The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (160 page)

The old soldier made up for the triviality of the words quoted by the emphasis of his tone, in a feeble imitation of the speaker which had an immense success.

On leaving the barracks I would take a stroll, and then, to fill up the time before I went, as I did every evening, to dine with Saint-Loup at the hotel in which he and his friends had established their mess, I walked back to my own, as soon as the sun went down, so as to have a couple of hours in which to rest and read. In the square, the evening sky bedecked the pepper-pot turrets of the castle with little pink clouds which matched the colour of the bricks, and completed the harmony by softening the tone of the latter with a sunset glow. So strong a current of vitality coursed through my veins that no movement on my part could exhaust it; each step I took, after touching a paving-stone of the square, rebounded off it. I seemed to have the wings of Mercury growing on my heels. One of the fountains was filled with a ruddy glow, while in the other the moonlight had already begun to turn the water opalescent. Between them were children at play, uttering shrill cries, wheeling in circles, obeying some necessity of the hour, like swifts or bats. Next door to the hotel, the old law-courts and the Louis XVI orangery, in which were now installed the savings bank and the Army Corps headquarters, were lit from within by the palely gilded globes of their gas-jets which, already aglow though it was still daylight outside, suited those vast, tall, eighteenth-century windows from which the last gleams of the setting sun had not yet departed, as a head-dress of yellow tortoise-shell might suit a complexion heightened with rouge, and persuaded me to seek out my fireside and the lamp which, alone in the shadowy façade of my hotel, was striving to resist the gathering darkness, and for the sake of which I went indoors before it was quite dark, for pleasure, as to an appetising meal. I retained, in my lodgings, the same fullness of sensation that I had felt outside. It gave such an apparent convexity of surface to things which as a rule seem flat and insipid—to the yellow flame of the fire, the coarse blue paper of the sky on which the setting sun had scribbled corkscrews and whirligigs like a schoolboy with a piece of red chalk, the curiously patterned cloth on the round table on which a ream of essay paper and an inkpot lay in readiness for me together with one of Bergotte’s novels—that ever since then these things have continued to seem to me to abound in a richly particular form of existence which I feel that I should be able to extract from them if it were granted me to set eyes on them again. I thought with joy of the barracks I had just left and of its weather-cock turning with every wind that blew. Like a diver breathing through a pipe which rises above the surface of the water, I felt that I was in some sense linked to a healthy, open-air life through my connexion with those barracks, that towering observatory dominating a countryside furrowed with strips of green enamel, into whose various buildings I esteemed it a priceless privilege, which I hoped would last, to be free to go whenever I chose, always certain of a welcome.

At seven o’clock I dressed and went out again to dine with Saint-Loup at the hotel where he took his meals. I liked to go there on foot. It was by now pitch dark, and after the third day of my visit, as soon as night had fallen an icy wind began blowing which seemed a harbinger of snow. As I walked, I ought not, one might have supposed, to have ceased for a moment to think of Mme de Guermantes; it was only in an attempt to draw nearer to her that I had come to visit Robert’s garrison. But memories and griefs are fleeting things. There are days when they recede so far that we are barely conscious of them, we think that they have gone for ever. Then we pay attention to other things. And the streets of this town had not yet become for me what streets are in the place where one is accustomed to live, simply means of getting from one place to another. The life led by the inhabitants of this unknown world must, it seemed to me, be a thing of wonder, and often the lighted windows of some dwelling kept me standing for a long while motionless in the dark by laying before my eyes the actual and mysterious scenes of an existence into which I might not penetrate. Here the fire-spirit displayed to me in a crimson tableau a chestnut-seller’s booth in which a couple of non-commissioned officers, their belts slung over the backs of chairs, were playing cards, never dreaming that a magician’s wand was conjuring them out of the night like an apparition on the stage and presenting them as they actually were at that very moment to the eyes of a spellbound passer-by whom they could not see. In a little curio shop a half-spent candle, projecting its warm glow over an engraving, reprinted it in sanguine, while, battling against the darkness, the light of a big lamp bronzed a scrap of leather, inlaid a dagger with glittering spangles, spread a film of precious gold like the patina of time or the varnish of an old master on pictures which were only bad copies, made in fact of the whole hovel, in which there was nothing but pinch-beck rubbish, a marvellous composition by Rembrandt. Sometimes I lifted my eyes to gaze at some huge old dwelling-house whose shutters had not been closed and in which amphibious men and women, adapting themselves anew each evening to living in a different element from their day-time one, floated slowly to and fro in the rich liquid that after nightfall rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps to fill the rooms to the very brink of their outer walls of stone and glass, the displacement of their bodies sending oleaginous golden ripples through it. I proceeded on my way, and often, in the dark alley that ran past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Méséglise, the force of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I suddenly felt a skirt brush past me, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger. This Gothic alley meant for me something so real that if I had been successful in picking up and enjoying a woman there, it would have been impossible for me not to believe that it was the ancient charm of the place that was bringing us together, even if she were no more than a common street-walker, stationed there every evening, whom the wintry night, the strange place, the darkness, the mediaeval atmosphere had invested with their mysterious glamour. I thought of what might be in store for me; to try to forget Mme de Guermantes seemed to me to be painful, but sensible, and for the first time possible, even perhaps easy. In the absolute quiet of this neighbourhood I could hear ahead of me shouted words and laughter which must come from tipsy revellers staggering home. I waited to see them; I stood peering in the direction from which I had heard the noise. But I was obliged to wait for some time, for the surrounding silence was so intense that it had allowed sounds that were still a long way off to penetrate it with the utmost clarity and force. Finally the revellers did appear; not, as I had supposed, in front of me, but far behind. Whether because the intersection of side streets and the interposition of buildings had, by reverberation, brought about this acoustic error, or because it is very difficult to locate a sound when its position is unknown to us, I had been as mistaken about direction as about distance.

The wind grew stronger. It was grainy and bristling with coming snow. I returned to the main street and jumped on board the little tram, from the platform of which an officer was acknowledging, without seeming to see them, the salutes of the uncouth soldiers who trudged past along the pavement, their faces daubed crimson by the cold, reminding me, in this little town which the sudden leap from autumn into early winter seemed to have transported further north, of the rubicund faces which Breughel gives to his merry, junketing, frostbound peasants.

And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends and to which the festive season now beginning attracted a number of people from near and far, I found, as I hurried across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the “everlasting fire,” an influx (worthy of some
Numbering of the People at Bethlehem
such as the Old Flemish masters used to paint) of new arrivals who assembled there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them, would recommend lodgings elsewhere in the town) for bed and board, while a scullion hurried past holding a struggling fowl by the neck. And similarly, in the big dining-room which I passed through on the first day before coming to the little room where my friend was waiting for me, it was of some Biblical repast portrayed with mediaeval naïvety and Flemish exaggeration that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the polished floor for greater speed and set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved at once, but where—for many diners were finishing when I arrived—they piled up untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them were inspired far less by a desire to meet the requirements of the diners than by respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but naïvely illustrated with real details borrowed from local custom, and by an aesthetic and religious anxiety to make evident to the eye the splendour of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought by a sideboard at the far end of the room; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, I made my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late-comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled in the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), and, at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues, went straight towards this servitor in whom I felt I recognised a character traditionally present in these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the simple, snub-nosed, ill-drawn features and dreamy expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect. In addition—doubtless in view of the coming festivities—the cast was reinforced by a celestial contingent recruited entirely from a reserve of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, with fair hair framing a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true, playing an instrument, but stood musing before a gong or a pile of plates, while other less infantile angels flew swiftly across the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless fluttering of the napkins which dangled from them like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed ends. Fleeing those ill-defined regions, screened by a hedge of palms, from which the angelic servitors looked, at a distance, as though they had floated down out of the empyrean, I forced my way through to the smaller room in which Saint-Loup’s table was laid. I found there several of his friends who dined with him regularly, nobles except for one or two commoners in whom the young nobles had, as early as their school-days, detected likely friends, and with whom they readily fraternised, proving thereby that they were not in principle hostile to the middle classes, even if they were Republican, provided they had clean hands and went to mass. On the first of these evenings, before we sat down to dinner, I drew Saint-Loup into a corner and, in front of all the rest but so that they should not hear me, said to him:

“Robert, this is hardly the time or the place for what I am going to say, but I shan’t be a second. I keep forgetting to ask you when I’m in the barracks: isn’t that Mme de Guermantes’s photograph that you have on your table?”

“Why, yes, she’s my dear aunt.”

“Of course she is; what a fool I am. I used to know that, but I’d never thought about it. I say, your friends will be getting impatient, we must be quick, they’re looking at us. Or another time will do; it isn’t at all important.”

“That’s all right, carry on. They can wait.”

“No, no, I do want to be polite to them; they’re so nice. Besides, it doesn’t really matter in the least, I assure you.”

“Do you know the worthy Oriane, then?”

This “worthy Oriane,” as he might have said “the good Oriane,” did not imply that Saint-Loup regarded Mme de Guermantes as especially good. In this instance the words “good,” “excellent,” “worthy,” are mere reinforcements of the definite article indicating a person who is known to both parties and of whom the speaker does not quite know what to say to someone outside the family circle. The word “good” does duty as a stop-gap and keeps the conversation going for a moment until the speaker has hit upon “Do you see much of her?” or “I haven’t set eyes on her for months,” or “I shall be seeing her on Tuesday,” or “She must be getting on, now, you know.”

“I can’t tell you how funny it is that it should be her photograph, because we’re living in her house now, and I’ve been hearing the most astounding things about her” (I should have been hard put to it to say what) “which have made me immensely interested in her, only from a literary point of view, you understand, from a—how shall I put it—from a Balzacian point of view. You’re so clever you can see what I mean without my having to explain. But we must hurry up. What on earth will your friends think of my manners?”

“They’ll think absolutely nothing. I’ve told them you’re sublime, and they’re a great deal more nervous than you are.”

“You really are too kind. But listen, what I want to say is this: I suppose Mme de Guermantes hasn’t any idea that I know you, has she?”

“I can’t say. I haven’t seen her since the summer, because I haven’t had any leave since she’s been in town.”

“The fact of the matter is, I’ve been told that she regards me as an absolute idiot.”