In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (38 page)

The train for Paris started, without M. de Charlus. Then Albertine and I took our seats in our own train, without my discovering what had become of M. de Charlus and Morel. “We must never quarrel any more, I beg your pardon again,” Albertine said to me, alluding to the Saint-Loup incident. “We must always be nice to each other,” she added tenderly. “As for your friend Saint-Loup, if you think that I’m the least bit interested in him, you’re quite mistaken. All that I like about him is that he seems so very fond of you.” “He’s a very good fellow,” I said, taking care not to attribute to Robert those imaginary excellences which I should not have failed to invent, out of friendship for him, had I been with anybody but Albertine. “He’s an excellent creature, frank, devoted, loyal, someone you can rely on in any circumstances.” In saying this I confined myself, restrained by my jealousy, to speaking the truth about Saint-Loup, but what I said was indeed the truth. But it expressed itself in precisely the same terms as Mme de Villeparisis had used in speaking to me of him, when I did not yet know him, imagined him to be so different, so proud, and said to myself: “People think him kind because he’s a blue-blooded nobleman.”In the same way, when she had said to me: “He would be so pleased,” I thought to myself, after seeing him outside the hotel preparing to take the reins, that his aunt’s words had been mere social banality, intended to flatter me. And I had realised afterwards that she had spoken sincerely, thinking of the things that interested me, of my reading, and because she knew that that was what Saint-Loup liked, as it was later to happen to me to say sincerely to somebody who was writing a history of his ancestor La Rochefoucauld, the author of the
Maximes
, and wished to consult Robert about him: “He will be so pleased.” It was simply that I had learned to know him. But, when I set eyes on him for the first time, I had not supposed that an intelligence akin to my own could be enveloped in so much outward elegance of dress and attitude. By his feathers I had judged him to be a bird of another species. It was Albertine now who, perhaps a little because Saint-Loup, out of kindness to myself, had been so cold to her, said to me what I had once thought: “Ah, he’s as devoted as all that! I notice that people are invariably credited with all the virtues when they belong to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” And yet, the fact that Saint-Loup belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain was something I had never once thought of again in the course of all these years in which, stripping himself of his prestige, he had demonstrated his virtues to me. Such a change of perspective in looking at other people, more striking already in friendship than in merely social relations, is all the more striking still in love, where desire so enlarges the scale, so magnifies the proportions of the slightest signs of coldness, that it had required far less than Saint-Loup had shown at first sight for me to believe myself disdained at first by Albertine, to imagine her friends as fabulously inhuman creatures, and to ascribe Elstir’s judgment, when he said to me of the little band with exactly the same sentiment as Mme de Villeparisis speaking of Saint-Loup: “They’re good girls,” simply to the indulgence people have for beauty and a certain elegance. Yet was this not the verdict I would automatically have expressed when I heard Albertine say: “In any case, whether he’s devoted or not, I sincerely hope I shall never see him again, since he’s made us quarrel. We must never quarrel again. It isn’t nice.” Since she had seemed to desire Saint-Loup, I felt more or less cured for the time being of the idea that she cared for women, assuming that the two things were irreconcilable. And, looking at Albertine’s mackintosh, in which she seemed to have become another person, the tireless vagrant of rainy days, and which, close-fitting, malleable and grey, seemed at that moment not so much intended to protect her clothes from the rain as to have been soaked by it and to be clinging to her body as though to take the imprint of her form for a sculptor, I tore off that tunic which jealously enwrapped a longed-for breast and, drawing Albertine towards me:

“But won’t you, indolent traveller, rest your head

And dream your dreams upon my shoulder?”

I said, taking her head in my hands, and showing her the wide meadows, flooded and silent, which extended in the gathering dusk to a horizon closed by the parallel chains of distant blue hills.

Two days later, on the famous Wednesday, in that same little train which I had again taken at Balbec to go and dine at La Raspelière, I was extremely anxious not to miss Cottard at Graincourt-Saint-Vast, where a second telephone message from Mme Verdurin had told me that I should find him. He was to join my train and would tell me where we had to get out to pick up the carriages that would be sent from La Raspelière to the station. And so, as the little train stopped for only a moment at Graincourt, the first station after Doncières, I had posted myself in readiness at the open window for fear of not seeing Cottard or of his not seeing me. Vain fears! I had not realised to what an extent the little clan had moulded all its regular members after the same type, so that, as they stood waiting on the platform, being moreover in full evening dress, they were immediately recognisable by a certain air of assurance, elegance and familiarity, by a look in their eyes which seemed to sweep across the serried ranks of the common herd as across an empty space in which there was nothing to arrest their attention, watching for the arrival of some fellow-member who had taken the train at an earlier station, and sparkling in anticipation of the talk that was to come. This sign of election, with which the habit of dining together had marked the members of the little group, was not all that distinguished them when they were massed together in full strength, forming a more brilliant patch in the midst of the troop of passengers—what Brichot called the
pecus
, the herd—upon whose drab faces could be discerned no notion relating to the name Verdurin, no hope of ever dining at La Raspelière. To be sure, these common travellers would have been less interested than myself—notwithstanding the fame that several of the faithful had achieved—had anyone quoted in their hearing the names of these men whom I was astonished to see continuing to dine out when many of them had already been doing so, according to the stories that I had heard, before my birth, at a period at once so distant and so vague that I was inclined to exaggerate its remoteness. The contrast between the continuance not only of their existence, but of the fullness of their powers, and the obliteration of so many friends whom I had already seen vanish here or there, gave me the same feeling that we experience when in the stop-press column of the newspapers we read the very announcement that we least expected, for instance that of an untimely death, which seems to us fortuitous because the causes that have led up to it have remained outside our knowledge. This is the feeling that death does not descend uniformly upon all men, but that a more advanced wave of its tragic tide carries off a life situated at the same level as others which the waves that follow will long continue to spare. We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers. Then I saw that, with the passage of time, not only do real talents that may coexist with the most commonplace conversation reveal and impose themselves, but furthermore that mediocre persons arrive at those exalted positions, attached in the imagination of our childhood to certain famous elders, when it never occurred to us that a certain number of years later, their disciples, now become masters, would be famous too, and would inspire the respect and awe that they themselves once felt. But if the names of the faithful were unknown to the
pecus
, their aspect still singled them out in its eyes. Even in the train, when the coincidence of what they had been doing during the day assembled them all together, and they had only one isolated companion to collect at a subsequent station, the carriage in which they were gathered, designated by the sculptor Ski’s elbow, flagged by Cottard’s
Temps
, stood out from a distance like a special saloon, and rallied at the appointed station the tardy comrade. The only one who, because of his semi-blindness, might have missed these welcoming signals was Brichot. But one of the party would always volunteer to keep a look-out for him, and, as soon as his straw hat, his green umbrella and blue spectacles had been spotted, he would be gently but hastily guided towards the chosen compartment. So that it was inconceivable that one of the faithful, without exciting the gravest suspicions of his being “on the spree,” or even of his not having come by the train, should not pick up the others in the course of the journey. Sometimes the opposite process occurred: one of the faithful might have had to go some distance down the line during the afternoon and would be obliged in consequence to make part of the journey alone before being joined by the group; but even when thus isolated, alone of his kind, he did not fail as a rule to produce a certain effect. The Future towards which he was travelling marked him out to the person on the seat opposite, who would say to himself “He must be somebody,” and with the dim perspicacity of the travellers of Emmaus would discern a vague halo round the trilby of Cottard or of the sculptor Ski, and would be only half-astonished when at the next station an elegant crowd, if it were their terminal point, greeted the faithful one at the carriage door and escorted him to one of the waiting vehicles, all of them receiving a deep bow from the factotum of Douville station, or, if it were an intermediate station, invaded the compartment. This was what now occurred, with some precipitation, for several had arrived late, just as the train which was already in the station was about to start, with the troupe which Cottard led at the double towards the carriage at the window of which he had seen me signalling. Brichot, who was among this group of the faithful, had become more faithful than ever in the course of these years which had diminished the assiduity of others. As his sight became steadily weaker, he had been obliged, even in Paris, to reduce more and more his work after dark. Besides, he was out of sympathy with the modern Sorbonne, where ideas of scientific exactitude, after the German model, were beginning to prevail over humanism. He now confined himself exclusively to his lectures and to his duties as an examiner; hence he had a great deal more time to devote to social pursuits, that is to say to evenings at the Verdurins’, or to those that now and again were given for the Verdurins by one or other of the faithful, tremulous with emotion. It is true that on two occasions love had almost succeeded in achieving what his work could no longer do: in detaching Brichot from the little clan. But Mme Verdurin, who “kept a weather eye open,” and moreover, having acquired the habit in the interests of her salon, had come to take a disinterested pleasure in this sort of drama and execution, had brought about an irremediable breach between him and the dangerous person, being skilled (as she put it) at “putting things in order” and “stopping the rot.” This she had found all the easier in the case of one of the dangerous persons in that the latter was simply Brichot’s laundress, and Mme Verdurin, having free access to the fifth-floor rooms of the Professor, who was crimson with pride whenever she deigned to climb his stairs, had only had to throw the wretched woman out. “What!” the Mistress had said to Brichot, “a woman like myself does you the honour of calling upon you, and you entertain a creature like that?” Brichot had never forgotten the service that Mme Verdurin had rendered him by preventing his old age from foundering in the mire, and became more and more attached to her, whereas, in contrast to this renewal of affection and possibly because of it, the Mistress was beginning to be tired of this too docile follower of whose obedience she could be certain in advance. But Brichot acquired from his intimacy with the Verdurins a glamour which set him apart from all his colleagues at the Sorbonne. They were dazzled by the accounts that he gave them of dinner-parties to which they would never be invited, by the mention made of him in the reviews, or the portrait of him exhibited in the Salon, by some writer or painter of repute whose talent the occupants of the other chairs in the Faculty of Letters esteemed but whose attention they had no prospect of attracting, and in particular by the elegance of the mundane philosopher’s attire, an elegance which they had mistaken at first for slovenliness until their colleague had benevolently explained to them that a top hat could quite acceptably be placed on the floor when one was paying a call and was not the right thing for dinners in the country, however smart, where it should be replaced by a trilby, which was perfectly all right with a dinner-jacket.

For the first few moments after the little group had swept into the carriage, I could not even speak to Cottard, for he was completely breathless, not so much from having run in order not to miss the train as from astonishment at having caught it at the last second. He felt more than the joy of success, almost the hilarity of a merry prank. “Ah! that was a good one!” he said when he had recovered himself. “A minute later! ‘Pon my soul, that’s what they call arriving in the nick of time!” he added with a wink, intended not so much to inquire whether the expression was apt, for he now overflowed with confidence, but to express his self-satisfaction. At length he was able to introduce me to the other members of the little clan. I was dismayed to see that they were almost all in the dress which in Paris is called a “smoking.” I had forgotten that the Verdurins were beginning to make tentative moves in the direction of fashionable ways, moves which, slowed down by the Dreyfus case, accelerated by the “new” music, they in fact denied, and would continue to deny until they were complete, like those military objectives which a general does not announce until he has reached them, so as not to appear defeated if he fails. Society for its part was quite prepared to go half-way to meet them. At the moment it had reached the point of regarding them as people to whose house nobody in Society went but who were not in the least perturbed by the fact. The Verdurin salon was understood to be a Temple of Music. It was there, people affirmed, that Vinteuil had found inspiration and encouragement. And although Vinteuil’s sonata remained wholly unappreciated and almost unknown, his name, referred to as that of the greatest contemporary composer, enjoyed an extraordinary prestige. Finally, certain young men of the Faubourg having decided that they ought to be as well educated as the middle classes, three of them had studied music and among these Vinteuil’s sonata enjoyed an enormous vogue. They would speak of it, on returning to their homes, to the intelligent mothers who had encouraged them to improve their minds. And, taking an interest in their sons’ studies, these mothers would gaze with a certain respect at Mme Verdurin in her front box at concerts, following the music from the score. So far, this latent social success of the Verdurins had expressed itself in two facts only. In the first place, Mme Verdurin would say of the Princesse de Caprarola: “Ah! she’s intelligent, that one, she’s a charming woman. What I cannot endure are the imbeciles, the people who bore me—they drive me mad.” Which would have made anybody at all perspicacious realise that the Princesse de Caprarola, a woman who moved in the highest society, had called upon Mme Verdurin. She had even mentioned the Verdurins’ name in the course of a visit of condolence which she had paid to Mme Swann after the death of her husband, and had asked whether she knew them. “What name did you say?” Odette had asked with sudden wistfulness. “Verdurin? Oh, yes, of course,” she had continued glumly, “I don’t know them, or rather, I know them without really knowing them, they’re people I used to meet with friends years ago, they’re quite nice.” When the Princesse de Caprarola had gone, Odette regretted not having told the bare truth. But the immediate falsehood was not the fruit of her calculations, but the revelation of her fears and her desires. She denied not what it would have been adroit to deny, but what she would have liked not to be the case, even if her interlocutor was bound to hear an hour later that it was indeed the case. A little later she had recovered her self-assurance, and would even anticipate questions by saying, so as not to appear to be afraid of them: “Mme Verdurin, why, I used to know her terribly well,” with an affectation of humility, like a great lady who tells you that she has taken the tram. “There has been a great deal of talk about the Verdurins lately,” Mme de Souvré would remark. Odette, with the smiling disdain of a duchess, would reply: “Yes, I do seem to have heard a lot about them lately. Every now and then there are new people like that who arrive in society,” without reflecting that she herself was among the newest. “The Princesse de Caprarola has dined there,” Mme de Souvré would continue. “Ah!” Odette would reply, accentuating her smile, “that doesn’t surprise me. That sort of thing always begins with the Princesse de Caprarola, and then someone else follows suit, like Comtesse Molé.” Odette, in saying this, appeared to be filled with a profound contempt for the two great ladies who made a habit of “house-warming” in recently established salons. One felt from her tone that the implication was that she, Odette, like Mme de Souvré, was not the sort of person to let herself in for that sort of thing.