In Search of Lost Time (66 page)

Nor did she or my father either seem to find, in talking about Swann's grandparents, about the title of honorary stockbroker, a pleasure that surpassed all others. My imagination had singled out and sanctified one particular family within the social Paris, just as it had singled out from the Paris of stone one particular house whose carriage entrance it had sculpted and whose windows it had made precious. But
I was the only one who could see these ornaments. In the same way that my father and mother regarded the house that Swann lived in as similar to the other houses built at the same time in the neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann's family seemed to them of the same sort as many other families of stockbrokers. They judged it more favourably or less depending on the degree to which it shared in merits common to the rest of the universe and did not see in it anything unique. On the contrary, what they appreciated in it they encountered to an equal, or higher, degree elsewhere. And so, after having agreed that the house was well situated, they would talk about another that was better situated, but that had nothing to do with Gilberte, or about financiers a cut above her grandfather; and if they had seemed for a moment to be of the same opinion as me, it was because of a misunderstanding that would soon be dispelled. For, in order to perceive in everything that surrounded Gilberte an unknown quality analogous in the world of emotions to what infra-red may be in the world of colours, my parents would have needed that supplementary and ephemeral sense with which love had endowed me.

On the days when Gilberte had let me know she would not be coming to the Champs-Élysées, I would try to go for a walk that brought me a little closer to her. Sometimes I would lead Françoise on a pilgrimage before the house where the Swanns lived. I would make her repeat endlessly what, through the governess, she had learned relating to Mme Swann. ‘It seems she's a great believer in her medals. She'll never go off on a trip if she's heard an owl hooting, or something ticking inside the wall like a clock, or if she sees a cat at midnight, or if the wood furniture creaks. Oh, yes! She's a very religious person!' I was so in love with Gilberte that if, along the way, I saw their old butler walking a dog, my emotion would force me to stop, I would stare at his white whiskers with eyes full of passion. Françoise would say to me:

– What's wrong with you?

Then, we would continue on our way until we reached their carriage entrance, where a concierge different from any other concierge, and steeped even to the braid of his livery in the same painful charm I had felt in the name Gilberte, seemed to know that I was one of those
people whom a primordial unworthiness would prohibit for ever from penetrating into the mysterious life that he was charged with guarding and on which the windows of the entresol seemed conscious of being closed, resembling far less, between the stately fall of their muslin curtains, any other windows, than they did Gilberte's own eyes. At other times, we would go down the boulevards and I would take up a position at the corner of the rue Duphot; I had been told that here one could often see Swann going past on his way to the dentist; and my imagination so differentiated Gilberte's father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of the real world introduced into it such magic, that, even before I reached the Madeleine, I was moved at the thought of approaching a street where I might suddenly encounter that supernatural apparition.

But most often – when I was not going to see Gilberte – since I had learned that Mme Swann went for a walk almost every day in the allée des Acacias, around the Grand Lac, and in the allée de la Reine-Marguerite
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I would steer Françoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. For me it was like those zoological gardens in which one sees diverse flora and contrasting landscapes brought together in one place; where, after a hill, one finds a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a ditch, a hill, a marsh, but knows they are there only to provide the hippopotamus, zebras, crocodiles, albino rabbits, bears and heron with an appropriate environment or a picturesque setting in which to frolic about; the Bois too, equally complex, bringing together as it does diverse enclosed little worlds – first a farm planted with red trees, American oaks, like an agricultural estate in Virginia, then a stand of firs at the edge of the lake, or a forest from which would rise suddenly in her supple fur, with the lovely eyes of an animal, some woman walking quickly – it was the Garden of Woman; and – like the Alley of the Myrtles in
The Aeneid
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– planted for their sake with trees of a single species, the allée des Acacias was a favourite spot of the most famous Beauties. Just as, from a long way off, the top of the rock from which it will dive into the water thrills the children who know they are about to see the sea lion, so, well before reaching the allée des Acacias, first their fragrance, which, radiating all around, allowed one to sense from a distance the approach and the singularity
of a powerful, soft, vegetative entity, then, when I drew near, the glimpsed crest of their greenery, light and childishly graceful, with its easy elegance, its coquettish cut, its thin material, on which hundreds of flowers had swooped down like vibratile winged colonies of precious parasites, and, finally, even their name, feminine, indolent and sweet – all of this made my heart pound, but with a worldly desire, like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of the beautiful guests whom the usher announces as they enter the ball-room. I had been told that in the alley I would see certain fashionable women who, even though they were not all married, were habitually mentioned along with Mme Swann, but most often by their professional names; their new names, when they had any, were only a sort of incognito which those who wanted to talk about them took care to remove in order to make themselves understood. Thinking that Beauty – in the order of feminine refinements – was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which these women had been initiated, and that they had the power to make it real, I accepted in advance as a revelation the vision of their clothes, their carriages and horses, a thousand details deep within which I placed my belief as though it were an inner soul which would give the cohesiveness of a masterpiece to that ephemeral and shifting tableau. But it was Mme Swann whom I wanted to see, and I waited for her to pass, as moved as if she had been Gilberte, whose parents, steeped like all that surrounded her in her charm, excited in me as much love as she did, indeed a disturbance that was even more painful (because their point of contact with her was that domestic part of her life which was forbidden to me), and lastly (because I soon knew, as will be seen, that they did not like my playing with her) that feeling of veneration which we always have for those who wield unrestrained power to do us harm.

I assigned the first place to simplicity, in the order of aesthetic merit and social grandeur, when I saw Mme Swann on foot, wearing a cloth polonaise, on her head a little toque trimmed with a pheasant wing, a bouquet of violets at her bodice, in a hurry, crossing the allée des Acacias as if it were merely the shortest way to return home and answering with a wink the gentlemen in carriages who, recognizing her figure from far away, bowed to her and said to themselves that no
one was as smart. But in place of simplicity, it was ostentation that I put on the highest rank, if, after I had forced Françoise, who was exhausted and said her legs were ‘folding up', to walk back and forth for an hour, at last I would see, coming out of the alley that leads from the Porte Dauphine – the picture for me of royal glamour, of the arrival of a sovereign, an impression such as no real queen has been able to give me since then, because the notion I had of their power was less vague and more founded upon experience – borne along by two flying fiery horses as slender and smoothly turned as in the drawings of Constantin Guys,
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carrying an enormous coachman settled on his seat and wrapped in furs like a Cossack, next to a little groom who recalled the ‘tiger' of ‘the late Baudenord'
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I saw – or rather I felt imprint its form on my heart with a neat and exhausting wound – a matchless victoria, in its design a little high and with allusions to the old forms showing through its ‘
dernier cri
' opulence, in the depths of which Mme Swann lay back carelessly, her hair now blonde with a single grey lock and girded with a thin band of flowers, most often violets, from which descended long veils, in her hand a mauve parasol, on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I saw only the beneficence of a monarch and in which there was, more than anything else, a cocotte's provocativeness, and which she inclined gently on the people who bowed to her. That smile in reality said to some of them: ‘I remember it very well – it was exquisite!'; to others: ‘How I would have loved to! What bad luck!'; to others: ‘Why yes, if you like! I'll stay in line for a moment longer and cut out as soon as I can.' When strangers passed, she would still allow an idle smile to linger around her lips, as though it were turned to the expectation or memory of a friend, which made people say: ‘How beautiful she is!' And for certain men only she had a smile that was sour, stiff, reticent and cold, and meant: ‘Yes, you beast, I know you have the tongue of a viper, that you can't keep from talking! But do I care about you? Do I?' Coquelin
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went past holding forth among a group of listening friends, and with his hand gave a broad theatrical hello to the people in the carriages. But I was thinking only about Mme Swann and I pretended I had not seen her yet, for I knew that once she drew level with the Tir aux Pigeons
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she would tell her coachman to cut out of
the line and stop so that she could come back down the alley on foot. And on the days when I felt I had the courage to pass close to her, I would drag Françoise in that direction. At a certain moment, in fact, in the footpath, walking towards us, I would see Mme Swann letting the long train of her mauve dress spread out behind her, clothed, as the common people imagine queens, in fabrics and rich finery that other women did not wear, lowering her eyes now and then to the handle of her parasol, paying little attention to the people passing, as if her great business and her goal were to take some exercise, without thinking that she was being observed and that all heads were turned towards her. But now and then when she had looked back to call her greyhound, she would imperceptibly cast a circular gaze around her.

Even those who did not know her were alerted by something singular and excessive – or perhaps by a telepathic radiation like those that triggered bursts of applause from the ignorant crowd at moments when La Berma was sublime – that this must be some well-known person. They would ask one another: ‘Who is she?', or sometimes question a passing stranger, or promise themselves they would remember the way she was dressed as a reference for some better-informed friend who would immediately enlighten them. Others, half stopping in their walk, would say:

– Do you know who that is? Mme Swann! That means nothing to you? Odette de Crécy?

– Odette de Crécy? Why in fact I was just wondering… Those sad eyes… But you know she can't be as young as she once was! I remember I slept with her the day MacMahon resigned.

– You'd better not remind her of it. She's now Mme Swann, wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club who's a friend of the Prince of Wales. But she's still superb.

– Yes, but if only you'd known her then – how pretty she was! She lived in a very strange little house filled with Chinese bric-à-brac. I remember we were bothered by the newsboys shouting outside, in the end she made me get up.

Though I could not hear these comments, I did perceive all around her the indistinct murmur of celebrity. My heart raced with impatience at the thought that yet another instant was going to pass before the
moment when all these people, among whom I was disconsolate not to find a certain mulatto banker by whom I felt I was despised, would see the young stranger to whom they had paid no attention bow (without knowing her, in fact, but I felt I was authorized to do so because my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter's playmate) to that woman whose reputation for beauty, improper behaviour and elegance was universal. But I was already very close to Mme Swann, so I raised my hat to her with a motion so large, so extended, so prolonged, that she could not help smiling. People laughed. As for her, she had never seen me with Gilberte, she did not know my name, but for her I was – like one of the keepers of the Bois, or the boatman or the ducks on the lake to which she threw bread – one of those secondary, familiar, anonymous figures, as lacking in individual character as an ‘extra' on stage, of her outings in the Bois. On certain days when I had not seen her in the allée des Acacias, I would sometimes find her in the allée de la Reine-Marguerite, where women go who want to be alone, or to appear to want to be alone; she would not remain alone for long, soon joined by some friend, often wearing a grey ‘topper', whom I did not know and who would talk to her for a long time, while their two carriages followed.

The complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which makes it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden, I rediscovered this year as I was crossing it to go to Trianon,
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on one of the first mornings of this month of November when, in Paris, inside the houses, we are so close to the autumn spectacle, and yet denied it, as it rapidly comes to an end without our witnessing it, that we are filled with a yearning, a veritable fever for the dead leaves that may go so far as to stop us from sleeping. In my closed room, they had been coming for a month now, summoned by my desire to see them, between my thoughts and any object to which I applied myself, and they eddied like those yellow spots that sometimes, whatever we may be looking at, dance in front of our eyes. And that morning, no longer hearing the rain fall as on the days before, seeing the fine weather smile at the corners of the drawn curtains as at the corners of a closed mouth that betrays the secret of its happiness, I
had felt that I might be able to look at those yellow leaves as the light passed through them, in their supreme beauty; and being no more able to keep myself from going to see the trees than in earlier days, when the wind blew too hard in my chimney, from departing for the seaside, I had left to go to Trianon, by way of the Bois de Boulogne. It was the hour and it was the season when the Bois seems perhaps the most manifold, not only because it is more subdivided, but also because it is subdivided differently. Even in the open parts where one embraces a great space, here and there, in front of the dark distant masses of the trees that had no leaves or still had their summer leaves, a double row of orange chestnut trees seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted so far by the scene-painter, who had not put any colour on the rest, and it offered its alley in full light for the episodic walk of figures that would be added later.