The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (77 page)

“Oh, Monsieur,” I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would inform Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, “if you would do that, if you would speak of me to Mme Swann my whole life would not be long enough to prove my gratitude, and that life would be all at your service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do not know Mme Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her.”

I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as not to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not possess. But as I uttered them I sensed that they were already superfluous, for from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its chilling ardour, I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of hesitation and displeasure, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to the invisible interlocutor whom one has within oneself at the moment when one is telling him something that one’s other interlocutor, the person to whom one has been talking up till then—myself, in this instance—is not meant to hear. I realised in a flash that the words I had pronounced, which, feeble as they were when measured against the flood of gratitude that was coursing through me, had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois and to confirm his decision upon an intervention which would have given him so little trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those that could have been chosen with diabolical malice by persons anxious to do me harm) the only ones that could result in his abandoning his intention. Indeed, on hearing them, in the same way as when a stranger with whom we have been pleasantly exchanging impressions which we might have supposed to be similar about passers-by whom we agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly as he feels his pocket: “What a pity I haven’t got my revolver with me; I could have picked off the lot of them,” M. de Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more simple than to be commended to Mme Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and must consequently be very difficult to obtain, thought that the desire I had expressed, though ostensibly normal, must cloak some different motive, some suspect intention, some prior transgression, on account of which, in the certainty of displeasing Mme Swann, no one had hitherto been willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I realised that this mission was one he would never discharge, that he might see Mme Swann daily, for years to come, without ever mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few days later, for some information which I required, and charged my father to convey it to me. But he had not thought fit to tell her on whose behalf he was inquiring. So she would never discover that I knew M. de Norpois and that I so longed to be asked to her house; and this was perhaps a lesser misfortune than I supposed. For the second of these discoveries would probably not have added much to the efficacy of the first, which was in any event dubious: for Odette, the idea of her own life and of her own home awakened no mysterious uneasiness, and a person who knew her, who came to her house, did not seem to her a fabulous creature such as he seemed to me who would have flung a stone through Swann’s windows if I could have written upon it that I knew M. de Norpois; I was convinced that such a message, even when transmitted in so brutal a fashion, would have given me far more prestige in the eyes of the lady of the house than it would have prejudiced her against me. But even if I had been capable of understanding that the mission which M. de Norpois did not perform must have remained futile, indeed that it might have damaged my credit with the Swanns, I should not have had the courage, had he proved himself willing, to relieve the Ambassador of it and to renounce the pleasure—however fatal its consequences might prove—of feeling that my name and my person were thus brought for a moment into Gilberte’s presence, into her unknown life and home.

After M. de Norpois had gone my father cast an eye over the evening paper, and I thought once more of Berma. The pleasure which I had experienced in listening to her required all the more to be reinforced in that it had fallen far short of what I had promised myself; and so it at once assimilated everything that was capable of giving it nourishment, for instance those merits which M. de Norpois had ascribed to her and which my mind had imbibed at a single draught, like a dry lawn when water is poured on it. Then my father handed me the newspaper, pointing out to me a paragraph which ran more or less as follows:—

The performance of
Phèdre
, given this afternoon before an enthusiastic audience which included the foremost representatives of the artistic and critical world, was for Mme Berma, who played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as any that she has known in the course of her phenomenal career. We shall return at greater length to this performance, which is indeed an event in the history of the stage; suffice it to say here that the best qualified judges were unanimous in declaring that this interpretation shed an entirely new light on the role of Phèdre, which is one of the finest and most complex of Racine’s creations, and that it constituted the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to witness.

As soon as my mind had conceived this new idea of “the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art,” it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, adding to it a little of what it lacked, and the combination formed something so exalting that I exclaimed to myself: “What a great artist!” It will doubtless be argued that I was not absolutely sincere. But let us bear in mind, rather, the countless writers who, dissatisfied with the passage they have just written, read some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been trying to express in their prose, and become so imbued with this idea of genius that they add it to their own productions when they return to them, no longer see them in the light in which they appeared at first, and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: “After all!” without taking into account that, into the total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to their own but which, after all, they did not write; let us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress who has done nothing but betray them; all those, too, who are sustained by the alternative hopes, on the one hand of an incomprehensible survival after death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy, and on the other of a reassuring void, when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise they must expiate after their death; let us bear in mind also the travellers who come home enraptured by the over-all splendour of a journey from which day by day they experienced nothing but tedium; and let us then declare whether, in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that makes us most happy which has not first sought, like a real parasite, and won from an alien but neighbouring idea the greater part of the strength that it originally lacked.

My mother appeared none too pleased that my father no longer thought of a diplomatic career for me. I fancy that, anxious above all else that a definite rule of life should discipline the vagaries of my nervous system, what she regretted was not so much seeing me abandon diplomacy as the prospect of my devoting myself to literature. “Don’t worry,” my father told her, “the main thing is that a man should find pleasure in his work. He’s no longer a child. He knows pretty well now what he likes, it’s very unlikely that he will change, and he’s quite capable of deciding for himself what will make him happy in life.”

That evening, as I waited for the time to arrive when, thanks to the freedom of choice which they allowed me, I should or should not begin to be happy in life, my father’s words caused me great uneasiness. His unexpected kindnesses, when they occurred, had always made me long to kiss his glowing cheeks above his beard, and if I did not yield to the impulse, it was simply because I was afraid of annoying him. Now, as an author becomes alarmed when he sees the fruits of his own meditations, which do not appear to him to be of great value since he does not separate them from himself, oblige a publisher to choose a brand of paper, to employ a type-face finer, perhaps, than they deserve, I asked myself whether my desire to write was of sufficient importance to justify my father in dispensing so much generosity. But apart from that, in speaking of my inclinations as no longer liable to change, and of what was destined to make my life happy, he aroused in me two very painful suspicions. The first was that (at a time when, every day, I regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following morning) my existence had already begun, and that, furthermore, what was yet to follow would not differ to any extent from what had gone before. The second suspicion, which was really no more than a variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside Time, but was subject to its laws, just like those characters in novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me into such gloom when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my hooded wicker chair. In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can rest assured. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk around the courtyard of a hospital, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, “He’s no longer a child,” “His tastes won’t change now,” and so forth, my father had suddenly made me conscious of myself in Time, and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: “He very seldom comes up from the country now. He has finally decided to end his days there.”

Meanwhile my father, in order to forestall any criticism that we might feel tempted to make of our guest, said to my mother: “Upon my word, old Norpois was a bit ‘stuffy,’ as you call it, this evening, wasn’t he? When he said that it wouldn’t have been ‘seemly’ to ask the Comte de Paris a question, I was quite afraid you would burst out laughing.”

“Not at all!” answered my mother. “I was delighted to see a man of his standing and his age with that sort of simplicity, which is really a sign of decency and good breeding.”

“I dare say. But that doesn’t prevent him from having a shrewd and discerning mind—as I know very well since I see him on the Commission, remember, where he’s very different from what he was here,” exclaimed my father, who was glad to see that Mamma appreciated M. de Norpois, and anxious to persuade her that he was even better than she supposed, because a cordial nature exaggerates a friend’s qualities with as much pleasure as a mischievous one finds in depreciating them. “What was it that he said, again—‘With princes one never does know’ …?”

“Yes, that was it. I noticed it at the time; it was very shrewd. You can see that he has a profound experience of life.”

“It’s extraordinary that he should have dined with the Swanns, and that he seems to have found quite re
spectable people there, government officials. How on earth can Mme Swann have managed to get hold of them?”

“Did you notice the malicious way he said: ‘It is a house which is especially attractive to gentlemen!’?”

And each of them attempted to reproduce the manner in which M. de Norpois had uttered these words, as they might have attempted to capture some intonation of Bressant’s voice or of Thiron’s in
L’Aventurière
or in
Le Gendre de M. Poirier
. But of all his sayings there was none so keenly relished as one was by Françoise, who, years afterwards, could not “keep a straight face” if we reminded her that she had been described by the Ambassador as “a first-rate chef,” a compliment which my mother had gone in person to transmit to her, like a War Minister passing on the congratulations of a visiting sovereign after reviewing the troops. I had, as it happened, preceded my mother to the kitchen. For I had extorted from Françoise, who though a pacifist was cruel, a promise that she would cause no undue suffering to the rabbit which she had to kill, and I had had no report yet of its death. Françoise assured me that it had passed away as peacefully as could be desired, and very swiftly. “I’ve never seen a beast like it; it died without saying a blessed word; you would have thought it was dumb.” Being but little versed in the language of beasts, I suggested that rabbits perhaps did not squeal like chickens. “Just wait till you see,” said Françoise, filled with contempt for my ignorance, “if rabbits don’t squeal every bit as much as chickens. Why, their voices are even louder.”

Françoise received the compliments of M. de Norpois with the proud simplicity, the joyful and (if only momentarily) intelligent expression of an artist when someone speaks to him of his art. My mother had sent her when she first came to us to several of the big restaurants to see how the cooking there was done. I had the same pleasure, that evening, in hearing her dismiss the most famous of them as mere cookshops, that I had had long ago when I learned with regard to theatrical artists that the hierarchy of their merits did not at all correspond to that of their reputations. “The Ambassador,” my mother told her, “assured me that he knows nowhere where one can get cold beef and soufflés as good as yours.” Françoise, with an air of modesty and of paying just homage to the truth, agreed, but seemed not at all impressed by the title “Ambassador”; she said of M. de Norpois, with the friendliness due to a man who had taken her for a chef: “He’s a good old soul, like me.” She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he arrived, but knowing that Mamma hated people lurking behind doors and at windows, and thinking that she would get to know from the other servants or from the porter that she had been keeping watch (for Françoise saw everywhere nothing but “jealousies” and “tale-bearings,” which played the same baleful and perennial role in her imagination as, for certain other people, the intrigues of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had contented herself with a peep from the kitchen window, “so as not to have words with Madame,” and from her momentary glimpses of M. de Norpois had “thought it was Monsieur Legrandin,” because of what she called his “agelity” and in spite of their having not a single point in common.