The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (76 page)

I began to talk about the Comte de Paris, to ask whether he was not one of Swann’s friends, for I was afraid lest the conversation should drift away from him. “Why, yes!” replied M. de Norpois, turning towards me and fixing upon my modest person the azure gaze in which there floated, as in their vital element, his immense capacity for work and his power of assimilation. “And upon my word,” he added, once more addressing my father, “I do not think that I shall be over-stepping the bounds of the respect which I have always professed for the Prince (without, however, maintaining any personal relations with him, which would inevitably compromise my position, unofficial though it may now be) if I tell you of a little episode which is not unintriguing. No more than four years ago, at a small railway station in one of the countries of Central Europe, the Prince happened to set eyes on Mme Swann. Naturally, none of his circle ventured to ask His Royal Highness what he thought of her. That would not have been seemly. But when her name came up by chance in conversation, by certain signs—barely perceptible, if you like, but quite unmistakable—the Prince appeared willing enough to let it be understood that his impression of her had on the whole been far from unfavourable.”

“But there could have been no possibility, surely, of her being presented to the Comte de Paris?” inquired my father.

“Well, we don’t know; with princes one never does know,” replied M. de Norpois. “The most exalted, those who know best how to secure what is due to them, are as often as not the last to let themselves be embarrassed by the decrees of popular opinion, even by those for which there is most justification, especially when it is a question of their rewarding a personal attachment to themselves. And it is certain that the Comte de Paris has always most graciously acknowledged the devotion of Swann, who is moreover a man of wit if ever there was one.”

“And what was your own impression, Your Excellency?” my mother asked, from politeness as well as from curiosity.

All the vigour of an old connoisseur broke through the habitual moderation of his speech as he answered: “Quite excellent!”

And knowing that the admission that a strong impression has been made on one by a woman takes its place, provided that one makes it in a playful tone, in a certain form of the art of conversation that is highly appreciated, he broke into a little laugh that lasted for several moments, moistening the old diplomat’s blue eyes and making his nostrils, with their network of tiny scarlet veins, quiver. “She is altogether charming!”

“Was there a writer of the name of Bergotte at this dinner, Monsieur?” I asked timidly, still trying to keep the conversation to the subject of the Swanns.

“Yes, Bergotte was there,” replied M. de Norpois, inclining his head courteously towards me, as though in his desire to be agreeable to my father he attached to everything connected with him a genuine importance, even to the questions of a boy of my age who was not accustomed to see such politeness shown to him by persons of his. “Do you know him?” he went on, fastening on me that clear gaze the penetration of which had won the admiration of Bismarck.

“My son does not know him, but he admires his work immensely,” my mother explained.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed M. de Norpois, inspiring me with doubts of my own intelligence far graver than those that ordinarily tormented me, when I saw that what I valued a thousand times more than myself, what I regarded as the most exalted thing in the world, was for him at the bottom of the scale of admiration, “I do not share your son’s point of view. Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, there’s no more to it than that, and that is not much. Nowhere does one find in his flaccid works what one might call structure. No action—or very little—but above all no range. His books fail at the foundation, or rather they have no foundation at all. At a time like the present, when the ever-increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations and is on the eve, perhaps, of undergoing others more drastic still, when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side, you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something more than a clever fellow who lulls us into forgetting, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner. I don’t deny that Bergotte’s manner can be quite seductive at times, but taken as a whole, it is all very precious, very thin, and altogether lacking in virility. I can now understand more easily, when I bear in mind your altogether excessive regard for Bergotte, the few lines that you showed me just now, which it would be ungracious of me not to overlook, since you yourself told me in all simplicity that they were merely a childish scribble.” (I had indeed said so, but I did not mean a word of it.) “For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth. After all, others as well as yourself have such sins upon their conscience, and you are not the only one who has believed himself a poet in his idle moments. But one can see in what you showed me the unfortunate influence of Bergotte. You will not, of course, be surprised when I say that it had none of his qualities, since he is a past-master in the art—entirely superficial by the by—of handling a certain style of which, at your age, you cannot have acquired even the rudiments. But already there is the same fault, that nonsense of stringing together fine-sounding words and only afterwards troubling about what they mean. That is putting the cart before the horse. Even in Bergotte’s books, all those Chinese puzzles of form, all those subtleties of a deliquescent mandarin seem to me to be quite futile. Given a few fireworks let off prettily enough by an author, and up goes the shout of masterpiece. Masterpieces are not so common as all that! Bergotte cannot place to his credit—does not carry in his baggage, if I may use the expression—a single novel that is at all lofty in its conception, one of those books which one keeps in a special corner of one’s library. I cannot think of one such in the whole of his work. But that does not mean that, in his case, the work is not infinitely superior to the author. Ah! there’s a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an individual who corresponded less to his—more pretentious, more pompous, more ill-bred. Vulgar at times, at others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not—such is your Bergotte. He has the most confused and convoluted mind, what our forebears called sesquipedalian, and he makes the things that he says even more unpleasing by the manner in which he says them. I forget for the moment whether it is Loménie or Sainte-Beuve who tells us that Vigny repelled people by the same failing. But Bergotte has never given us a
Cinq-Mars
, or a
Cachet rouge
, certain pages of which are veritable anthology pieces.”

Shattered by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an essay or merely to devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious once again of my intellectual nullity and that I was not cut out for the literary life. Doubtless in the old days at Combray certain impressions of a very humble order, or a few pages of Bergotte, had plunged me into a state of reverie which had appeared to me to be of great value. But this state was what my prose poem reflected; there could be no doubt that M. de Norpois had at once grasped and seen through the fallacy of what I had thought to be beautiful simply through a deceptive mirage, since the Ambassador had not been taken in by it. He had shown me, on the contrary, what an infinitely unimportant place was mine when I was judged from outside, objectively, by the best-disposed and most intelligent of experts. I felt dismayed, diminished; and my mind, like a fluid which is without dimensions save those of the vessel that is provided for it, just as it had expanded in the past to fill the vast capacity of genius, contracted now, was entirely contained within the straitened mediocrity in which M. de Norpois had of a sudden enclosed and sealed it.

“Our first introduction—I speak of Bergotte and myself,” he resumed, turning to my father, “was somewhat beset with thorns (which is, after all, only another way of saying that it was piquant). Bergotte—some years ago, now—paid a visit to Vienna while I was Ambassador there; he was introduced to me by the Princess Metternich, came and wrote his name in the Embassy book, and made it known that he wished to be invited. Now, being when abroad the representative of France, to which he has after all done some honour by his writings, to a certain extent (let us say, to be precise, to a very slight extent), I was prepared to set aside the unfavourable opinion that I hold of his private life. But he was not travelling alone, and moreover he let it be understood that he was not to be invited without his companion. I trust that I am no more of a prude than most men, and, being a bachelor, I was perhaps in a position to throw open the doors of the Embassy a little wider than if I had been married and the father of a family. Nevertheless, I confess that there are depths of ignominy to which I refuse to accommodate myself and which are made more repulsive still by the tone, more than just moral, but frankly moralising, that Bergotte adopts in his books, where one finds nothing but perpetual and, between ourselves, somewhat wearisome analyses, painful scruples, morbid remorse, and, for the merest peccadilloes, veritable preachifying (one knows what that’s worth), while all the time he is showing such frivolity and cynicism in his private life. To cut a long story short, I avoided answering, the Princess returned to the charge, but with no greater success. So that I do not suppose that I appear exactly in the odour of sanctity to the gentleman, and I am not sure how far he appreciated Swann’s kindness in inviting him and myself on the same evening. Unless of course it was he who asked for the invitation. One can never tell, for really he is a sick man. Indeed that is his sole excuse.”

“And was Mme Swann’s daughter at the dinner?” I asked M. de Norpois, taking advantage, to put this question, of a moment in which, as we all moved towards the drawing-room, I could more easily conceal my emotion than would have been possible at table, where I was held fast in the glare of the lamplight.

M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember:

“Ah, yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, of course, I remember now that she was introduced to me before dinner as the daughter of our Amphitryon. I’m afraid that I saw little of her; she retired to bed early. Or else she went out to see some friends—I forget which. But I can see that you are very intimate with the Swann household.”

“I play with Mlle Swann in the Champs-Elysées, and she’s delightful.”

“Oh! so that’s it? But I assure you, I too thought her charming. I must confess to you, however, that I do not believe that she will ever come anywhere near her mother, if I may say as much without hurting your feelings.”

“I prefer Mlle Swann’s face, but I admire her mother, too, enormously. I go for walks in the Bois simply in the hope of seeing her pass.”

“Ah! But I must tell them that; they will be highly flattered.”

While he was uttering these words, and for a few seconds after he had uttered them, M. de Norpois was still in the same position as anyone else who, hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his family as respectable stockbrokers, of his house as a fine house, imagined that I would speak just as readily of another man equally intelligent, of other stockbrokers equally respectable, of another house equally fine; it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that he is a lunatic. M. de Norpois knew that there is nothing unnatural in the pleasure one derives from looking at pretty women, that it is good manners, when someone speaks to you of a pretty woman with any warmth, to pretend to think that he is in love with her, and to promise to further his designs. But in saying that he would speak of me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like an Olympian deity who has taken on the fluidity of a breath of wind, or rather the aspect of the old greybeard whose form Minerva borrows, to insinuate myself, unseen, into Mme Swann’s drawing-room, to attract her attention, to occupy her thoughts, to arouse her gratitude for my admiration, to appear before her as the friend of an important person, to seem to her worthy to be invited by her in the future and to enter into the intimate life of her family), this important person who was going to use on my behalf the great influence which he must have with Mme Swann inspired in me suddenly an affection so compelling that I had difficulty in restraining myself from kissing his soft, white, wrinkled hands, which looked as though they had been left lying too long in water. I almost made as if to do so, in an impulsive movement which I believed that I alone had noticed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly the extent to which our words or gestures are apparent to others. Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the incidentals of our speech and of our postures scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom we converse. It is, no doubt, to a supposition of this sort that criminals yield when they touch up the wording of a statement already made, thinking that the new variant cannot be confronted with any existing version. But it is quite possible that, even with respect to the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is doomed to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the leader column says to us of an event, of a work of art,
a fortiori
of a singer who has enjoyed her “hour of fame”: “Who will remember this in ten years’ time?”, does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions overleaf speak often of a fact in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is still known in its entirety? Perhaps this does not quite hold true for the brief life of a human being. And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was also a guest there, seemed to me the most solid support that I could hope to find, because he was a friend of my father, indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and moreover, by profession and upbringing trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador had gone, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had “seen the moment in which I was about to kiss his hand,” not only did I blush to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how different from what I might have believed was not only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the composition of his memory. This piece of gossip enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of absence and presence of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness, of which the human mind is composed; and I was as marvellously surprised as on the day on which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero’s books, that there existed a precise list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite to his hunts a thousand years before the birth of Christ.