In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (58 page)

I ought here to add that this insignificance into which the most serious matters relapsed, by contrast with the violence of my exaltation, came in the end to include Mlle Simonet and her friends. The enterprise of knowing them seemed to me easy now but a matter of indifference, for my immediate sensation, thanks to its extraordinary intensity, to the joy that its slightest modifications, its mere continuity provoked, alone had any importance for me; all the rest, parents, work, pleasures, girls at Balbec, weighed no more than a flake of foam in a strong wind that will not let it find a resting place, existed no longer save in relation to this internal power: inebriation brings about for an hour or two a state of subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; everything is reduced to appearances and exists only as a function of our sublime self. This is not to say that a genuine love, if we have one, cannot subsist in such a state. But we feel so unmistakably, as though in a new atmosphere, that unknown pressures have altered the dimensions of that love, that we can no longer consider it in the old way. It is indeed still there, but somehow displaced, no longer weighing upon us, satisfied by the sensation which the present affords it, a sensation that is sufficient for us, since for what is not the here and now we take no thought. Unfortunately the coefficient which thus alters our values alters them only during that hour of intoxication. The people who were no longer of any importance, whom we scattered with our breath like soap-bubbles, will tomorrow resume their density; we shall have to try afresh to settle down to work which had ceased to have any meaning. A more serious matter still, these mathematics of the morrow, the same as those of yesterday, in whose problems we shall find ourselves inexorably involved, govern us even during those hours, and we alone are unconscious of their rule. If there is a hostile or virtuous woman in our vicinity, that question so difficult an hour ago—to know whether we should succeed in finding favour with her—seems to us now a million times easier of solution without having become easier in any respect, for it is only in our eyes, in our own inward eyes, that we have altered. And she is as displeased with us at this moment for having taken a liberty with her as we shall be with ourselves next day at the thought of having given a hundred francs to the bell-hop, and for the same reason, which in our case has merely been delayed, namely the absence of intoxication.

I knew none of the women who were at Rivebelle and who, because they were part and parcel of my intoxication just as its reflexions are part and parcel of a mirror, appeared to me a thousand times more desirable than the less and less existent Mlle Simonet. One of them, young, fair, alone, with a sad expression on a face framed in a straw hat trimmed with field-flowers, gazed at me for a moment with a dreamy air and struck me as being attractive. Then it was the turn of another, and of a third; finally of a dark one with glowing cheeks. Almost all of them were known, if not to myself, to Saint-Loup.

He had, in fact, before he made the acquaintance of his present mistress, lived so much in the restricted world of amorous adventure that of all the women who were dining on those evenings at Rivebelle, where many of them had appeared quite by chance, having come to the coast some to join their lovers, others in the hope of finding lovers, there was scarcely one that he did not know from having spent—he himself, or one or other of his friends—at least one night with her. He did not greet them if they were with men, and they, although they looked more at him than at anyone else because the indifference which he was known to feel towards every woman who was not his actress gave him in their eyes a special glamour, appeared not to know him. But you could hear them whispering: “That’s young Saint-Loup. It seems he’s still quite gone on that tart of his. It’s true love! What a handsome fellow he is! I think he’s just wonderful. And what style! Some women have all the luck, don’t they? And he’s so nice in every way. I saw a lot of him when I was with d’Orléans. They were quite inseparable, those two. He was going the pace in those days. But he’s given it all up now, she can’t complain. Ah! she can certainly consider herself lucky. I wonder what in the world he sees in her. He must be a bit of a chump, when all’s said and done. She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. I can tell you, a little shop-girl would be ashamed to be seen in her knickers. Do just look at his eyes a moment: you’d go to hell for a man like that. Hush, don’t say a word; he’s seen me; look, he’s smiling. Oh, he knew me all right. Just you mention my name to him, and see what he says!” Between these women and him I caught a glance of mutual understanding. I should have liked him to introduce me to them, so that I might ask them for assignations which they would grant me, even if I was unable to keep them. For otherwise each of their faces would remain for all time devoid, in my memory, of that part of itself—just as though it had been hidden by a veil—which varies in every woman, which we cannot imagine in any woman until we have actually seen it in her, and which appears only in the look she gives us that acquiesces in our desire and promises that it shall be satisfied. And yet, even thus reduced, their faces meant far more to me than those of women whom I knew to be virtuous, and did not seem to me to be flat, like theirs, with nothing behind them, fashioned in one piece with no depth or solidity. It was not, of course, for me what it must be for Saint-Loup who, by an act of memory, beneath the indifference, transparent to him, of the motionless features which affected not to know him, or beneath the dull formality of the greeting that might equally well have been addressed to anyone else, could recall, could see, dishevelled locks, a convulsed mouth, a pair of half-closed eyes, a whole silent picture like those that painters, to deceive the bulk of their visitors, drape with a decent covering. For me, who felt that nothing of my personality had penetrated the surface of any one of these women, or would be borne by her upon the unknown ways which she would tread through life, these faces remained sealed. But it was enough for me to know that they did open in order for them to seem to me to be more precious than I should have thought them had they been only handsome medals instead of lockets within which memories of love were hidden. As for Robert, scarcely able to keep his seat at table, concealing beneath a courtier’s smile his warrior’s thirst for action—when I looked at him closely I could see to what extent the vigorous bone structure of his triangular face must have been modelled on that of his ancestors, a face designed rather for an ardent bowman than for a sensitive man of letters. Beneath the delicate skin the bold construction, the feudal architecture were apparent. His head reminded one of those old castle keeps on which the disused battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been converted into libraries.

On the way back to Balbec, of this or that charmer to whom he had introduced me I would repeat to myself without a moment’s interruption, and yet almost unconsciously: “What a delightful woman!” as one sings a refrain. True, these words were prompted rather by overexcitement than by any lasting judgment. It was nevertheless true that if I had had a thousand francs on me and if there had still been a jeweller’s shop open at that hour, I should have bought the unknown a ring. When the successive hours of our lives unfold as though on too widely disparate planes, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who next day will not interest us in the least. But we feel that we are still responsible for what we said to them overnight, and that we must honour our promises.

Since, on those evenings, I came back late, it was a pleasure to be reunited, in a room no longer hostile, with the bed in which, on the day of my arrival, I had supposed that it would always be impossible for me to find any rest, whereas now my weary limbs longed for its support; so that, one after the other, my thighs, my hips and my shoulders sought to adhere at every point to the sheets that covered its mattress, as if my fatigue, like a sculptor, had wished to take a cast of an entire human body. But I could not get to sleep; I sensed the approach of morning; peace of mind, health of body were no longer mine. In my distress it seemed to me that I should never recapture them. I should have had to sleep for a long time if I were to find them again. But then, had I begun to doze, I must in any event be awakened in a couple of hours by the symphony concert on the beach. Suddenly I fell asleep, plunged into that deep slumber in which vistas are opened to us of a return to childhood, the recapture of past years, and forgotten feelings, of disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the evoking of the dead, the illusions of madness, retrogression towards the most elementary of the natural kingdoms (for we say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein, deprived of that reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; on the contrary we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change the slide), all those mysteries which we imagine ourselves not to know and into which we are in reality initiated almost every night, as into the other great mystery of extinction and resurrection. Rendered more vagabond by the difficulty of digesting my Rivebelle dinner, the successive and flickering illumination of shadowy zones of my past made of me a person for whom the supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just been talking in my dream.

And then, even my own life was entirely hidden from me by a new scene, like the drop lowered right at the front of the stage before which, while the scene shifters are busy behind, actors appear in an interim turn. The turn in which I was now playing a part was in the manner of oriental tales; I retained no knowledge of my past or of myself, on account of the extreme proximity of this interposed scenery; I was merely a character receiving the bastinado and undergoing various punishments for a crime the nature of which I could not make out, though it was actually that of having drunk too much port. Suddenly I awoke and discovered that, thanks to a long sleep, I had not heard a note of the concert. It was already afternoon; I verified this by my watch after several efforts to sit up in bed, efforts fruitless at first and interrupted by backward falls on to my pillow, brief falls of the kind that are a sequel of sleep as of other forms of intoxication, whether due to wine or to convalescence; in any case, even before I had looked at the time, I was certain that it was past midday. Last night I had been nothing more than an empty vessel, weightless, and (since one must have been lying down in order to be able to sit up, and have been asleep to be able to keep silent) had been unable to refrain from moving about and talking, no longer had any stability, any centre of gravity; I had been set in motion and it seemed that I might have continued on my dreary course until I reached the moon. But if, while I slept, my eyes had not seen the time, my body had nevertheless contrived to calculate it, had measured the hours not on a dial superficially decorated with figures, but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished forces which, like a powerful clock, it had allowed, notch by notch, to descend from my brain into the rest of my body where they now accumulated as far as the top of my knees the unimpaired abundance of their store. If it is true that the sea was once upon a time our native element, in which we must plunge our blood to recover our strength, it is the same with oblivion, with mental nothingness; we seem then to absent ourselves for a few hours from time, but the forces which have gathered in that interval without being expended measure it by their quantity as accurately as the pendulum of the clock or the crumbling hillocks of the hour-glass. Moreover, one does not emerge more easily from such a sleep than from a prolonged spell of wakefulness, so strongly does everything tend to persist; and if it is true that certain narcotics make us sleep, to have slept for a long time is an even more potent narcotic, after which we have great difficulty in making ourselves wake up. Like a sailor who sees plainly the quay where he can moor his boat, still tossed by the waves, I had every intention of looking at the time and of getting up, but my body was constantly cast back upon the tide of sleep; the landing was difficult, and before I attained a position in which I could reach my watch and confront its time with that indicated by the wealth of accumulated materials which my exhausted limbs had at their disposal, I fell back two or three times more upon my pillow.

At length I could reach and read it: “Two o’clock in the afternoon!” I rang, but at once I plunged back into a sleep which this time must have lasted infinitely longer if I was to judge by the refreshment, the vision of an immense night outlived, which I experienced on awakening. And yet, since my awakening was caused by the entry of Françoise, and since her entry had been prompted by my ringing the bell, this second sleep which, it seemed to me, must have been longer than the other and had brought me so much well-being and forgetfulness, could not have lasted for more than half a minute.

My grandmother opened the door of my bedroom, and I asked her countless questions about the Legrandin family.

It is not enough to say that I had returned to tranquillity and health, for it was more than a mere interval of space that had divided them from me the day before; I had had all night long to struggle against a contrary tide, and then I not only found myself again in their presence, but they had once more entered into me. At certain definite and still somewhat painful points beneath the surface of my empty head which would one day be broken, letting my ideas dissolve for ever, those ideas had once again taken their proper place and resumed that existence by which hitherto, alas, they had failed to profit.

Once again I had escaped from the impossibility of sleeping, from the deluge, the shipwreck of my nervous storms. I no longer feared the threats that had loomed over me the evening before, when I was deprived of rest. A new life was opening before me; without making a single movement, for I was still shattered, although quite alert and well, I savoured my weariness with a light heart; it had isolated and broken the bones of my legs and arms, which I could feel assembled before me, ready to come together again, and which I would rebuild merely by singing, like the architect in the fable.
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