The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (171 page)

“You knew what would happen, my dear girl? If I was mistaken, I’m quite prepared to take it all back. But I have after all the right to warn you against that flunkey whom I know all about from Balbec (otherwise I shouldn’t give a damn), and who is the biggest scoundrel that ever walked the face of the earth.”

She seemed anxious to pacify Robert and began to engage me in a literary conversation in which he joined. I did not find her boring to talk to, for she had a thorough knowledge of the works I admired, and her opinion of them agreed more or less with mine; but since I had heard Mme de Villeparisis declare that she had no talent, I attached little importance to this evidence of culture. She discoursed wittily on all manner of topics, and would have been genuinely entertaining had she not affected to an irritating degree the jargon of the coteries and studios. She extended it, moreover, to everything under the sun; for instance, having acquired the habit of saying of a picture, if it were Impressionist, or an opera, if Wagnerian, “Ah! that’s
good
,” one day when a young man had kissed her on the ear, and, touched by her pretence of being thrilled, had affected modesty, she said: “But really, as a sensation I call it distinctly
good
.” But what most surprised me was that the expressions peculiar to Robert (which in any case had probably come to him from literary men whom she knew) were used by her to him and by him to her as though they had been a necessary form of speech, and without any conception of the pointlessness of an originality that is universal.

She was so clumsy with her hands when eating that one felt she must appear extremely awkward on the stage. She recovered her dexterity only when making love, with that touching prescience of women who love the male so intensely that they immediately guess what will give most pleasure to that body which is yet so different from their own.

I ceased to take part in the conversation when it turned upon the theatre, for on that topic Rachel was too malicious for my liking. She did, it was true, take up in a tone of commiseration—against Saint-Loup, which proved that he was accustomed to hearing Rachel attack her—the defence of Berma, saying: “Oh, no, she’s a remarkable woman really. Of course, the things she does no longer appeal to us, they don’t correspond quite to what we’re after, but one must think of her at the time when she made her first appearance; we owe her a great deal. She has done good work, you know. And, besides she’s such a splendid woman, she has such a good heart. Naturally she doesn’t care about the things that interest us, but in her time she had, as well as a rather moving face, quite a shrewd intelligence.” (Our fingers, by the way, do not play the same accompaniment to all our aesthetic judgments. If it is a picture that is under discussion, to show that it is a fine piece of work, painted with a full brush, it is enough to stick out one’s thumb. But the “shrewd intelligence” is more exacting. It requires two fingers, or rather two fingernails, as though one were trying to flick away a particle of dust.) But, with this single exception, Saint-Loup’s mistress spoke of the best-known actresses in a tone of ironical superiority which annoyed me because I believed—quite mistakenly, as it happened—that it was she who was inferior to them. She was clearly aware that I must regard her as an indifferent actress and conversely have a great regard for those she despised. But she showed no resentment, because there is in all great talent while it is still, as hers was then, unrecognised, however sure it may be of itself, a vein of humility, and because we make the consideration that we expect from others proportionate not to our latent powers but to the position to which we have attained. (An hour or so later, at the theatre, I was to see Saint-Loup’s mistress show a great deal of deference towards those very artists whom she now judged so harshly.) And so, however little doubt my silence may have left her in, she insisted none the less on our dining together that evening, assuring me that never had anyone’s conversation delighted her so much as mine. If we were not yet in the theatre, to which we were to go after lunch, we had the sense of being in a green-room hung with portraits of old members of the company, so markedly were the waiters’ faces of a kind that seems to have perished with a whole generation of outstanding actors. They had a look, too, of Academicians: one of them, standing in front of a sideboard, was examining a dish of pears with the expression of detached curiosity that M. de Jussieu
¹⁰
might have worn. Others, on either side of him, were casting about the room the sort of gaze, instinct with curiosity and coldness, with which Members of the Institute who have arrived early scrutinise the audience, while they exchange a few murmured words which one fails to catch. They were faces well known to all the regular customers. One of them, however, was being pointed out, a newcomer with a wrinkled nose and sanctimonious lips who had an ecclesiastical air, and everyone gazed with interest at this newly elected candidate. But presently, perhaps to drive Robert away so that she might be alone with Aimé, Rachel began to make eyes at a young student who was lunching with a friend at a neighbouring table.

“Zézette, would you mind not looking at that young man like that,” said Saint-Loup, on whose face the hesitant flush of a moment ago had gathered now into a scarlet cloud which dilated and darkened his swollen features. “If you must make an exhibition of us I shall go and lunch elsewhere and join you at the theatre afterwards.”

At this point a messenger came up to tell Aimé that a gentleman wished him to go and speak to him at the door of his carriage. Saint-Loup, ever uneasy, and afraid now that it might be some message of an amorous nature that was to be conveyed to his mistress, looked out of the window and saw there, sitting in the back of his brougham, his hands tightly buttoned in white gloves with black seams and a flower in his buttonhole, M. de Charlus.

“There, you see!” he said to me in a low voice, “my family hunt me down even here. Will you, please—I can’t very well do it myself—but since you know the head waiter well, ask him not to go to the carriage. He’s certain to give us away. Ask him to send some other waiter who doesn’t know me. I know my uncle; if they tell him I’m not known here, he’ll never come inside to look for me, he loathes this sort of place. Really, it’s pretty disgusting that an old womaniser like him, who’s still at it, too, should be perpetually lecturing me and coming to spy on me!”

Aimé, on receiving my instructions, sent one of his underlings to explain that he was busy and could not come out at the moment, and (should the gentleman ask for the Marquis de Saint-Loup) that they did not know any such person. Presently the carriage departed. But Saint-Loup’s mistress, who had failed to catch our whispered conversation and thought that it was about the young man whom Robert had been reproaching her for making eyes at, broke out in a torrent of abuse.

“Ah, so that’s it! So it’s the young man over there, now, is it? Thank you for telling me; it’s a real pleasure to have this sort of thing with one’s meals! Don’t pay any attention to him,” she added, turning to me, “he’s a bit piqued today, and anyway he just says these things because he thinks it’s smart and rather aristocratic to appear to be jealous.”

And she began to drum her feet and her fingers in nervous irritation.

“But, Zézette, it’s for me that it’s unpleasant. You’re making us ridiculous in the eyes of that fellow, who will begin to imagine you’re making advances to him, and who looks an impossible bounder, too.”

“Oh, no, I think he’s charming. For one thing, he’s got the most adorable eyes, and a way of looking at women—you can feel he must love them.”

“If you’ve lost your senses, you can at least keep quiet until I’ve left the room,” cried Robert. “Waiter, my things.”

I did not know whether I was expected to follow him.

“No, I need to be alone,” he told me in the same tone in which he had just been addressing his mistress, and as if he were quite as furious with me. His anger was like a single musical phrase to which in an opera several lines of dialogue are sung which are entirely different from one another in meaning and character in the libretto, but which the music gathers into a common sentiment. When Robert had gone, his mistress called Aimé and asked him various questions. She then wanted to know what I thought of him.

“He has an amusing expression, hasn’t he? You see, what would amuse me would be to know what he really thinks about things, to have him wait on me often, to take him travelling. But that would be all. If we were expected to love all the people we find attractive, life would be pretty ghastly, wouldn’t it? It’s silly of Robert to imagine things. It all begins and ends in my head: Robert has nothing to worry about.” She was still gazing at Aimé. “Do look what dark eyes he has. I should love to know what goes on behind them.”

Presently she received a message that Robert was waiting for her in a private room, to which he had gone by another door to finish his lunch without having to pass through the restaurant again. I thus found myself alone, until I too was summoned by Robert. I found his mistress stretched out on a sofa laughing under the kisses and caresses that he was showering on her. They were drinking champagne. “Hallo, you!” she said to him from time to time, having recently picked up this expression which seemed to her the last word in affection and wit. I had had little lunch, I was extremely uncomfortable, and, though Legrandin’s words had no bearing on the matter, I was sorry to think that I was beginning this first afternoon of spring in a back room in a restaurant and would finish it in the wings of a theatre. Looking first at the time to see that she was not making herself late, Rachel offered me a glass of champagne, handed me one of her Turkish cigarettes and unpinned a rose for me from her bodice. Whereupon I said to myself: “I needn’t regret my day too much, after all. These hours spent in this young woman’s company are not wasted, since I have had from her—charming gifts which cannot be bought too dear—a rose, a scented cigarette and a glass of champagne.” I told myself this because I felt that it would endow with an aesthetic character, and thereby justify and rescue, these hours of boredom. I ought perhaps to have reflected that the very need which I felt of a reason that would console me for my boredom was sufficient to prove that I was experiencing no aesthetic sensation. As for Robert and his mistress, they appeared to have no recollection of the quarrel which had been raging between them a few minutes earlier, or of my having been a witness to it. They made no allusion to it, offered no excuse for it, any more than for the contrast with it which their present conduct provided. By dint of drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that had come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which we get from the sun or from travelling to that which is induced by exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication—and each should have a different “reading,” like fathoms on a chart—lays bare in us, at the precise depth which it has reached; a different kind of man. The room which Saint-Loup had taken was small, but the single mirror which decorated it was of such a kind that it seemed to reflect a score of others in an endless vista; and the electric bulb placed at the top of the frame must at night, when it was lit, followed by the procession of twenty or more reflexions similar to its own, give to the drinker, even when alone, the idea that the surrounding space was multiplying itself simultaneously with his sensations, heightened by intoxication, and that, shut up by himself in this little cell, he was reigning nevertheless over something far more extensive in its indefinite luminous curve than a passage in the “Jardin de Paris.” Being then myself at this moment the said drinker, suddenly, looking for him in the glass, I caught sight of him, a hideous stranger, staring at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger than my disgust; from gaiety or bravado, I gave him a smile which he returned. And I felt myself so much under the ephemeral and potent sway of the minute in which our sensations are so strong, that I am not sure whether my sole regret was not at the thought that the hideous self whom I had just caught sight of in the glass was perhaps on his last legs, and that I should never meet that stranger again for the rest of my life.

Robert was annoyed only because I did not seem to want to shine more in the eyes of his mistress.

“What about that fellow you met this morning who combines snobbery with astronomy? Do tell her about him, I’ve forgotten the story,” and he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

“But, my dear boy, there’s nothing more to say than what you’ve just said.”

“What a bore you are. Then tell her about Françoise in the Champs-Elysées. She’ll enjoy that.”

“Oh, do! Bobby has told me so much about Françoise.” And taking Saint-Loup by the chin, she said once more, for want of anything more original, drawing the said chin nearer to the light: “Hallo, you!”

Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in themselves; I was amused, imagining that I was contemplating the characters in some old comic novel, to see the heroine of the play, struck by the new face of the young man who had just come into the stalls, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love which the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the running fire of his impassioned speech, still kept a gleaming eye fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his fancy; and thus, thanks mainly to the information that Saint-Loup had given me as to the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of little merit, interested me too; for I could feel germinating and blossoming within it for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease-paint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul of the words of a part, those robust if ephemeral, and rather captivating, personalities which are the characters in a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time have already disintegrated into an actor who is no longer in the situation which was his in the play, into a text which no longer shows the actor’s face, into a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned, in short, to elements that contain nothing of them, because of their dissolution, effected as soon as the play is over—a dissolution which, like that of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.