In Search of Lost Time (10 page)

I heard my family's footsteps as they went out with Swann; and when the bell on the gate told me he had left, I went to the window. Mama was asking my father if he had thought the lobster was good and if M. Swann had had more coffee-and-pistachio ice cream. ‘I found it quite ordinary, said my mother; I think next time we'll have to try another flavour. – I can't tell you how changed I find Swann, said my great-aunt, he has aged so!' My great-aunt was so used to seeing Swann always as the same adolescent that she was surprised to find him suddenly less young than the age she continued to give him. And my family was also beginning to feel that in him this ageing was abnormal, excessive, shameful and deserved by the unmarried, by all those for whom it seems that the great day that has no tomorrow is longer than for others, because for them it is empty and the moments in it add up from morning on without then being divided among children. ‘I think he has no end of worries with that wretched wife of his who is living with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all of Combray knows. It's the talk of the town.' My mother pointed out that in spite of this he had been looking much less sad for some time now. ‘He also doesn't make that gesture of his as often, so like his father, of wiping his eyes and running his hand across his forehead. I myself think that in his heart of hearts he no longer loves that woman. – Why, naturally he doesn't love her any more, answered my grandfather. I received a letter from him about it a long time ago by now, a letter with which I hastened not to comply and which leaves no doubt about his feelings, at least his feelings of love, for his wife. Well now! You see, you didn't thank him for the Asti,' added my grandfather, turning to his two sisters-in-law. ‘What? We didn't thank him? I think, just between you and me, that I put it quite delicately, answered my aunt Flora. – Yes, you managed it very well: quite admirable, said my Aunt Céline. – But you were very good too. – Yes, I was rather proud of my remark about kind neighbours. – What? Is that what you call thanking him? exclaimed my grandfather. I certainly heard that, but devil take me if
I thought it was directed at Swann. You can be sure he never noticed. – But see here, Swann isn't stupid, I'm sure he appreciated it. After all, I couldn't tell him how many bottles there were and what the wine cost!' My father and mother were left alone there, and sat down for a moment; then my father said: ‘Well, shall we go up to bed? – If you like, my dear, even though I'm not the least bit sleepy; yet it couldn't be that perfectly harmless coffee ice cream that's keeping me so wide awake; but I can see a light in the servants' hall and since poor Françoise has waited up for me, I'll go and ask her to unhook my bodice while you're getting undressed.' And my mother opened the latticed door that led from the vestibule to the staircase. Soon, I heard her coming upstairs to close her window. I went without a sound into the hallway; my heart was beating so hard I had trouble walking, but at least it was no longer pounding from anxiety, but from terror and joy. I saw the light cast in the stairwell by Mama's candle. Then I saw Mama herself; I threw myself forward. In the first second, she looked at me with astonishment, not understanding what had happened. Then an expression of anger came over her face, she did not say a single word to me, and indeed for much less than this they would go several days without speaking to me. If Mama had said one word to me, it would have been an admission that they could talk to me again and in any case it would perhaps have seemed to me even more terrible, as a sign that, given the gravity of the punishment that was about to be prepared, silence, estrangement, would have been childish. A word would have been like the calm with which you answer a servant when you have just decided to dismiss him; the kiss you give a son you are sending off to enlist, whereas you would have refused it if you were simply going to be annoyed with him for a few days. But she heard my father coming up from the dressing-room where he had gone to undress and, to avoid the scene he would make over me, she said to me in a voice choked with anger: ‘Run, run, so at least your father won't see you waiting like this as if you were out of your mind!' But I repeated to her: ‘Come and say goodnight to me,' terrified as I saw the gleam from my father's candle already rising up the wall, but also using his approach as a means of blackmail and hoping that Mama, to avoid my father's finding me still there if she continued to refuse,
would say: ‘Go back to your room, I'll come.' It was too late, my father was there in front of us. Involuntarily, though no one heard, I murmured these words: ‘I'm done for!'

It was not so. My father was constantly refusing me permission for things that had been authorized in the more generous covenants granted by my mother and grandmother because he did not bother about ‘principles' and for him there was no ‘law of nations'. For a completely contingent reason, or even for no reason, he would at the last minute deny me a certain walk that was so customary, so consecrated that to deprive me of it was a violation, or, as he had done once again this evening, long before the ritual hour he would say to me: ‘Go on now, up to bed, no arguments!' But also, because he had no principles (in my grandmother's sense), he was not properly speaking intransigent. He looked at me for a moment with an expression of surprise and annoyance, then as soon as Mama had explained to him in a few embarrassed words what had happened, he said to her: ‘Go along with him, then. You were just saying you didn't feel very sleepy, stay in his room for a little while, I don't need anything. – But my dear, answered my mother timidly, whether I'm sleepy or not doesn't change anything, we can't let the child get into the habit… – But it isn't a question of habit, said my father, shrugging his shoulders, you can see the boy is upset, he seems very sad; look, we're not brutes! You'll end by making him ill, and that won't do us much good! There are two beds in his room; go ahead and tell Françoise to prepare the big one for you and sleep there with him tonight. Now then, goodnight, I'm not as high-strung as the two of you, I'm going to bed.'

It was impossible to thank my father; he would have been irritated by what he called mawkishness. I stood there not daring to move; he was still in front of us, tall, in his white nightshirt under the pink and violet Indian cashmere shawl that he tied around his head now that he had attacks of neuralgia, with the gesture of Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli
²³
that M. Swann had given me, as he told Sarah she must depart from the side of Isaac. This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last for ever and new ones have formed
that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama: ‘Go with the boy.' The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me. But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take care to listen, the sobs I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that did not burst out until I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is quieting down around me more and more now that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamour of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

Mama spent that night in my room; when I had just committed such a misdeed that I expected to have to leave the house, my parents granted me more than I could ever have won from them as reward for a good deed. Even at the moment when it manifested itself through this pardon, my father's conduct towards me retained that arbitrary and undeserved quality that was so characteristic of it and that arose from the fact that it generally resulted from fortuitous convenience rather than a premeditated plan. It may even be that what I called his severity, when he sent me to bed, deserved that name less than my mother's or my grandmother's, for his nature, in certain respects more different from mine than theirs was, had probably kept him from discovering until now how very unhappy I was every evening, something my mother and my grandmother knew well; but they loved me enough not to consent to spare me my suffering, they wanted to teach me to master it in order to reduce my nervous sensitivity and strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection for me was of another sort, I do not know if he would have been courageous enough for that: the one time he realized that I was upset, he had said to my mother: ‘Go and comfort him.' Mama stayed in my room that night and, as though not to allow any remorse to spoil those hours which were so different from what I had had any right to expect, when Françoise, realizing that something extraordinary was happening when she saw Mama sitting next to me, holding my hand and letting me cry without scolding
me, asked her: ‘Why, Madame, now what's wrong with Monsieur that he's crying so?' Mama answered her: ‘Why, even he doesn't know, Françoise, he's in a state; prepare the big bed for me quickly and go on up to bed yourself.' And so, for the first time, my sadness was regarded no longer as a punishable offence but as an involuntary ailment that had just been officially recognized, a nervous condition for which I was not responsible; I had the relief of no longer having to mingle qualms of conscience with the bitterness of my tears, I could cry without sin. I was also not a little proud, with respect to Françoise, of this turnabout in human affairs which, an hour after Mama had refused to come up to my room and had sent the disdainful answer that I should go to sleep, raised me to the dignity of a grown-up and brought me suddenly to a sort of puberty of grief, of emancipation from tears. I ought to have been happy: I was not. It seemed to me that my mother had just made me a first concession which must be painful to her, that this was a first abdication on her part before the ideal she had conceived for me, and that for the first time she, who was so courageous, was confessing herself defeated. It seemed to me that, if I had just gained a victory, it was over her, that I had succeeded, as illness, affliction, or age might have done, in slackening her will, in causing her judgment to weaken and that this evening was the beginning of a new era, would remain as a sad date. If I had now dared, I would have said to Mama: ‘No I don't want this, don't sleep here.' But I was aware of the practical wisdom, the realism as it would be called now, which in her tempered my grandmother's ardently idealistic nature, and I knew that, now that the harm was done, she would prefer to let me at least enjoy the soothing pleasure of it and not disturb my father. True, my mother's lovely face still shone with youth that evening when she so gently held my hands and tried to stop my tears; but it seemed to me that this was precisely what should not have been, her anger would have saddened me less than this new gentleness which my childhood had not known before; it seemed to me that with an impious and secret hand I had just traced in her soul a first wrinkle and caused a first white hair to appear. At the thought of this my sobs redoubled, and then I saw that Mama, who never let herself give way to any emotion with me, was suddenly overcome by my own and was
trying to suppress a desire to cry. When she saw that I had noticed, she said to me with a smile: ‘There now, my little chick, my little canary, he's going to make his Mama as silly as himself if this continues. Look, since you're not sleepy and your mama isn't either, let's not go on upsetting each other, let's do something, let's get one of your books.' But I had none there. ‘Would you enjoy it less if I took out the books your grandmother will be giving you on your saint's day? Think about it carefully: you mustn't be disappointed not to have anything the day after tomorrow.' On the contrary, I was delighted, and Mama went to get a packet of books, of which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which they were wrapped, more than their shape, short and thick, but which, in this first guise, though summary and veiled, already eclipsed the box of colours from New Year's Day and the silkworms from last year. They were
La Mare au Diable
,
François le Champi, La Petite Fadette
and
Les Maîtres Sonneurs
. My grandmother, as I learned afterwards, had first chosen the poems of Musset, a volume of Rousseau, and
Indiana
;
²⁴
for though she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries, it did not occur to her that a great breath of genius might have a more dangerous and less invigorating influence on the mind even of a child than would the open air and the sea breeze on his body. But as my father had nearly called her mad when he learned which books she wanted to give me, she had returned to the bookstore in Jouy-le-Vicomte herself, so that I would not risk not having my present (it was a burning-hot day and she had come home so indisposed that the doctor had warned my mother not to let her tire herself out that way again) and she had resorted to the four pastoral novels of George Sand. ‘My dear daughter, she said to Mama, I could not bring myself to give the boy something badly written.'

In fact, she could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive an intellectual profit, and especially the profit which beautiful things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in the satisfactions of material comfort and vanity. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called ‘useful', when she had to give an armchair, silverware, a walking-stick, she looked for ‘old' ones, as though, now that long
desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness, they would appear more disposed to tell us about the life of people of other times than to serve the needs of our own life. She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of the most beautiful monuments or landscapes. But at the moment of buying them, and even though the thing represented had an aesthetic value, she found that vulgarity and utility too quickly resumed their places in that mechanical mode of representation, the photograph. She would try to use cunning and, if not to eliminate commercial banality entirely, at least to reduce it, to substitute for the greater part of it more art, to introduce into it in a sense several ‘layers' of art: instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or Mount Vesuvius, she would make inquiries of Swann as to whether some great painter had not depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of Chartres Cathedral by Corot,
²⁵
of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud by Hubert Robert,
²⁶
of Mount Vesuvius by Turner,
²⁷
which made one degree of art more. But if the photographer had been removed from the representation of the masterpiece or of nature and replaced by a great artist, he still reclaimed his rights to reproduce that very interpretation. Having deferred vulgarity as far as possible, my grandmother would try to move it back still farther. She would ask Swann if the work had not been engraved, preferring, whenever possible, old engravings that also had an interest beyond themselves, for example those that represent a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it today (like the engraving by Morghen
²⁸
of Leonardo's
Last Supper
before its deterioration). It must be said that the results of this interpretation of the art of gift-giving were not always very brilliant. The idea I formed of Venice from a drawing by Titian that is supposed to have the lagoon in the background was certainly far less accurate than the one I would have derived from simple photographs. We could no longer keep count, at home, when my great-aunt wanted to draw up an indictment against my grandmother, of the armchairs she had presented to young couples engaged to be married or old husbands and wives which, at the first attempt to make use of them, had immediately collapsed under the weight of one of the recipients. But my grandmother would have believed it petty to be overly concerned about the solidity of a piece
of wood in which one could still distinguish a small flower, a smile, sometimes a lovely invention from the past. Even what might, in these pieces of furniture, answer a need, since it did so in a manner to which we are no longer accustomed, charmed her like the old ways of speaking in which we see a metaphor that is obliterated, in our modern language, by the abrasion of habit. Now, in fact, the pastoral novels of George Sand that she was giving me for my saint's day were, like an old piece of furniture, full of expressions that had fallen into disuse and turned figurative again, the sort you no longer find anywhere but in the country. And my grandmother had bought them in preference to others just as she would have been quicker to commend an estate on which there was a Gothic dovecote or another of those old things that exercise such a happy influence on the mind by filling it with longing for impossible voyages through time.