In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (24 page)

My mother had not, indeed, awaited this verdict from Bergotte before
telling me that I might ask Gilberte to tea whenever I had friends
coming. But I dared not do so for two reasons. The first was that at
Gilberte's there was never anything else to drink but tea. Whereas at
home Mamma insisted on there being a pot of chocolate as well. I was
afraid that Gilberte might regard this as 'common'; and so conceive a
great contempt for us. The other reason was a formal difficulty, a
question of procedure which I could never succeed in settling. When I
arrived at Mme. Swann's she used to ask me: "And how is your mother?"
I had made several overtures to Mamma to find out whether she would do
the same when Gilberte came to us, a point which seemed to me more
serious than, at the Court of Louis XIV, the use of 'Monseigneur.' But
Mamma would not hear of it for a moment.

"Certainly not. I do not know Mme. Swann."

"But neither does she know you."

"I never said she did, but we are not obliged to behave in exactly the
same way about everything. I shall find other ways of being civil to
Gilberte than Mme. Swann has with you."

But I was unconvinced, and preferred not to invite Gilberte.

Leaving my parents, I went upstairs to change my clothes and on
emptying my pockets came suddenly upon the envelope which the Swanns'
butler had handed me before shewing me into the drawing–room. I was
now alone. I opened it; inside was a card on which I was told the
name of the lady whom I ought to have 'taken in' to luncheon.

It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the
world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, for
that matter, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering),
by assuring me that, in contradiction of all that I had believed at
the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for
anything better than to make love. He added to this service a second,
the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later; it was he
who took me for the first time into a disorderly house. He had indeed
told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might
enjoy. But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those
houses were to enable me to substitute actual human features. So that
if I owed to Bloch—for his 'good tidings' that beauty and the
enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things, and that we have
acted foolishly in renouncing them for all time—a debt of gratitude
of the same kind that we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher
who has given us reason to hope for length of days in this world and
not to be entirely cut off from it when we shall have passed beyond
the veil, the houses of assignation which I began to frequent some
years later—by furnishing me with specimens of beauty, by allowing me
to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to
invent, which is something more than a mere summary of former
beauties, that present indeed divine, the one present that we cannot
bestow upon ourselves, before which faint and fail all the logical
creations of our intellect, and which we can seek from reality alone:
an individual charm—deserved to be ranked by me with those other
benefactors more recent in origin but of comparable utility (before
finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the seductive
charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, by studying other painters,
hearing other composers, visiting other cities): namely illustrated
editions of the history of painting, symphonic concerts and handbooks
to 'Mediaeval Towns.' But the house to which Bloch led me (and which
he himself, for that matter, had long ceased to visit), was of too
humble a grade, its denizens were too inconspicuous and too little
varied to be able to satisfy my old or to stimulate new curiosities.
The mistress of this house knew none of the women with whom one asked
her to negotiate, and was always suggesting others whom one did not
want. She boasted to me of one in particular, one of whom, with a
smile full of promise (as though this had been a great rarity and a
special treat) she would whisper: "She is a Jewess! Doesn't that make
you want to?" (That, by the way, was probably why the girl's name was
Rachel.) And with a silly and affected excitement which, she hoped,
would prove contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of
sensual satisfaction: "Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn't that
be lovely? Rrrr!" This Rachel, of whom I caught a glimpse without her
seeing me, was dark and not good looking, but had an air of
intelligence, and would pass the tip of her tongue over her lips as
she smiled, with a look of boundless impertinence, at the 'boys' who
were introduced to her and whom I could hear making conversation. Her
small and narrow face was framed in short curls of black hair,
irregular as though they were outlined in pen–strokes upon a
wash–drawing in Indian ink. Every evening I promised the old woman who
offered her to me with a special insistence, boasting of her superior
intelligence and her education, that I would not fail to come some day
on purpose to make the acquaintance of Rachel, whom I had nicknamed
"Rachel when from the Lord." But the first evening I had heard her, as
she was leaving the house, say to the mistress: "That's settled then;
I shall be free to–morrow, if you have anyone you won't forget to send
for me."

And these words had prevented me from recognising her as a person
because they had made me classify her at once in a general category of
women whose habit, common to all of them, was to come there in the
evening to see whether there might not be a louis or two to be earned.
She would simply vary her formula, saying indifferently: "If you want
me" or "If you want anybody."

The mistress, who was not familiar with Halévy's opera, did not know
why I always called the girl "Rachel when from the Lord." But failure
to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing,
and it was always with a whole–hearted laugh that she would say to me:

"Then there's nothing doing to–night? When am I going to fix you up
with 'Rachel when from the Lord'? Why do you always say that, 'Rachel
when from the Lord'? Oh, that's very smart, that is. I'm going to make
a match of you two. You won't be sorry for it, you'll see."

Once I was just making up my mind, but she was 'in the press,' another
time in the hands of the hairdresser, an elderly gentleman who never
did anything for the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and
then comb it. And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the
humbler frequenters of the place (working girls, they called
themselves, but they always seemed to be out of work), had come to mix
drinks for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the
gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of the
speakers gave an attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to
this house because, anxious to present a token of my good–will to the
woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her
several pieces, notably a big sofa, which I had inherited from my aunt
Léonie. I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my
parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a
warehouse. But as soon as I discovered them again in the house where
these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that
one had imbibed in the air of my aunt's room at Combray became
apparent to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned
them in their helplessness! Had I outraged the dead, I should not have
suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their new mistress,
for they seemed to me to be alive, and to be appealing to me, like
those objects, apparently inanimate, in a Persian fairy–tale, in which
are embodied human souls that are undergoing martyrdom and plead for
deliverance. Besides, as our memory presents things to us, as a rule,
not in their chronological sequence but as it were by a reflexion in
which the order of the parts is reversed, I remembered only long
afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I
had tasted for the first time the sweets of love with one of my girl
cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat
rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie
had left her room.

A whole lot more of my aunt Léonie's things, and notably a magnificent
set of old silver plate, I sold, in spite of my parents' warnings, so
as to have more money to spend, and to be able to send more flowers to
Mme. Swann who would greet me, after receiving an immense basket of
orchids, with: "If I were your father, I should have you up before the
magistrate for this." How was I to suppose that one day I might regret
more than anything the loss of my silver plate, and rank certain other
pleasures more highly than that (which would have shrunk perhaps into
none at all) of bestowing favours upon Gilberte's parents. Similarly,
it was with Gilberte in my mind, and so as not to be separated from
her, that I had decided not to enter a career of diplomacy abroad. It
is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to
last, that we make our irrevocable decisions. I could scarcely
imagine that that strange substance which was housed in Gilberte, and
from her permeated her parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to
all things else, could be liberated from her, could migrate into
another person. The same substance, unquestionable, and yet one that
would have a wholly different effect on me. For a single malady goes
through various evolutions, and a delicious poison can no longer be
taken with the same impunity when, with the passing of the years, the
heart's power of resistance has diminished.

My parents meanwhile would have liked to see the intelligence that
Bergotte had discerned in me made manifest in some remarkable
achievement. When I still did not know the Swanns I thought that I
was prevented from working by the state of agitation into which I was
thrown by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte when I chose. But, now
that their door stood open to me, scarcely had I sat down at my desk
than I would rise and run to them. And after I had left them and was
at home again, my isolation was only apparent, my mind was powerless
to swim against the stream of words on which I had allowed myself
mechanically to be borne for hours on end. Sitting alone, I continued
to fashion remarks such as might have pleased or amused the Swanns,
and to make this pastime more entertaining I myself took the parts of
those absent players, I put to myself imagined questions, so chosen
that my brilliant epigrams served merely as happy answers to them.
Though conducted in silence, this exercise was none the less a
conversation and not a meditation, my solitude a mental society in
which it was not I myself but other imaginary speakers who controlled
my choice of words, and in which I felt as I formulated, in place of
the thoughts that I believed to be true, those that came easily to my
mind, and involved no introspection from without, that kind of
pleasure, entirely passive, which sitting still affords to anyone who
is burdened with a sluggish digestion.

Had I been less firmly resolved upon setting myself definitely to
work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since
my resolution was explicit, since within twenty–four hours, in the
empty frame of that long morrow in which everything was so well
arranged because I myself had not yet entered it, my good intentions
would be realised without difficulty, it was better not to select an
evening on which I was ill–disposed for a beginning for which the
following days were not, alas, to shew themselves any more propitious.
But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one
who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two
or three days. Confident that by the day after next I should have
written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my
decision; I preferred to remain patient for a few hours and then to
bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that
was already under way. Unfortunately the morrow was not that vast,
external day to which I in my fever had looked forward. When it drew
to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain
internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty–four hours longer. And at
the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer
the same hope that they would be realised at once, no longer the
courage, therefore, to subordinate everything else to their
realisation: I began again to keep late hours, having no longer, to
oblige me to go to bed early on any evening, the certain hope of
seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my
creative energy, several days of relaxation, and the only time that my
grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned tone, to frame the
reproach: "Well, and that work of yours; aren't we even to speak of it
now?" I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see
that my mind was irrevocably made up, she had further and perhaps for
a long time postponed the execution of my task, by the shock which her
denial of justice to me had given my nerves, since until I had
recovered from that shock I should not feel inclined to begin my work.
She felt that her scepticism had charged blindly into my intention.
She apologised, kissing me: "I am sorry; I shall not say anything
again," and, so that I should not be discouraged, assured me that,
from the day on which I should be quite well again, the work would
come of its own accord from my superfluity of strength.

Besides, I said to myself, in spending all my time with the Swanns, am
I not doing exactly what Bergotte does? To my parents it seemed almost
as though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the
same drawing–room with a great writer, the life most favourable to the
growth of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed
from having to create that talent for himself, from within himself,
and can acquire it from some one else, is as impossible as it would be
to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health, in spite of
neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst
excesses, merely by dining out often in the company of a physician.
The person, by the way, who was most completely taken in by this
illusion, which misled me as well as my parents, was Mme. Swann. When
I explained to her that I was unable to come, that I must stay at home
and work, she looked as though she were thinking that I made a great
fuss about nothing, that there was something foolish as well as
ostentatious in what I had said.