In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (7 page)

Among the people to whom this sort of marriage appeared ridiculous, people who in their own case would ask themselves, “What will M. de Guermantes think, what will Bréauté say, when I marry Mlle de Montmorency?”, among the people who cherished that sort of social ideal, would have figured, twenty years earlier, Swann himself, the Swann who had taken endless pains to get himself elected to the Jockey Club and had reckoned at that time on making a brilliant marriage which, by consolidating his position, would have made him one of the most prominent figures in Paris. However, the visions which such a marriage suggests to the mind of the interested party need, like all visions, if they are not to fade away and be altogether lost, to receive sustenance from without. Your most ardent longing is to humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if you never hear of him any more, having removed to some other place, your enemy will come to have no longer the slightest importance to you. If for twenty years one has lost sight of all the people on whose account one would have liked to be elected to the Jockey Club or the Institute, the prospect of becoming a member of one or other of those establishments will have ceased to tempt one. Now, fully as much as retirement, ill-health or religious conversion, a protracted love affair will substitute fresh visions for the old. There was no renunciation on Swann’s part, when he married Odette, of his social ambitions, for from those ambitions Odette had long ago, in the spiritual sense of the word, detached him. Besides, had he not been so detached, his marriage would have been all the more creditable. It is because they entail the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, ignominious marriages are the most estimable of all. (One cannot very well include among ignominious marriages those that are made for money, there being no instance on record of a couple, of whom the wife or else the husband has thus sold himself, who have not sooner or later been admitted into society, if only by tradition, and on the strength of so many precedents, and so as not to have, as it were, one law for the rich and another for the poor.) Perhaps, on the other hand, the artistic, if not the perverse side of Swann’s nature would in any event have derived a certain pleasure from coupling himself, in one of those crossings of species such as Mendelians practise and mythology records, with a creature of a different race, archduchess or prostitute—from contracting a royal alliance or marrying beneath him. There had been but one person in all the world whose opinion he took into consideration whenever he thought of his possible marriage with Odette; this was, and from no snobbish motive, the Duchesse de Guermantes—with whom Odette, on the contrary, was but little concerned, thinking only of those people whose position was immediately above her own rather than in so vague an empyrean. But when Swann in his day-dreams saw Odette as already his wife he invariably pictured to himself the moment when he would take her—her, and above all his daughter—to call upon the Princesse des Laumes (who was shortly, on the death of her father-in-law, to become Duchesse de Guermantes). He had no desire to introduce them anywhere else, but his heart would soften as he imagined—articulating to himself their actual words—all the things that the Duchess would say of him to Odette, and Odette to the Duchess, the affection that she would show for Gilberte, spoiling her, making him proud of his child. He enacted to himself the scene of this introduction with the same precision in each of its imaginary details that people show when they consider how they would spend, supposing they were to win it, a lottery prize the amount of which they have arbitrarily determined. In so far as a mental picture which accompanies one of our resolutions may be said to motivate it, so it might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to introduce her, together with Gilberte, without anyone else being present, without, if need be, anyone else ever coming to know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. We shall see how this sole social ambition that he had entertained for his wife and daughter was precisely the one whose realisation proved to be forbidden him, by a veto so absolute that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess could never come to know them. We shall see too that, on the contrary, the Duchesse de Guermantes did strike up a friendship with Odette and Gilberte after Swann’s death. And doubtless he would have been wiser—in so far as he could attach such importance to so small a matter—not to have formed too dark a picture of the future in this connexion, but to have consoled himself with the hope that the desired meeting might indeed take place when he was no longer there to enjoy it. The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one had believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, and was there not already in his lifetime—as it were a prefiguration of what was to happen after his death—a posthumous happiness in this marriage with Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she had not attracted him at first sight—whom he had married when he no longer loved her, when the person who, in Swann, had so longed to live and so despaired of living all his life with Odette, when that person was dead?

I began to talk about the Comte de Paris, to ask whether he was not one of Swann’s friends, for I was afraid lest the conversation should drift away from him. “Why, yes!” replied M. de Norpois, turning towards me and fixing upon my modest person the azure gaze in which there floated, as in their vital element, his immense capacity for work and his power of assimilation. “And upon my word,” he added, once more addressing my father, “I do not think that I shall be over-stepping the bounds of the respect which I have always professed for the Prince (without, however, maintaining any personal relations with him, which would inevitably compromise my position, unofficial though it may now be) if I tell you of a little episode which is not unintriguing. No more than four years ago, at a small railway station in one of the countries of Central Europe, the Prince happened to set eyes on Mme Swann. Naturally, none of his circle ventured to ask His Royal Highness what he thought of her. That would not have been seemly. But when her name came up by chance in conversation, by certain signs—barely perceptible, if you like, but quite unmistakable—the Prince appeared willing enough to let it be understood that his impression of her had on the whole been far from unfavourable.”

“But there could have been no possibility, surely, of her being presented to the Comte de Paris?” inquired my father.

“Well, we don’t know; with princes one never does know,” replied M. de Norpois. “The most exalted, those who know best how to secure what is due to them, are as often as not the last to let themselves be embarrassed by the decrees of popular opinion, even by those for which there is most justification, especially when it is a question of their rewarding a personal attachment to themselves. And it is certain that the Comte de Paris has always most graciously acknowledged the devotion of Swann, who is moreover a man of wit if ever there was one.”

“And what was your own impression, Your Excellency?” my mother asked, from politeness as well as from curiosity.

All the vigour of an old connoisseur broke through the habitual moderation of his speech as he answered: “Quite excellent!”

And knowing that the admission that a strong impression has been made on one by a woman takes its place, provided that one makes it in a playful tone, in a certain form of the art of conversation that is highly appreciated, he broke into a little laugh that lasted for several moments, moistening the old diplomat’s blue eyes and making his nostrils, with their network of tiny scarlet veins, quiver. “She is altogether charming!”

“Was there a writer of the name of Bergotte at this dinner, Monsieur?” I asked timidly, still trying to keep the conversation to the subject of the Swanns.

“Yes, Bergotte was there,” replied M. de Norpois, inclining his head courteously towards me, as though in his desire to be agreeable to my father he attached to everything connected with him a genuine importance, even to the questions of a boy of my age who was not accustomed to see such politeness shown to him by persons of his. “Do you know him?” he went on, fastening on me that clear gaze the penetration of which had won the admiration of Bismarck.

“My son does not know him, but he admires his work immensely,” my mother explained.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed M. de Norpois, inspiring me with doubts of my own intelligence far graver than those that ordinarily tormented me, when I saw that what I valued a thousand times more than myself, what I regarded as the most exalted thing in the world, was for him at the bottom of the scale of admiration, “I do not share your son’s point of view. Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, there’s no more to it than that, and that is not much. Nowhere does one find in his flaccid works what one might call structure. No action—or very little—but above all no range. His books fail at the foundation, or rather they have no foundation at all. At a time like the present, when the ever-increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations and is on the eve, perhaps, of undergoing others more drastic still, when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side, you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something more than a clever fellow who lulls us into forgetting, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner. I don’t deny that Bergotte’s manner can be quite seductive at times, but taken as a whole, it is all very precious, very thin, and altogether lacking in virility. I can now understand more easily, when I bear in mind your altogether excessive regard for Bergotte, the few lines that you showed me just now, which it would be ungracious of me not to overlook, since you yourself told me in all simplicity that they were merely a childish scribble.” (I had indeed said so, but I did not mean a word of it.) “For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth. After all, others as well as yourself have such sins upon their conscience, and you are not the only one who has believed himself a poet in his idle moments. But one can see in what you showed me the unfortunate influence of Bergotte. You will not, of course, be surprised when I say that it had none of his qualities, since he is a past-master in the art—entirely superficial by the by—of handling a certain style of which, at your age, you cannot have acquired even the rudiments. But already there is the same fault, that nonsense of stringing together fine-sounding words and only afterwards troubling about what they mean. That is putting the cart before the horse. Even in Bergotte’s books, all those Chinese puzzles of form, all those subtleties of a deliquescent mandarin seem to me to be quite futile. Given a few fireworks let off prettily enough by an author, and up goes the shout of masterpiece. Masterpieces are not so common as all that! Bergotte cannot place to his credit—does not carry in his baggage, if I may use the expression—a single novel that is at all lofty in its conception, one of those books which one keeps in a special corner of one’s library. I cannot think of one such in the whole of his work. But that does not mean that, in his case, the work is not infinitely superior to the author. Ah! there’s a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an individual who corresponded less to his—more pretentious, more pompous, more ill-bred. Vulgar at times, at others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not—such is your Bergotte. He has the most confused and convoluted mind, what our forebears called sesquipedalian, and he makes the things that he says even more unpleasing by the manner in which he says them. I forget for the moment whether it is Loménie or Sainte-Beuve who tells us that Vigny repelled people by the same failing. But Bergotte has never given us a
Cinq-Mars
, or a
Cachet rouge
, certain pages of which are veritable anthology pieces.”

Shattered by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an essay or merely to devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious once again of my intellectual nullity and that I was not cut out for the literary life. Doubtless in the old days at Combray certain impressions of a very humble order, or a few pages of Bergotte, had plunged me into a state of reverie which had appeared to me to be of great value. But this state was what my prose poem reflected; there could be no doubt that M. de Norpois had at once grasped and seen through the fallacy of what I had thought to be beautiful simply through a deceptive mirage, since the Ambassador had not been taken in by it. He had shown me, on the contrary, what an infinitely unimportant place was mine when I was judged from outside, objectively, by the best-disposed and most intelligent of experts. I felt dismayed, diminished; and my mind, like a fluid which is without dimensions save those of the vessel that is provided for it, just as it had expanded in the past to fill the vast capacity of genius, contracted now, was entirely contained within the straitened mediocrity in which M. de Norpois had of a sudden enclosed and sealed it.