staff and the tradesmen on the other, her own servants who bore instead of her the shock of contact with all this strange humanity and kept up the familiar atmosphere around their mistress, having set her prejudices between herself and the other visitors, indifferent whether or not she gave offence to people whom her friends would not have had in their houses, it was in her own world that she continued to live, by correspondence with her friends, by memories, by her intimate awareness of her own position, the quality of her manners, the adroitness of her courtesy. And every day, when she came downstairs to go for a drive in her own carriage, the lady’s-maid who came after her carrying her wraps, and the footman who preceded her, seemed like sentries who, at the gate of an embassy, flying the flag of the country to which she belonged, assured to her upon foreign soil the privilege of extra-territoriality. She did not leave her room until the middle of the afternoon on the day after our arrival, so that we did not see her in the dining-room, into which the manager, since we were newcomers, conducted us at the lunch hour, taking us under his wing, as a corporal takes a squad of recruits to the master-tailor to have them fitted; we did however see a moment later a country squire and his daughter, of an obscure but very ancient Breton family, M. and Mlle de Stermaria, whose table had been allotted to us in the belief that they had gone out and would not be back until the evening. Having come to Balbec only to see various owners of manors whom they knew in that neighbourhood, they spent in the hotel dining-room, what with the invitations they accepted and the visits they paid, only such time as was strictly unavoidable. It was their haughtiness that preserved them intact from all human sympathy, from arousing the least interest in the strangers seated round about them, among whom M. de Stermaria kept up the glacial, preoccupied, distant, stiff, touchy and ill-intentioned air that we assume in a railway refreshment-room in the midst of fellow-passengers whom we have never seen before and will never see again, and with whom we can conceive of no other relations than to defend from their onslaught our cold chicken and our corner seat in the train. No sooner had we begun our lunch than we were asked to leave the table on the instructions of M. de Stermaria who had just arrived and, without the faintest attempt at an apology to us, requested the head waiter in our hearing to see that such a mistake did not occur again, for it was repugnant to him that “people whom he did not know” should have taken his table.

And certainly the feeling which impelled a young actress (better known in fact for her smart clothes, her wit, her collection of German porcelain, than for the occasional parts that she had played at the Odéon), her lover, an immensely rich young man for whose sake she had acquired her culture, and two sprigs of the aristocracy at that time much in the public eye, to form an exclusive group, to travel only together, to come down to luncheon—when at Balbec—very late, after everyone else had finished, to spend the whole day in their sitting-room playing cards, reflected no sort of ill-will towards the rest of us but simply the requirements of the taste that they had formed for a certain type of witty conversation, for certain refinements of good living, which made them find pleasure in spending their time, in taking their meals, only by themselves, and would have rendered intolerable a life in common with people who had not been initiated. Even at a dinner-table or a card table, each of them had to be certain that in the diner or partner who sat opposite to him there were, latent and in abeyance, a certain brand of knowledge which would enable him to identify the rubbish which so many houses in Paris boast of as genuine mediaeval or Renaissance “pieces” and, whatever the subject of discussion, criteria common to them all wherewith to distinguish the good from the bad. No doubt by now, at such moments, it was merely by some rare and amusing interjection flung into the general silence of meal or game, or by the new and charming frock which the young actress had put on for lunch or for poker, that the special kind of existence in which these four friends desired everywhere to remain plunged was made apparent. But by engulfing them thus in a system of habits which they knew by heart it sufficed to protect them from the mystery of the life that was going on all round them. All the long afternoon, the sea was suspended there before their eyes only as a canvas of attractive colouring might hang on the wall of a wealthy bachelor’s flat, and it was only in the intervals between hands that one of the players, finding nothing better to do, raised his eyes to it to seek some indication of the weather or the time, and to remind the others that tea was ready. And at night they did not dine in the hotel, where, hidden springs of electricity flooding the great dining-room with light, it became as it were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose glass wall the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen’s families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch the luxurious life of its occupants gently floating upon the golden eddies within, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social question, this: whether the glass wall will always protect the banquets of these weird and wonderful creatures, or whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them). Meanwhile, perhaps, amid the dumbfounded stationary crowd out there in the dark, there may have been some writer, some student of human ichthyology, who, as he watched the jaws of old feminine monstrosities close over a mouthful of submerged food, was amusing himself by classifying them by race, by innate characteristics, as well as by those acquired characteristics which bring it about that an old Serbian lady whose buccal appendage is that of a great sea-fish, because from her earliest years she has moved in the fresh waters of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, eats her salad for all the world like a La Rochefoucauld.