The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (73 page)

I was introduced to him before dinner by my father, who summoned me into his study for the purpose. As I entered, the Ambassador rose, held out his hand, bowed his tall figure and fixed his blue eyes attentively on my face. As the foreign visitors who used to be presented to him, in the days when he still represented France abroad, were all more or less (even the famous singers) persons of note, with regard to whom he therefore knew that he would be able to say later on, when he heard their names mentioned in Paris or in Petersburg, that he remembered perfectly the evening he had spent with them in Munich or Sofia, he had formed the habit of impressing upon them, by his affability, the pleasure he felt in making their acquaintance; but in addition to this, being convinced that in the life of foreign capitals, in contact at once with all the interesting personalities that passed through them and with the manners and customs of the native populations, one acquired a deeper insight than could be gleaned from books into the history, the geography, the traditions of the different nations, and into the intellectual trends of Europe, he would exercise upon each newcomer his keen power of observation, so as to decide at once with what manner of man he had to deal. It was some time since the Government had entrusted him with a post abroad, but as soon as anyone was introduced to him, his eyes, as though they had not yet received notification of their master’s retirement, began their fruitful observation, while by his whole attitude he endeavoured to convey that the stranger’s name was not unknown to him. And so, while speaking to me kindly and with the air of self-importance of a man who is conscious of the vastness of his experience, he never ceased to examine me with a sagacious curiosity for his own profit, as though I had been some exotic custom, some historic and instructive monument or some star on tour. And in this way he gave proof, in his attitude towards me, at once of the majestic benevolence of the sage Mentor and of the zealous curiosity of the young Anacharsis.

He offered me absolutely no opening to the
Revue des Deux-Mondes
, but put a number of questions to me about my life and my studies, and about my tastes which I heard thus spoken of for the first time as though it might be a reasonable thing to obey their promptings, whereas hitherto I had always supposed it to be my duty to suppress them. Since they inclined me towards literature, he did not dissuade me from it; on the contrary, he spoke of it with deference, as of some venerable and charming personage whose select circle, in Rome or at Dresden, one remembers with pleasure and regrets only that one’s multifarious duties in life enable one to revisit so seldom. He appeared to envy me, with an almost rakish smile, the delightful hours which, more fortunate than himself and more free, I should be able to spend with such a mistress. But the very terms that he employed showed me Literature as something entirely different from the image that I had formed of it at Combray, and I realised that I had been doubly right in renouncing it. Until now, I had concluded only that I had no gift for writing; now M. de Norpois took away from me even the desire to write. I wanted to express to him what had been my dreams; trembling with emotion, I was painfully anxious that all the words I uttered would be the sincerest possible equivalent of what I had felt and had never yet attempted to formulate; which is to say that my words were very unclear. Perhaps from a professional habit, perhaps by virtue of the calm that is acquired by every important personage whose advice is commonly sought, and who, knowing that he will keep the control of the conversation in his own hands, allows his interlocutor to fret, to struggle, to toil to his heart’s content, perhaps also to show off the character of his face (Greek, according to himself, despite his sweeping whiskers), M. de Norpois, while anything was being expounded to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute as if you had been addressing some ancient—and deaf—bust in a museum. Until suddenly, falling upon you like an auctioneer’s hammer or a Delphic oracle, the Ambassador’s voice, as he replied to you, would be all the more striking in that nothing in his face had allowed you to guess what sort of impression you had made on him, or what opinion he was about to express.

“Precisely,” he suddenly began, as though the case were now heard and judged, after having allowed me to stammer incoherently beneath those motionless eyes which never for an instant left my face; “a friend of mine has a son whose case,
mutatis mutandis
, is very much like yours.” He adopted in speaking of our common predisposition the same reassuring tone as if it had been a predisposition not for literature but for rheumatism, and he had wished to assure me that it would not necessarily prove fatal. “He too chose to leave the Quai d’Orsay, although the way had been paved for him there by his father, and without caring what people might say, he settled down to write. And certainly, he’s had no reason to regret it. He published two years ago—of course, he’s much older than you—a book about the Sense of the Infinite on the western shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza, and this year he has brought out a short treatise, less weighty but written with a lively, not to say cutting pen, on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army; and these have put him quite in a class by himself. He’s already gone pretty far, and he’s not the sort of man to stop halfway. I happen to know that (without any suggestion, of course, of his standing for election) his name has been mentioned several times in conversation, and not at all unfavourably, at the Academy of Moral Sciences. And so, though one can’t say yet, of course, that he’s exactly at the pinnacle, he has fought his way by sheer merit to a very fine position indeed, and success—which doesn’t always come only to the pushers and the muddlers, the fusspots who are generally show-offs—success has crowned his efforts.”

My father, seeing me already, in a few years’ time, an Academician, exuded a satisfaction which M. de Norpois raised to the highest pitch when, after a momentary hesitation during which he appeared to be calculating the possible consequences of his act, he handed me his card and said: “Why not go and see him yourself? Tell him I sent you. He may be able to give you some good advice,” plunging me by these words into as painful a state of anxiety as if he had told me that I was to embark next day as cabin-boy on board a wind-jammer.

My aunt Léonie had bequeathed to me, together with a multiplicity of objects and furniture which were something of an embarrassment, almost all her liquid assets—revealing thus after her death an affection for me which I had little suspected in her lifetime. My father, who was trustee of this estate until I came of age, now consulted M. de Norpois with regard to a number of investments. He recommended certain stocks bearing a low rate of interest, which he considered particularly sound, notably English consols and Russian four per cents. “With absolutely first-class securities such as those,” said M. de Norpois, “even if your income from them is nothing very great, you may be certain of never losing any of your capital.” My father then gave him a rough indication of what else he had bought. M. de Norpois gave a just perceptible smile of congratulation; like all capitalists, he regarded wealth as an enviable thing, but thought it more delicate to compliment people upon their possessions only by an inconspicuous sign of intelligent sympathy; at the same time, as he was himself colossally rich, he thought it in good taste to seem to regard as considerable the inferior incomes of his friends, with, however, a happy and comforting reference to the superiority of his own. On the other hand, he did not hesitate to congratulate my father on the “composition” of his portfolio, selected “with so sure, so delicate, so fine a taste.” It was as though he attributed to the relative values of shares, and even to shares themselves, something akin to aesthetic merit. Of one, comparatively recent and still little known, which my father mentioned, M. de Norpois, like the people who have always read the books of which you imagined you alone had ever heard, said at once, “Ah, yes, I used to amuse myself for a time following it in the share index; it was not uninteresting,” with the retrospective smile of a regular subscriber who has read the latest novel already, in monthly instalments, in his magazine. “It wouldn’t be at all a bad idea to apply for some of this new issue. It’s distinctly attractive; they’re offering it at a most tempting discount.” But when he came to some of the older investments, my father, who could not remember their exact names, which it was easy to confuse with others of the same kind, opened a drawer and showed the securities themselves to the Ambassador. The sight of them enchanted me. They were ornamented with cathedral spires and allegorical figures, like some of the old romantic editions that I had pored over as a child. All the products of one period resemble one another; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me more strongly of the instalments of
Notre-Dame de Paris
and of various works of Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer’s door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a registered share in the Water Company.

The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by affection that, in practice, his attitude towards everything I did was one of blind indulgence. And so he had no qualm about sending me to fetch a little prose poem which I had made up years before at Combray on coming home from a walk. I had written it in a state of exaltation which must, I felt certain, communicate itself to everyone who read it. But it was not destined to captivate M. de Norpois, for he handed it back to me without a word.

My mother, who was full of respect for all my father’s occupations, came in now to ask timidly whether dinner might be served. She was afraid to interrupt a conversation in which she herself could have no part. And indeed my father was continually reminding the Marquis of some useful measure which they had decided to support at the next meeting of the Commission, speaking in the peculiar tone always adopted in a strange environment by a pair of colleagues—akin, in this respect, to a pair of schoolfellows—whose professional routine has furnished them with a common fund of memories to which others have no access and to which they apologise for referring in their presence.

But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. At length my father became uneasy: “I had thought,” he ventured, after an endless preamble, “of asking the advice of the Commission …” Then from the face of the noble virtuoso, who had maintained the passivity of an orchestral player whose moment has not yet come, there emerged with an even delivery, on a sharp note, and as though they were no more than the completion (but scored for a different voice) of the phrase that my father had begun, the words: “of which you will not hesitate, of course, to call a meeting, more especially as the members are all known to you personally and can easily make themselves available.” It was not in itself a very remarkable ending. But the immobility that had preceded it made it detach itself with the crystal clarity, the almost mischievous unexpectedness of those phrases with which the piano, silent until then, takes over, at a given moment, from the cello to which one has just been listening, in a Mozart concerto.

“Well, did you enjoy your matinée?” asked my father as we moved to the dining-room, hoping to draw me out and with the idea that my enthusiasm would give M. de Norpois a good opinion of me. “He has just been to see Berma. You remember we talked about it the other day,” he went on, turning towards the diplomat, in the same tone of retrospective, technical and mysterious allusiveness as if he had been referring to a meeting of the Commission.

“You must have been enchanted, especially if you had never seen her before. Your father was alarmed at the possible repercussions that this little jaunt might have upon your health, which is none too good, I am told, none too robust. But I soon set his mind at rest. Theatres today are not what they were even twenty years ago. You have more or less comfortable seats now, and a certain amount of ventilation, although we have still a long way to go before we come up to the standard of Germany or England, who in that respect as in many others are immeasurably ahead of us. I have never seen Mme Berma in
Phèdre
, but I have always heard that she is excellent in the part. You were charmed with her, of course?”

M. de Norpois, a man a thousand times more intelligent than myself, must know that hidden truth which I had failed to extract from Berma’s playing, and would reveal it to me; in answering his question I would ask him to let me know in what that truth consisted; and he would thereby justify me in the longing that I had felt to see and hear the actress. I had only a moment; I must take advantage of it and bring my cross-examination to bear upon the essential points. But what were they? Fastening my whole attention upon my own so confused impressions, with no thought of winning the admiration of M. de Norpois but only that of learning from him the truth that I had still to discover, I made no attempt to substitute ready-made phrases for the words that failed me but stood there stammering until finally, in the hope of provoking him into declaring what was so admirable about Berma, I confessed that I had been disappointed.

“What’s that?” cried my father, annoyed at the bad impression which this admission of my failure to appreciate the performance must make on M. de Norpois, “How can you possibly say that you didn’t enjoy it? Why, your grandmother has been telling us that you sat there hanging on every word that Berma uttered, with your eyes starting out of your head; that everyone else in the theatre seemed quite bored beside you.”

“Oh, yes, I listened as hard as I could, trying to find out what it was that was supposed to be so wonderful about her. Of course, she’s frightfully good …”

“If she is frightfully good, what more do you want?”

“One of the things that have undoubtedly contributed to the success of Mme Berma,” said M. de Norpois, turning with application towards my mother, so as not to leave her out of the conversation, and in conscientious fulfilment of his duty of politeness to the lady of the house, “is the perfect taste that she shows in her choice of roles, which always assures her of complete success, and success of the right sort. She hardly ever appears in anything trivial. Look how she has thrown herself into the part of Phèdre. And then, she brings the same good taste to the choice of her costumes, and to her acting. In spite of her frequent and lucrative tours in England and America, the vulgarity—I will not say of John Bull, which would be unjust, at any rate as regards the England of the Victorian era—but of Uncle Sam has not infected her. No loud colours, no rant. And then that admirable voice, which serves her so well and upon which she plays so ravishingly—I should almost be tempted to describe it as a musical instrument!”