The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (191 page)

“But, Doctor, ought I to take a similar cure?” asked my grandmother, aghast.

“It is not necessary, Madame. The symptoms you betray here will vanish at my bidding. Besides, you have a very efficient person whom I appoint as your doctor from now onwards. That is your malady itself, your nervous hyperactivity. Even if I knew how to cure you of it, I should take good care not to. All I need do is to control it. I see on your table there one of Bergotte’s books. Cured of your nervous diathesis, you would no longer care for it. Now, how could I take it upon myself to substitute for the joys that it procures you a nervous stability which would be quite incapable of giving you those joys? But those joys themselves are a powerful remedy, the most powerful of all perhaps. No, I have nothing to say against your nervous energy. All I ask is that it should listen to me; I leave you in its charge. It must reverse its engines. The force which it has been using to prevent you from going out, from taking sufficient food, must be directed towards making you eat, making you read, making you go out, and distracting you in every possible way. Don’t tell me that you feel tired. Tiredness is the organic realisation of a preconceived idea. Begin by not thinking it. And if ever you have a slight indisposition, which is a thing that may happen to anyone, it will be just as if you hadn’t, for your nervous energy will have endowed you with what M. de Talleyrand astutely called ‘imaginary good health.’ See, it has begun to cure you already. You’ve been sitting up in bed listening to me without once leaning back on your pillows, your eyes bright, colour in your cheeks. I’ve been talking to you for a good half-hour and you haven’t noticed the time. Well, Madame, I shall now bid you good-day.”

When, after seeing Dr du Boulbon to the door, I returned to the room in which my mother was alone, the anguish that had been weighing me down for several weeks suddenly lifted, I sensed that my mother was going to give vent to her joy and would observe mine too, and I felt that inability to endure the suspense of the coming moment when a person is about to be overcome with emotion in our presence, which
mutatis mutandis
is not unlike the thrill of fear that runs through one when one knows that somebody is going to come in and startle one by a door that is still closed. I tried to speak to Mamma but my voice broke, and, bursting into tears, I remained for a long time with my head on her shoulder, weeping, savouring, accepting, cherishing my grief, now that I knew that it had departed from my life, as we like to work ourselves up into a state of exaltation with virtuous plans which circumstances do not permit us to put into execution.

Françoise annoyed me by refusing to share in our joy. She was in a state of great excitement because there had been a terrible scene between the lovesick footman and the tale-bearing porter. It had required the Duchess herself, in her benevolence, to intervene, restore a semblance of calm, and forgive the footman. For she was a kind mistress, and it would have been the ideal “place” if only she didn’t listen to “tittle-tattle.”

During the last few days people had begun to hear of my grandmother’s illness and to ask after her. Saint-Loup had written to me: “I do not wish to take advantage of a time when your dear grandmother is unwell to convey to you what is far more than mere reproach on a matter with which she has no concern. But I should not be speaking the truth were I to say to you, if only by preterition, that I shall ever forget the perfidy of your conduct, or that there can ever be any forgiveness for so scoundrelly a betrayal.” But some other friends, supposing that my grandmother was not seriously ill, or not knowing that she was ill at all, had asked me to meet them next day in the Champs-Elysées, to go with them from there to pay a call together, ending up with a dinner in the country, the thought of which appealed to me. I had no longer any reason to forgo these two pleasures. When my grandmother had been told that it was now imperative, if she was to obey Dr du Boulbon’s orders, that she should go out as much as possible, she had herself at once suggested the Champs-Elysées. It would be easy for me to escort her there; and, while she sat reading, to arrange with my friends where I should meet them later; and I should still be in time, if I made haste, to take the train with them to Ville d’Avray. When the time came, my grandmother did not want to go out, saying that she felt tired. But my mother, acting on du Boulbon’s instructions, had the strength of mind to be firm and to command obedience. She was almost in tears at the thought that my grandmother was going to relapse again into her nervous weakness and might not recover from it. Never had there been such a fine, warm day for an outing. The sun as it moved through the sky interposed here and there in the broken solidity of the balcony its insubstantial muslins, and gave to the freestone ledge a warm epidermis, an ill-defined halo of gold. As Françoise had not had time to send a “wire” to her daughter, she left us immediately after lunch. She considered it kind enough of her as it was to call first at Jupien’s to get a stitch put in the cape which my grandmother was going to wear. Returning at that moment from my morning walk, I accompanied her into the shop. “Is it your young master who brings you here,” Jupien asked Françoise, “is it you who have brought him to see me, or is it a fair wind and Dame Fortune that brings you both?” For all his want of education, Jupien respected the laws of syntax as instinctively as M. de Guermantes, in spite of every effort, broke them. With Françoise gone and the cape mended, it was time for my grandmother to get ready. Having obstinately refused to let Mamma stay in the room with her, left to herself she took an endlessly long time over her dressing, and now that I knew that she was not ill, with that strange indifference which we feel towards our relations so long as they are alive, and which makes us put everyone else before them, I thought it very selfish of her to take so long and to risk making me late when she knew that I had an appointment with my friends and was dining at Ville d’Avray. In my impatience I finally went downstairs without waiting for her, after I had twice been told that she was just ready. At last she joined me, without apologising to me as she generally did for having kept me waiting, flushed and bothered like a person who has come to a place in a hurry and has forgotten half her belongings, just as I was reaching the half-opened glass door which let in the liquid, humming, tepid air from outside, as though the sluices of a reservoir had been opened between the glacial walls of the house, without warming them.

“Oh, dear, if you’re going to meet your friends I ought to have put on another cape. I look rather wretched in this one.”

I was startled to see her so flushed, and supposed that having begun by making herself late she had had to hurry over her dressing. When we left the cab at the corner of the Avenue Gabriel, in the Champs-Elysées, I saw my grandmother turn away without a word and make for the little old pavilion with its green trellis at the door of which I had once waited for Françoise. The same park-keeper who had been there then was still there beside the “Marquise” as, following my grandmother who, doubtless because she was feeling sick, had her hand in front of her mouth, I climbed the steps of the little rustic theatre erected there in the middle of the gardens. At the entrance, as in those travelling circuses where the clown, dressed for the ring and smothered in flour, stands at the door and takes the money himself for the seats, the “Marquise,” at the receipt of custom, was still in her place with her huge, irregular face smeared with coarse paint and her little bonnet of red flowers and black lace surmounting her auburn wig. But I do not think she recognised me. The park-keeper, abandoning the supervision of the greenery, with the colour of which his uniform had been designed to harmonise, was sitting beside her chatting.

“So you’re still here,” he was saying. “You don’t think of retiring?”

“And why should I retire, Monsieur? Will you tell me where I should be better off than here, where I’d be more comfy and snug? And then there’s all the coming and going, plenty of distraction. My little Paris, I call it; my customers keep me in touch with everything that’s going on. Just to give you an example, there’s one of them went out not five minutes ago; he’s a judge, a proper high-up. Well!” she exclaimed heatedly, as though prepared to maintain the truth of this assertion by violence, should the agent of civic authority show any sign of challenging its accuracy, “for the last eight years, do you hear me, every blessed day, regular on the stroke of three he comes here, always polite, never saying one word louder than another, never making any mess; and he stays half an hour and more to read his papers while seeing to his little needs. There was one day he didn’t come. I never noticed it at the time, but that evening, all of a sudden I says to myself: ‘Why, that gentleman never came today; perhaps he’s dead!’ And I came over all queer, seeing as how I get quite fond of people when they behave nicely. And so I was very glad when I saw him come in again next day, and I said to him: ‘I hope nothing happened to you yesterday, sir?’ And he told me nothing had happened to
him
, it was his wife that had died, and it had given him such a turn he hadn’t been able to come. He looked sad, of course—well, you know, people who’ve been married five-and-twenty years—but he seemed pleased, all the same, to be back here. You could see that all his little habits had been quite upset. I did what I could to cheer him up. I said to him: ‘You mustn’t let go of things, sir. Just keep coming here the same as before, it will be a little distraction for you in your sorrow.’ ”

The “Marquise” resumed a gentler tone, for she had observed that the guardian of groves and lawns was listening to her good-naturedly and with no thought of contradiction, keeping harmlessly in its scabbard a sword which looked more like a gardening implement or some horticultural emblem.

“And besides,” she went on, “I choose my customers, I don’t let everyone into my parlours, as I call them. Doesn’t it just look like a parlour with all my flowers? Such friendly customers I have; there’s always someone or other brings me a spray of nice lilac, or jasmine or roses; my favourite flowers, roses are.”

The thought that we were perhaps viewed with disfavour by this lady because we never brought any sprays of lilac or fine roses to her bower made me blush, and in the hope of escaping physically (or of being condemned only
in absentia
) from an adverse judgment, I moved towards the exit. But it is not always in this world the people who bring us fine roses to whom we are most friendly, for the “Marquise,” thinking that I was bored, turned to me:

“You wouldn’t like me to open a little cabin for you?”

And, on my declining:

“No? You’re sure you won’t?” she persisted, smiling. “You’re welcome to it, but of course, not having to pay for a thing won’t make you want to do it if you’ve got nothing to do.”

At this moment a shabbily dressed woman hurried into the place who seemed to be feeling precisely the want in question. But she did not belong to the “Marquise’s” world, for the latter, with the ferocity of a snob, said to her curtly:

“I’ve nothing vacant, Madame.”

“Will they be long?” asked the poor lady, flushed beneath the yellow flowers in her hat.

“Well, ma’am, if you want my advice you’d better try somewhere else. You see, there’s still these two gentlemen waiting, and I’ve only one closet; the others are out of order.”

“Looked like a bad payer to me,” she explained when the other had gone. “That’s not the sort we want here, either; they’re not clean, don’t treat the place with respect. It’d be me who’d have to spend the next hour cleaning up after her ladyship. I’m not sorry to lose her couple of sous.”

At last, after a good half-hour, my grandmother emerged, and fearing that she might not seek to atone by a lavish gratuity for the indiscretion she had shown by remaining so long inside, I beat a retreat so as not to have to share in the scorn which the “Marquise” would no doubt heap on her, and strolled down a path, but slowly, so that my grandmother should not have to hurry to overtake me, as presently she did. I expected her to begin: “I’m afraid I’ve kept you waiting; I hope you’ll still be in time for your friends,” but she did not utter a single word, so much so that, feeling a little hurt, I was disinclined to speak first. Finally, looking up at her I noticed that as she walked beside me she kept her face turned the other way. I was afraid that she might be feeling sick again. I looked at her more closely and was struck by the disjointedness of her gait. Her hat was crooked, her cloak stained; she had the dishevelled and disgruntled appearance, the flushed, slightly dazed look of a person who has just been knocked down by a carriage or pulled out of a ditch.

“I was afraid you were feeling sick, Grandmamma; are you feeling better now?” I asked her.

Doubtless she thought that it would be impossible for her not to make some answer without alarming me.

“I heard the whole of the ‘Marquise’s’ conversation with the keeper,” she told me. “Could anything have been more typical of the Guermantes, or the Verdurins and their little clan? ‘Ah! in what courtly terms those things were put!’ ”
¹⁸
And she added, with deliberate application, this from her own special Marquise, Mme de Sévigné: “As I listened to them I thought that they were preparing for me the delights of a farewell.”

Such were the remarks that she addressed to me, remarks into which she had put all her critical delicacy, her love of quotation, her memory of the classics, more thoroughly even than she would normally have done, and as though to prove that she retained possession of all these faculties. But I guessed rather than heard what she said, so inaudible was the voice in which she mumbled her sentences, clenching her teeth more than could be accounted for by the fear of vomiting.

“Come!” I said lightly enough not to seem to be taking her illness too seriously, “since you’re feeling a little sick I suggest we go home. I don’t want to trundle a grandmother with indigestion about the Champs-Elysées.”

“I didn’t like to suggest it because of your friends,” she replied. “Poor pet! But if you don’t mind, I think it would be wiser.”