The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (328 page)

But on certain such evenings I had recourse to a ruse which won me Albertine’s kiss. Knowing how quickly sleep came to her as soon as she lay down (she knew it also, for, instinctively, before lying down, she would take off the slippers which I had given her, and her ring which she placed by the bedside, as she did in her own room when she went to bed), knowing how heavy her sleep was, how affectionate her awakening, I would find an excuse
for going to look for something and make her lie down on my bed. When I returned she would be asleep and I saw before me the other woman that she became whenever one saw her full-face. But her personality quickly changed when I lay down beside her and saw her again in profile. I could take her head, lift it up, press her face to my lips, put her arms round my neck, and she would continue to sleep, like a watch that never stops, like an animal that stays in whatever position you put it in, like a climbing plant, a convolvulus which continues to thrust out its tendrils whatever support you give it. Only her breathing was altered by each touch of my fingers, as though she were an instrument on which I was playing and from which I extracted modulations by drawing different notes from one after another of its strings. My jealousy subsided, for I felt that Albertine had become a creature that breathes and is nothing else besides, as was indicated by the regular suspiration in which is expressed that pure physiological function which, wholly fluid, has the solidity neither of speech nor of silence; and, in its ignorance of all evil, drawn seemingly rather from a hollowed reed than from a human being, that breath, truly paradisiacal to me who at such moments felt Albertine to be withdrawn from everything, not only physically but morally, was the pure song of the angels. And yet, in that breathing, I thought to myself of a sudden that perhaps many names of people, borne on the stream of memory, must be revolving.

Sometimes indeed the human voice was added to that music. Albertine would murmur a few words. How I longed to catch their meaning! It would happen that the name of a person of whom we had been speaking and who had aroused my jealousy would come to her lips, but
without making me unhappy, for the memory that it brought with it seemed to be only that of the conversations that she had had with me on the subject. One evening, however, when with her eyes still shut she half awoke, she said tenderly, addressing me: “Andrée.” I concealed my emotion. “You’re dreaming, I’m not Andrée,” I said to her, smiling. She smiled also: “Of course not, I wanted to ask you what Andrée said to you this evening.” “I assumed that you used to lie beside her like that.” “Oh no, never,” she said. But, before making this reply, she had hidden her face for a moment in her hands. So her silences were merely screens, her surface affection merely kept beneath the surface a thousand memories which would have rent my heart, her life was full of those incidents the good-natured, bantering account of which forms one’s daily gossip at the expense of other people, people who do not matter, but which, so long as a woman remains buried in the depths of one’s heart, seem to us so precious a revelation of her life that, for the privilege of exploring that underlying world, we would gladly sacrifice our own. Then her sleep would seem to me a marvellous and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand. But as a rule, when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recaptured her innocence. In the attitude which I had imposed upon her, but which in her sleep she had speedily made her own, she seemed to trust herself to me. Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between herself and me, towards whom she raised her arm, on whom she rested her hand, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an indissoluble attachment. Her sleep
moreover did not separate her from me and allowed her to retain the consciousness of our affection; its effect was rather to abolish everything else; I would kiss her, tell her that I was going to take a turn outside, and she would half-open her eyes and say to me with a look of surprise—for the hour was indeed late—“But where are you off to, my darling—” (calling me by my Christian name), and at once fall asleep again. Her sleep was no more than a sort of blotting out of the rest of her life, an even silence over which from time to time familiar words of tenderness would pass in their flight. By putting these words together, one might have arrived at the unalloyed conversation, the secret intimacy of a pure love. This calm slumber delighted me, as a mother, reckoning it a virtue, is delighted by her child’s sound sleep. And her sleep was indeed that of a child. Her awakening also, so natural and so loving, before she even knew where she was, that I sometimes asked myself with dread whether she had been in the habit, before coming to live with me, of not sleeping alone but of finding, when she opened her eyes, someone lying by her side. But her childlike grace was more striking. Like a mother again, I marvelled that she should always awake in such a good humour. After a few moments she would recover consciousness, would utter charming words, unconnected with one another, mere twitterings. By a sort of reversal of roles, her throat, which as a rule one seldom remarked, now almost startlingly beautiful, had acquired the immense importance which her eyes, by being closed in sleep, had lost, her eyes, my regular interlocutors to which I could no longer address myself after the lids had closed over them. Just as the closed lids impart an innocent, grave beauty to
the face by suppressing all that the eyes express only too plainly, there was in the words, not devoid of meaning but interrupted by moments of silence, which Albertine uttered as she awoke, a pure beauty of a kind that is not constantly tarnished, as is conversation, by habits of speech, stale repetitions, traces of familiar defects. Moreover, when I had decided to wake Albertine, I would have been able to do so without fear, knowing that her awakening would bear no relation to the evening that we had passed together, but would emerge from her sleep as morning emerges from night. As soon as she had begun to open her eyes with a smile, she would have offered me her lips, and before she had even said a word, I would have savoured their freshness, as soothing as that of a garden still silent before the break of day.

The day after the evening when Albertine had told me that she might perhaps, then that she might not, be going to see the Verdurins, I awoke early, and, while I was still half asleep, my joy informed me that it was a spring day interpolated in the middle of the winter. Outside, popular themes skilfully transposed for various instruments, from the horn of the china repairer, or the trumpet of the chair mender, to the flute of the goatherd who seemed, on a fine morning, to be a Sicilian drover, were lightly orchestrating the matutinal air with an “Overture for a Public Holiday.” Our hearing, that delightful sense, brings us the company of the street, of which it traces every line for us, sketches all the figures that pass along it, showing us their colours. The iron shutters of the baker’s shop and of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over every possibility of feminine
bliss, were now being raised, like the canvas of a ship that is getting under way and about to set sail across the transparent sea, on to a vision of young shopgirls. This sound of the iron shutters being raised would perhaps have been my sole pleasure in a different part of the town. In this quarter a hundred other sounds contributed to my joy, of which I would not have missed a single one by remaining too long asleep. It is one of the enchantments of the old aristocratic quarters that they are at the same time plebeian. Just as, sometimes, cathedrals used to have them within a stone’s throw of their portals (which have even preserved the name, like the door of Rouen cathedral styled the Booksellers’, because these latter used to expose their merchandise in the open air beside it), so various minor trades, but in this case itinerant, passed in front of the noble Hotel de Guermantes, and made one think at times of the ecclesiastical France of long ago. For the beguiling calls which they launched at the little houses on either side had, with rare exceptions, little connexion with song. They differed from song as much as the declamation—scarcely tinged by even the most imperceptible modulation—of
Boris Godunov
and
Pelléas;
but on the other hand recalled the drone of a priest intoning his office, of which these street scenes are but the good-humoured, secular, and yet half-liturgical counterpart. Never had I so delighted in them as since Albertine had come to live with me; they seemed to me a joyous signal of her awakening, and by interesting me in the life of the world outside made me all the more conscious of the soothing virtue of a beloved presence, as constant as I could wish. Several of the foodstuffs peddled in the street,
which personally I detested, were greatly to Albertine’s liking, so much so that Françoise used to send her young footman out to buy them, slightly humiliated perhaps at finding himself mixing with the plebeian crowd. Very distinct in this peaceful quarter (where the noises were no longer a cause of lamentation to Françoise and had become a source of pleasure to myself), there reached my ears, each with its different modulation, recitatives declaimed by these humble folk as they would be in the music—so entirely popular—of
Boris
, where an initial tonality is barely altered by the inflexion of one note leaning upon another, music of the crowd, which is more speech than music. It was “Winkles, winkles, a ha’porth of winkles!” that brought people running to buy the cornets in which were sold those horrid little shellfish, which, if Albertine had not been there, would have repelled me, as did the snails which I heard being peddled at the same hour. Here again it was of the barely musical declamation of Moussorgsky that the vendor reminded me, but not of it alone. For after having almost “spoken” the refrain: “Who’ll buy my snails, fine, fresh snails?” it was with the vague sadness of Maeterlinck, transposed into music by Debussy, that the snail vendor, in one of those mournful cadences in which the composer of
Pelléas
shows his kinship with Rameau: “If vanquished I must be, is it for thee to be my vanquisher?”
³
added with a singsong melancholy: “Only tuppence a dozen …”

I have always found it difficult to understand why these perfectly simple words were sighed in a tone so far from appropriate, as mysterious as the secret which makes everyone look sad in the old palace to which Melisande
has not succeeded in bringing joy, and as profound as one of the thoughts of the aged Arkel who seeks to utter in the simplest words the whole lore of wisdom and destiny. The very notes upon which the voice of the old King of Allemonde or that of Golaud rises with ever-increasing sweetness to say: “We do not know what is happening here. It may seem strange. Perhaps nothing that happens is in vain,” or else: “You mustn’t be frightened … she was a poor little mysterious creature, like everyone,” were those which served the snail vendor to repeat in an endless cantilena: “Only tuppence a dozen …” But this metaphysical lamentation scarcely had time to expire upon the shore of the infinite before it was interrupted by a shrill trumpet. This time it was not a question of victuals; the words of the libretto were: “Dogs clipped, cats doctored, tails and ears docked.”

It was true that the fantasy or wit of each vendor or vendress frequently introduced variations into the words of all these chants that I used to hear from my bed. And yet a ritual suspension interposing a silence in the middle of a word, especially when it was repeated a second time, constantly evoked the memory of old churches. In his little cart drawn by a she-ass which he stopped in front of each house before entering the courtyard, the old-clothes man, brandishing a whip, intoned: “Old clothes, any old clothes, old clo … thes” with the same pause between the final syllables as if he had been intoning in plainchant: “
Per omnia saecula saeculo … rum
” or “
requiescat in pa … ce
” although he had no reason to believe in the immortality of his clothes, nor did he offer them as cerements for the eternal rest in peace. And similarly, as the
motifs, even at this early hour, were beginning to interweave with one another, a costermonger pushing her little hand-cart employed in her litany the Gregorian division:

although she had probably never heard of the antiphonary, or of the seven tones that symbolise, four the arts of the quadrivium and three those of the trivium.

Drawing from a penny whistle, or from a bagpipe, airs of his own southern country whose sunlight harmonised well with these fine days, a man in a smock, carrying a bullwhip in his hand and wearing a Basque beret on his head, stopped before each house in turn. It was the goatherd with two dogs driving before him his string of goats. As he came from a distance, he arrived fairly late in our quarter; and the women came running out with bowls to receive the milk that was to give strength to their little ones. But with the Pyrenean airs of this benign shepherd was now blended the bell of the grinder, who cried: “Knives, scissors, razors.” With him the saw-setter was unable to compete, for, lacking an instrument, he had to be content with calling: “Any saws to set? Here’s the setter!” while in a gayer mood the tinker, after enumerating the pots, pans and everything else that he repaired, struck up the refrain:

and little Italians carrying big iron boxes painted red, upon which the numbers—winning and losing—were marked, and flourishing their rattles, issued the invitation: “Enjoy yourselves, ladies, here’s a treat.”

Françoise brought in the
Figaro
. A glance was sufficient to show me that my article had still not appeared. She told me that Albertine had asked whether she might come to my room and sent word that she had after all given up the idea of calling upon the Verdurins and had decided to go, as I had advised her, to the “special” matinee at the Trocadéro—what nowadays would be called, though with considerably less significance, a “gala” matinee—after a short ride which she had promised to take with Andrée. Now that I knew that she had abandoned her possibly nefarious intention of going to see Mme Verdurin, I said with a laugh: “Tell her to come in,” and told myself that she might go wherever she chose and that it was all the same to me. I knew that by the end of the afternoon, when dusk began to fall, I should probably be a different man, moping, attaching to every one of Albertine’s movements an importance that they did not possess at this morning hour when the weather was so fine. For my insouciance was accompanied by a clear notion of its cause, but was in no way modified thereby.