In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (19 page)

Sometimes in those last days of winter we would go, before proceeding
on our expedition, into one of the small picture–shows that were being
given at that time, where Swann, as a collector of mark, was greeted
with special deference by the dealers in whose galleries they were
held. And in that still wintry weather the old longing to set out for
the South of France and Venice would be reawakened in me by those
rooms in which a springtime, already well advanced, and a blazing sun
cast violet shadows upon the roseate Alpilles and gave the intense
transparency of emeralds to the Grand Canal. If the weather were
inclement, we would go to a concert or a theatre, and afterwards to
one of the fashionable tearooms. There, whenever Mme. Swann had
anything to say to me which she did not wish the people at the next
table, or even the waiters who brought our tea, to understand, she
would say it in English, as though that had been a secret language
known to our two selves alone. As it happened everyone in the place
knew English—I only had not yet learned the language, and was obliged
to say so to Mme. Swann in order that she might cease to make, on the
people who were drinking tea or were serving us with it, remarks which
I guessed to be uncomplimentary without either my understanding or the
person referred to losing a single word.

Once, in the matter of an afternoon at the theatre, Gilberte gave me a
great surprise. It was precisely the day of which she had spoken to me
some time back, on which fell the anniversary of her grandfather's
death. We were to go, she and I, with her governess, to hear
selections from an opera, and Gilberte had dressed with a view to
attending this performance, and wore the air of indifference with
which she was in the habit of treating whatever we might be going to
do, with the comment that it might be anything in the world, no matter
what, provided that it amused me and had her parents' approval. Before
luncheon, her mother drew us aside to tell us that her father was
vexed at the thought of our going to a theatre on that day. This
seemed to me only natural. Gilberte remained impassive, but grew pale
with an anger which she was unable to conceal; still she uttered not a
word. When M. Swann joined us his wife took him to the other end of
the room and said something in his ear. He called Gilberte, and they
went together into the next room. We could hear their raised
voices. And yet I could not bring myself to believe that Gilberte, so
submissive, so loving, so thoughtful, would resist her father's
appeal, on such a day and for so trifling a matter. At length Swann
reappeared with her, saying: "You heard what I said. Now you may do as
you like."

Gilberte's features remained compressed in a frown throughout luncheon,
after which we retired to her room. Then suddenly, without
hesitating and as though she had never at any point hesitated over her
course of action: "Two o'clock!" she exclaimed. "You know the concert
begins at half past." And she told her governess to make haste.

"But," I reminded her, "won't your father be cross with you?"

"Not the least little bit!"

"Surely, he was afraid it would look odd, because of the anniversary."

"What difference can it make to me what people think? I think it's
perfectly absurd to worry about other people in matters of sentiment.
We feel things for ourselves, not for the public. Mademoiselle has
very few pleasures; she's been looking forward to going to this
concert. I am not going to deprive her of it just to satisfy public
opinion."

"But, Gilberte," I protested, taking her by the arm, "it is not to
satisfy public opinion, it is to please your father."

"You are not going to pass remarks upon my conduct, I hope," she said
sharply, plucking her arm away.

* * *

A favour still more precious than their taking me with them to the
Jardin d'Acclimatation, the Swanns did not exclude me even from their
friendship with Bergotte, which had been at the root of the attraction
that I had found in them when, before I had even seen Gilberte, I
reflected that her intimacy with that godlike elder would have made
her, for me, the most passionately enthralling of friends, had not the
disdain that I was bound to inspire in her forbidden me to hope that
she would ever take me, in his company, to visit the towns that he
loved. And lo, one day, came an invitation from Mme. Swann to a big
luncheon–party. I did not know who else were to be the guests. On my
arrival I was disconcerted, as I crossed the hall, by an alarming
incident. Mme. Swann seldom missed an opportunity of adopting any of
those customs which pass as fashionable for a season, and then,
failing to find support, are speedily abandoned (as, for instance,
many years before, she had had her 'private hansom,' or now had,
printed in English upon a card inviting you to luncheon, the words,
'To meet,' followed by the name of some more or less important
personage). Often enough these usages implied nothing mysterious and
required no initiation. Take, for instance, a minute innovation of
those days, imported from England; Odette had made her husband have
some visiting cards printed on which the name Charles Swann was
preceded by "Mr.". After the first visit that I paid her, Mme. Swann
had left at my door one of these 'pasteboards,' as she called them. No
one had ever left a card on me before; I felt at once so much pride,
emotion, gratitude that, scraping together all the money I possessed,
I ordered a superb basket of camellias and had it sent to Mme. Swann.
I implored my father to go and leave a card on her, but first,
quickly, to have some printed on which his name should bear the prefix
"Mr.". He vouchsafed neither of my prayers; I was in despair for some
days, and then asked myself whether he might not after all have been
right. But this use of "Mr.," if it meant nothing, was at least
intelligible. Not so with another that was revealed to me on the
occasion of this luncheon–party, but revealed without any indication
of its purport. At the moment when I was about to step from the hall
into the drawing–room the butler handed me a thin, oblong envelope
upon which my name was inscribed. In my surprise I thanked him; but I
eyed the envelope with misgivings. I no more knew what I was expected
to do with it than a foreigner knows what to do with one of those
little utensils that they lay by his place at a Chinese banquet. I
noticed that it was gummed down; I was afraid of appearing indiscreet,
were I to open it then and there; and so I thrust it into my pocket
with an air of knowing all about it. Mme. Swann had written to me a
few days before, asking me to come to luncheon with 'just a few
people.' There were, however, sixteen of us, among whom I never
suspected for a moment that I was to find Bergotte. Mme. Swann, who
had already 'named' me, as she called it, to several of her guests,
suddenly, after my name, in the same tone that she had used in
uttering it (in fact, as though we were merely two of the guests at
her party, who ought each to feel equally flattered on meeting the
other), pronounced that of the sweet Singer with the snowy locks. The
name Bergotte made me jump like the sound of a revolver fired at me
point blank, but instinctively, for appearance's sake, I bowed; there,
straight in front of me, as by one of those conjurers whom we see
standing whole and unharmed, in their frock coats, in the smoke of a
pistol shot out of which a pigeon has just fluttered, my salute was
returned by a young common little thick–set peering person, with a red
nose curled like a snail–shell and a black tuft on his chin. I was
cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the
explosion was not only the feeble old man, of whom no vestige now
remained; there was also the beauty of an immense work which I had
contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had
constructed, like a temple, expressly for itself, but for which no
room was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with
blood–vessels, bones, muscles, sinews, of the little man with the snub
nose and black beard who stood before me. All the Bergotte whom I had
slowly and delicately elaborated for myself, drop by drop, like a
stalactite, out of the transparent beauty of his books, ceased (I
could see at once) to be of any use, the moment I was obliged to
include in him the snail–shell nose and to utilise the little black
beard; just as we must reject as worthless the solution of a problem
the terms of which we have not read in full, having failed to observe
that the total must amount to a specified figure. The nose and beard
were elements similarly ineluctable, and all the more aggravating in
that, while forcing me to reconstruct entirely the personage of
Bergotte, they seemed further to imply, to produce, to secrete
incessantly a certain quality of mind, alert and self–satisfied, which
was not in the picture, for such a mind had no connexion whatever with
the sort of intelligence that was diffused throughout those books, so
intimately familiar to me, which were permeated by a gentle and
godlike wisdom. Starting from them, I should never have arrived at
that snail–shell nose; but starting from the nose, which did not
appear to be in the slightest degree ashamed of itself, but stood out
alone there like a grotesque ornament fastened on his face, I must
proceed in a diametrically opposite direction from the work of
Bergotte, I must arrive, it would seem, at the mentality of a busy and
preoccupied engineer, of the sort who when you accost him in the
street thinks it correct to say: "Thanks, and you?" before you have
actually inquired of them how they are, or else, if you assure them
that you have been charmed to make their acquaintance, respond with an
abbreviation which they imagine to be effective, intelligent and
up–to–date, inasmuch as it avoids any waste of precious time on vain
formalities: "Same here!" Names are, no doubt, but whimsical
draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so
little like the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when
we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world
(which, for that matter, is not the true world, our senses being
little more endowed than our imagination with the art of portraiture,
so little, indeed, that the final and approximately lifelike pictures
which we manage to obtain of reality are at least as different from
the visible world as that was from the imagined). But in Bergotte's
case, my preconceived idea of him from his name troubled me far less
than my familiarity with his work, to which I was obliged to attach,
as to the cord of a balloon, the man with the little beard, without
knowing whether it would still have the strength to raise him from the
ground. It seemed quite clear, however, that it really was he who had
written the books that I had so greatly enjoyed, for Mme. Swann having
thought it incumbent upon her to tell him of my admiration for one of
these, he shewed no surprise that she should have mentioned this to
him rather than to any other of the party, nor did he seem to regard
her action as due to a misapprehension, but, swelling out the frock
coat which he had put on in honour of all these distinguished guests
with a body distended in anticipation of the coming meal, while his
mind was completely occupied by other, more real and more important
considerations, it was only as at some finished episode in his early
life, as though one had made an illusion to a costume of the Duc de
Guise which he had worn, one season, at a fancy dress ball, that he
smiled as he bore his mind back to the idea of his books; which at
once began to fall in my estimation (dragging down with them the whole
value of Beauty, of the world, of life itself), until they seemed to
have been merely the casual amusement of a man with a little beard. I
told myself that he must have taken great pains over them, but that,
if he had lived upon an island surrounded by beds of pearl–oysters, he
would instead have devoted himself to, and would have made a fortune
out of, the pearling trade. His work no longer appeared to me so
inevitable. And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed
prove that great writers were gods, ruling each one over a kingdom
that was his alone, or whether all that was not rather make–believe,
whether the differences between one man's book and another's were not
the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a
radical and essential difference between two contrasted personalities.

Meanwhile we had taken our places at the table. By the side of my
plate I found a carnation, the stalk of which was wrapped in silver
paper. It embarrassed me less than the envelope that had been handed
to me in the hall, which, however, I had completely forgotten. This
custom, strange as it was to me, became more intelligible when I saw
all the male guests take up the similar carnations that were lying by
their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their coats. I did
as they had done, with the air of spontaneity that a free–thinker
assumes in church, who is not familiar with the order of service but
rises when everyone else rises and kneels a moment after everyone else
is on his knees. Another usage, equally strange to me but less
ephemeral, disquieted me more. On the other side of my plate was a
smaller plate, on which was heaped a blackish substance which I did
not then know to be caviare. I was ignorant of what was to be done
with it but firmly determined not to let it enter my mouth.

Bergotte was sitting not far from me and I could hear quite well
everything that he said. I understood then the impression that M. de
Norpois had formed of him. He had indeed a peculiar 'organ'; there is
nothing that so much alters the material qualities of the voice as the
presence of thought behind what one is saying; the resonance of one's
diphthongs, the energy of one's labials are profoundly affected—in
fact, one's whole way of speaking. His seemed to me to differ entirely
from his way of writing, and even the things that he said from those
with which he filled his books. But the voice issues from behind a
mask through which it is not powerful enough to make us recognise, at
first sight, a face which we have seen uncovered in the speaker's
literary style. At certain points in the conversation, when Bergotte,
by force of habit, began to talk in a way which no one but M. de
Norpois would have thought affected or unpleasant, it was a long time
before I discovered an exact correspondence with the parts of his
books in which his form became so poetic and so musical. At those
points I could see in what he was saying a plastic beauty independent
of whatever his sentences might mean, and as human speech reflects the
human soul, though without expressing it as does literary style,
Bergotte appeared almost to be talking nonsense, intoning certain
words and, if he were secretly pursuing, beneath them, a single image,
stringing them together uninterruptedly on one continuous note, with a
wearisome monotony. So that a pretentious, emphatic and monotonous
opening was a sign of the rare aesthetic value of what he was saying,
and an effect, in his conversation, of the same power which, in his
books, produced that harmonious flow of imagery. I had had all the
more difficulty in discovering this at first since what he said at
such moments, precisely because it was the authentic utterance of
Bergotte, had not the appearance of being Bergotte's. It was an
abundant crop of clearly defined ideas, not included in that 'Bergotte
manner' which so many story–tellers had appropriated to themselves;
and this dissimilarity was probably but another aspect—made out with
difficulty through the stream of conversation, as an eclipse is seen
through a smoked glass—of the fact that when one read a page of
Bergotte it was never just what would have been written by any of
those lifeless imitators who, nevertheless, in newspapers and in
books, adorned their prose with so many "Bergottish" images and ideas.
This difference in style arose from the fact that what was meant by
"Bergottism" was, first and foremost, a priceless element of truth
hidden in the heart of everything, whence it was extracted by that
great writer, by virtue of his genius, and that this extraction, and
not simply the perpetration of "Bergottisms," was my sweet Singer's
aim in writing. Though, it must be added, he continued to perpetrate
them in spite of himself, and because he was Bergotte, so that, in one
sense, every fresh beauty in his work was the little drop of Bergotte
buried at the heart of a thing which he had distilled from it. But if,
for that reason, each of those beauties was related to all the rest,
and had a 'family likeness,' yet each remained separate and
individual, as was the act of discovery that had brought it to the
light of day; new, and consequently different from what was called the
Bergotte manner, which was a loose synthesis of all the "Bergottisms"
already invented and set forth by him in writing, with no indication
by which men who lacked genius might forecast what would be his next
discovery. So it is with all great writers, the beauty of their
language is as incalculable as that of a woman whom we have never
seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object of
which, and not of their language or its beauty, they are thinking, to
which they have not yet given expression. An author of memorials of
our time, wishing to write without too obviously seeming to be writing
like Saint–Simon, might, on occasion, give us the first line of his
portrait of Villars: "He was a rather tall man, dark…with an alert,
open, expressive physiognomy," but what law of determinism could bring
him to the discovery of Saint–Simon's next line, which begins with
"and, to tell the truth, a trifle mad"? The true variety is in this
abundance of real and unexpected elements, in the branch loaded with
blue flowers which thrusts itself forward, against all reason, from
the spring hedgerow that seemed already overcharged with blossoms,
whereas the purely formal imitation of variety (and one might advance
the same argument for all the other qualities of style) is but a
barren uniformity, that is to say the very antithesis of variety, and
cannot, in the work of imitators, give the illusion or recall other
examples of variety save to a reader who has not acquired the sense of
it from the masters themselves.