In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (8 page)

“Our first introduction—I speak of Bergotte and myself,” he resumed, turning to my father, “was somewhat beset with thorns (which is, after all, only another way of saying that it was piquant). Bergotte—some years ago, now—paid a visit to Vienna while I was Ambassador there; he was introduced to me by the Princess Metternich, came and wrote his name in the Embassy book, and made it known that he wished to be invited. Now, being when abroad the representative of France, to which he has after all done some honour by his writings, to a certain extent (let us say, to be precise, to a very slight extent), I was prepared to set aside the unfavourable opinion that I hold of his private life. But he was not travelling alone, and moreover he let it be understood that he was not to be invited without his companion. I trust that I am no more of a prude than most men, and, being a bachelor, I was perhaps in a position to throw open the doors of the Embassy a little wider than if I had been married and the father of a family. Nevertheless, I confess that there are depths of ignominy to which I refuse to accommodate myself and which are made more repulsive still by the tone, more than just moral, but frankly moralising, that Bergotte adopts in his books, where one finds nothing but perpetual and, between ourselves, somewhat wearisome analyses, painful scruples, morbid remorse, and, for the merest peccadilloes, veritable preachifying (one knows what that’s worth), while all the time he is showing such frivolity and cynicism in his private life. To cut a long story short, I avoided answering, the Princess returned to the charge, but with no greater success. So that I do not suppose that I appear exactly in the odour of sanctity to the gentleman, and I am not sure how far he appreciated Swann’s kindness in inviting him and myself on the same evening. Unless of course it was he who asked for the invitation. One can never tell, for really he is a sick man. Indeed that is his sole excuse.”

“And was Mme Swann’s daughter at the dinner?” I asked M. de Norpois, taking advantage, to put this question, of a moment in which, as we all moved towards the drawing-room, I could more easily conceal my emotion than would have been possible at table, where I was held fast in the glare of the lamplight.

M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember:

“Ah, yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, of course, I remember now that she was introduced to me before dinner as the daughter of our Amphitryon. I’m afraid that I saw little of her; she retired to bed early. Or else she went out to see some friends—I forget which. But I can see that you are very intimate with the Swann household.”

“I play with Mlle Swann in the Champs-Elysées, and she’s delightful.”

“Oh! so that’s it? But I assure you, I too thought her charming. I must confess to you, however, that I do not believe that she will ever come anywhere near her mother, if I may say as much without hurting your feelings.”

“I prefer Mlle Swann’s face, but I admire her mother, too, enormously. I go for walks in the Bois simply in the hope of seeing her pass.”

“Ah! But I must tell them that; they will be highly flattered.”

While he was uttering these words, and for a few seconds after he had uttered them, M. de Norpois was still in the same position as anyone else who, hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his family as respectable stockbrokers, of his house as a fine house, imagined that I would speak just as readily of another man equally intelligent, of other stockbrokers equally respectable, of another house equally fine; it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that he is a lunatic. M. de Norpois knew that there is nothing unnatural in the pleasure one derives from looking at pretty women, that it is good manners, when someone speaks to you of a pretty woman with any warmth, to pretend to think that he is in love with her, and to promise to further his designs. But in saying that he would speak of me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like an Olympian deity who has taken on the fluidity of a breath of wind, or rather the aspect of the old greybeard whose form Minerva borrows, to insinuate myself, unseen, into Mme Swann’s drawing-room, to attract her attention, to occupy her thoughts, to arouse her gratitude for my admiration, to appear before her as the friend of an important person, to seem to her worthy to be invited by her in the future and to enter into the intimate life of her family), this important person who was going to use on my behalf the great influence which he must have with Mme Swann inspired in me suddenly an affection so compelling that I had difficulty in restraining myself from kissing his soft, white, wrinkled hands, which looked as though they had been left lying too long in water. I almost made as if to do so, in an impulsive movement which I believed that I alone had noticed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly the extent to which our words or gestures are apparent to others. Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the incidentals of our speech and of our postures scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom we converse. It is, no doubt, to a supposition of this sort that criminals yield when they touch up the wording of a statement already made, thinking that the new variant cannot be confronted with any existing version. But it is quite possible that, even with respect to the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is doomed to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the leader column says to us of an event, of a work of art,
a fortiori
of a singer who has enjoyed her “hour of fame”: “Who will remember this in ten years’ time?”, does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions overleaf speak often of a fact in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is still known in its entirety? Perhaps this does not quite hold true for the brief life of a human being. And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was also a guest there, seemed to me the most solid support that I could hope to find, because he was a friend of my father, indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and moreover, by profession and upbringing trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador had gone, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had “seen the moment in which I was about to kiss his hand,” not only did I blush to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how different from what I might have believed was not only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the composition of his memory. This piece of gossip enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of absence and presence of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness, of which the human mind is composed; and I was as marvellously surprised as on the day on which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero’s books, that there existed a precise list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite to his hunts a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

“Oh, Monsieur,” I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would inform Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, “if you would do that, if you would speak of me to Mme Swann my whole life would not be long enough to prove my gratitude, and that life would be all at your service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do not know Mme Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her.”

I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as not to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not possess. But as I uttered them I sensed that they were already superfluous, for from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its chilling ardour, I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of hesitation and displeasure, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to the invisible interlocutor whom one has within oneself at the moment when one is telling him something that one’s other interlocutor, the person to whom one has been talking up till then—myself, in this instance—is not meant to hear. I realised in a flash that the words I had pronounced, which, feeble as they were when measured against the flood of gratitude that was coursing through me, had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois and to confirm his decision upon an intervention which would have given him so little trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those that could have been chosen with diabolical malice by persons anxious to do me harm) the only ones that could result in his abandoning his intention. Indeed, on hearing them, in the same way as when a stranger with whom we have been pleasantly exchanging impressions which we might have supposed to be similar about passers-by whom we agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly as he feels his pocket: “What a pity I haven’t got my revolver with me; I could have picked off the lot of them,” M. de Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more simple than to be commended to Mme Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and must consequently be very difficult to obtain, thought that the desire I had expressed, though ostensibly normal, must cloak some different motive, some suspect intention, some prior transgression, on account of which, in the certainty of displeasing Mme Swann, no one had hitherto been willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I realised that this mission was one he would never discharge, that he might see Mme Swann daily, for years to come, without ever mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few days later, for some information which I required, and charged my father to convey it to me. But he had not thought fit to tell her on whose behalf he was inquiring. So she would never discover that I knew M. de Norpois and that I so longed to be asked to her house; and this was perhaps a lesser misfortune than I supposed. For the second of these discoveries would probably not have added much to the efficacy of the first, which was in any event dubious: for Odette, the idea of her own life and of her own home awakened no mysterious uneasiness, and a person who knew her, who came to her house, did not seem to her a fabulous creature such as he seemed to me who would have flung a stone through Swann’s windows if I could have written upon it that I knew M. de Norpois; I was convinced that such a message, even when transmitted in so brutal a fashion, would have given me far more prestige in the eyes of the lady of the house than it would have prejudiced her against me. But even if I had been capable of understanding that the mission which M. de Norpois did not perform must have remained futile, indeed that it might have damaged my credit with the Swanns, I should not have had the courage, had he proved himself willing, to relieve the Ambassador of it and to renounce the pleasure—however fatal its consequences might prove—of feeling that my name and my person were thus brought for a moment into Gilberte’s presence, into her unknown life and home.

After M. de Norpois had gone my father cast an eye over the evening paper, and I thought once more of Berma. The pleasure which I had experienced in listening to her required all the more to be reinforced in that it had fallen far short of what I had promised myself; and so it at once assimilated everything that was capable of giving it nourishment, for instance those merits which M. de Norpois had ascribed to her and which my mind had imbibed at a single draught, like a dry lawn when water is poured on it. Then my father handed me the newspaper, pointing out to me a paragraph which ran more or less as follows:—

The performance of
Phèdre
, given this afternoon before an enthusiastic audience which included the foremost representatives of the artistic and critical world, was for Mme Berma, who played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as any that she has known in the course of her phenomenal career. We shall return at greater length to this performance, which is indeed an event in the history of the stage; suffice it to say here that the best qualified judges were unanimous in declaring that this interpretation shed an entirely new light on the role of Phèdre, which is one of the finest and most complex of Racine’s creations, and that it constituted the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to witness.

As soon as my mind had conceived this new idea of “the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art,” it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, adding to it a little of what it lacked, and the combination formed something so exalting that I exclaimed to myself: “What a great artist!” It will doubtless be argued that I was not absolutely sincere. But let us bear in mind, rather, the countless writers who, dissatisfied with the passage they have just written, read some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been trying to express in their prose, and become so imbued with this idea of genius that they add it to their own productions when they return to them, no longer see them in the light in which they appeared at first, and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: “After all!” without taking into account that, into the total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to their own but which, after all, they did not write; let us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress who has done nothing but betray them; all those, too, who are sustained by the alternative hopes, on the one hand of an incomprehensible survival after death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy, and on the other of a reassuring void, when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise they must expiate after their death; let us bear in mind also the travellers who come home enraptured by the over-all splendour of a journey from which day by day they experienced nothing but tedium; and let us then declare whether, in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that makes us most happy which has not first sought, like a real parasite, and won from an alien but neighbouring idea the greater part of the strength that it originally lacked.