In Search of Lost Time (8 page)

Yet one day when my grandmother had gone to ask a favour from a lady she had known at the Sacré-Coeur
⁷
(and with whom, because of our notion of the castes, she had not wished to remain in close contact despite a reciprocal congeniality), this lady, the Marquise de Villeparisis of the famous de Bouillon
⁸
family, had said to her: ‘I believe you know M. Swann very well; he is a great friend of my nephew and niece the des Laumes.' My grandmother had returned from her visit full of enthusiasm for the house, which overlooked some gardens and in which Mme de Villeparisis had advised her to rent a flat, and also for a waistcoat-maker and his daughter, who kept a shop in the courtyard into which she had gone to ask them to put a stitch in her skirt, which she had torn in the stairwell. My grandmother had
found these people wonderful, she declared that the girl was a pearl and the waistcoat-maker was the most distinguished, the finest man she had ever seen. Because for her, distinction was something absolutely independent of social position. She went into ecstasies over an answer the waistcoat-maker had given her, saying to Mama: ‘Sévigné
⁹
couldn't have said it any better!' and, in contrast, of a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house: ‘Oh, my dear daughter, how common he is!'

Now the remark about Swann had had the effect, not of raising him in my great-aunt's mind, but of lowering Mme de Villeparisis. It seemed that the respect which, on my grandmother's faith, we accorded Mme de Villeparisis created a duty on her part to do nothing that would make her less worthy, a duty in which she had failed by learning of Swann's existence, by permitting relatives of hers to associate with him. ‘What! She knows Swann? A person you claim is a relation of the Maréchal de MacMahon?'
¹⁰
This opinion of my family's regarding Swann's associations seemed to them confirmed later by his marriage to a woman of the worst social station, practically a cocotte, whom, what was more, he never attempted to introduce, continuing to come to our house alone, though less and less, but from whom they believed they could judge – assuming it was there that he had found her – the social circle, unknown to them, that he habitually frequented.

But one time, my grandfather read in a newspaper that M. Swann was one of the most faithful guests at the Sunday lunches given by the Duc de X…, whose father and uncle had been the most prominent statesmen in the reign of Louis-Philippe.
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Now my grandfather was interested in all the little facts that could help him enter imaginatively into the private lives of men like Molé, like the Duc Pasquier, like the Duc de Broglie.
¹²
He was delighted to learn that Swann associated with people who had known them. My great-aunt, however, interpreted this news in a sense unfavourable to Swann: anyone who chose his associations outside the caste into which he had been born, outside his social ‘class', suffered in her eyes a regrettable lowering of his social position. It seemed to her that he gave up forthwith the fruit of all the good relations with well-placed people so honourably preserved and stored away for their children by foresightful families (my great
aunt had even stopped seeing the son of a lawyer we knew because he had married royalty and was therefore in her opinion demoted from the respected rank of lawyer's son to that of one of those adventurers, former valets or stableboys, on whom they say that queens sometimes bestowed their favours). She disapproved of my grandfather's plan to question Swann, the next evening he was to come to dinner, about these friends of his we had discovered. At the same time my grandmother's two sisters, old maids who shared her nobility of character, but not her sort of mind, declared that they could not understand what pleasure their brother-in-law could find in talking about such foolishness. They were persons of lofty aspirations, who for that very reason were incapable of taking an interest in what is known as tittle-tattle, even if it had some historic interest, and more generally in anything that was not directly connected to an aesthetic or moral object. The disinterestedness of their minds was such, with respect to all that, closely or distantly, seemed connected with worldly life, that their sense of hearing – having finally understood its temporary uselessness when the conversation at dinner assumed a tone that was frivolous or merely pedestrian without these two old spinsters being able to lead it back to the subjects dear to them – would suspend the functioning of its receptive organs and allow them to undergo a true beginning of atrophy. If my grandfather needed to attract the two sisters' attention at such times, he had to resort to those bodily signals used by alienists with certain lunatics suffering from distraction: striking a glass repeatedly with the blade of a knife, while speaking to them sharply and looking them suddenly in the eye, violent methods which these psychiatrists often bring with them into their ordinary relations with healthy people, either from professional habit or because they believe everyone is a little crazy.

They were more interested when, the day before Swann was to come to dinner, and had personally sent them a case of Asti wine, my aunt, holding a copy of the
Figaro
in which next to the title of a painting in an exhibition of Corot, these words appeared: ‘From the collection of M. Charles Swann,' said to us: ‘Did you see this? Swann is “front page news” in the
Figaro
. – But I've always told you he had a great deal of taste, said my grandmother. – Of course you would!
Anything so long as your opinion is not the same as
ours
,' answered my great-aunt, who, knowing that my grandmother was never of the same opinion as she, and not being quite sure that she herself was the one we always declared was right, wanted to extract from us a general condemnation of my grandmother's convictions against which she was trying to force us into solidarity with her own. But we remained silent. When my grandmother's sisters expressed their intention of speaking to Swann about this mention in the
Figaro
, my great-aunt advised them against it. Each time she saw in others an advantage, however small, that she did not have, she persuaded herself that it was not an advantage but a detriment and she pitied them so as not to have to envy them. ‘I believe you would not be pleasing him at all; I am quite sure I would find it very unpleasant to see my name printed boldly like that in the newspaper, and I would not be at all gratified if someone spoke to me about it.' But she did not persist in trying to convince my grandmother's sisters; for they in their horror of vulgarity had made such a fine art of concealing a personal allusion beneath ingenious circumlocutions that it often went unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed. As for my mother, she thought only of trying to persuade my father to agree to talk to Swann not about his wife but about his daughter, whom he adored and because of whom it was said he had finally entered into this marriage. ‘You might just say a word to him; just ask how she is. It must be so hard for him.' But my father would become annoyed: ‘No, no; you have the most absurd ideas. It would be ridiculous.'

But the only one of us for whom Swann's arrival became the object of a painful preoccupation was I. This was because on the evenings when outsiders, or merely M. Swann, were present, Mama did not come up to my room. I had dinner before everyone else and afterwards I came and sat at the table, until eight o'clock when it was understood that I had to go upstairs; the precious and fragile kiss that Mama usually entrusted to me in my bed at the moment I was going to sleep I would have to convey from the dining-room to my bedroom and protect during the whole time I undressed, so that its sweetness would not shatter, so that its volatile essence would not spread and evaporate and, on precisely those evenings when I needed to receive it with more
care, I had to take it, I had to snatch it brusquely, publicly, without even having the time and the freedom of mind necessary to bring to what I was doing the attention of those possessed by some mania who do their utmost not to think of anything else while they are shutting a door, so as to be able, when the morbid uncertainty returns to them, to confront it victoriously with the memory of the moment when they did shut the door. We were all in the garden when the two hesitant rings of the little bell sounded. We knew it was Swann; even so we all looked at one another questioningly and my grandmother was sent on reconnaissance. ‘Remember to thank him intelligibly for the wine, you know how delicious it is and the case is enormous,' my grandfather exhorted his two sisters-in-law. ‘Don't start whispering, said my great-aunt. How comfortable would you feel arriving at a house where everyone is speaking so quietly! – Ah! Here's M. Swann. Let's ask him if he thinks the weather will be good tomorrow,' said my father. My mother thought that one word from her would wipe out all the affliction that we in our family might have caused Swann since his marriage. She found an opportunity to take him aside. But I followed her; I could not bring myself to part from her by even one step, thinking that very soon I would have to leave her in the dining-room and that I would have to go up to my room without having the consolation I had on the other evenings that she would come kiss me. ‘Now, M. Swann, she said to him, do tell me about your daughter; I'm sure she already has a taste for beautiful things like her papa. – Here, come and sit with the rest of us on the verandah,' said my grandfather coming up to them. My mother was obliged to stop, but she derived from this very constraint one more delicate thought, like good poets forced by the tyranny of rhyme to find their most beautiful lines: ‘We can talk about her again when we're by ourselves, she said softly to Swann. Only a mother is capable of understanding you. I'm sure her own mother would agree with me.' We all sat down around the iron table. I would have preferred not to think about the hours of anguish I was going to spend that evening alone in my room without being able to go to sleep; I tried to persuade myself they were not at all important, since I would have forgotten them by tomorrow morning, and to fix my mind on ideas of the future that should have led me as though
across a bridge beyond the imminent abyss that frightened me so. But my mind, strained by my preoccupation and as convex as the glance which I shot at my mother, would not allow itself to be penetrated by any foreign impressions. Thoughts certainly entered it, but only on condition that they left outside every element of beauty or simply of playfulness that could have moved or distracted me. As a patient, by means of an anaesthetic, can watch with complete lucidity the operation being performed on him, but without feeling anything, I could recite to myself some lines that I loved or observe the efforts my grandfather made to talk to Swann about the Duc d'Audiffret-Pasquier, without the former making me feel any emotion, the latter any hilarity. Those efforts were fruitless. Scarcely had my grandfather asked Swann a question relating to that orator than one of my grandmother's sisters, in whose ears the question was resonating like a profound but untimely silence that should be broken for the sake of politeness, would address the other: ‘Just imagine, Céline, I've met a young Swedish governess who has been telling me about the cooperatives in the Scandinavian countries; the details are most interesting. We really must have her here for dinner one evening. – Certainly! answered her sister Flora,
¹³
but I haven't been wasting my time either. At M. Vinteuil's I met a learned old man who knows Maubant
¹⁴
very well, and Maubant has explained to him in the greatest detail how he creates his parts. It's most interesting. He's a neighbour of M. Vinteuil's, I had no idea; and he's very nice. – M. Vinteuil isn't the only one who has nice neighbours,' exclaimed my Aunt Céline in a voice which was loud because of her shyness and artificial because of her premeditation, while casting at Swann what she called a meaningful look. At the same time my Aunt Flora, who had understood that this phrase was Céline's way of thanking Swann for the Asti, was also looking at Swann with an expression that combined congratulation and irony, either simply to emphasize her sister's witticism, or because she envied Swann for having inspired it, or because she could not help making fun of him since she thought he was being put on the spot. ‘I think we can manage to persuade the old gentleman to come for dinner, continued Flora; when you get him started on Maubant or Mme Materna,
¹⁵
he talks for hours without stopping. – That must be delightful,' sighed my
grandfather, in whose mind nature had unfortunately just as completely failed to include the possibility of taking a passionate interest in Swedish cooperatives or the creation of Maubant's parts as it had forgotten to furnish those of my grandmother's sisters with the little grain of salt one must add oneself, in order to find some savour in it, to a story about the private life of Molé or the Comte de Paris. ‘Listen, said Swann to my grandfather, what I'm going to say has more to do than it might appear with what you were asking me, because in certain respects things haven't changed enormously. This morning I was rereading something in Saint-Simon
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that would have amused you. It's in the volume about his mission to Spain;
¹⁷
it's not one of the best, hardly more than a journal, but at least it's a marvellously well-written journal, which already makes it rather fundamentally different from the deadly boring journals we think we have to read every morning and evening. – I don't agree, there are days when reading the papers seems to me very pleasant indeed…' my aunt Flora interrupted, to show that she had read the sentence about Swann's Corot in
Le Figaro
. ‘When they talk about things or people that interest us!' said my aunt Céline, going one better. ‘I don't deny it, answered Swann with surprise. What I fault the newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential. Since we tear the band off the newspaper so feverishly every morning, they ought to change things and put into the newspaper, oh, I don't know, perhaps… Pascal's
Pensées
!' (He isolated this word with an ironic emphasis so as not to seem pedantic.) ‘And then, in the gilt-edged volume that we open only once in ten years,' he added, showing the disdain for worldly things affected by certain worldly men, ‘we would read that the Queen of Greece has gone to Cannes or that the Princesse de Léon has given a costume ball. This way, the proper proportions would be re-established.' But, sorry he had gone so far as to speak even lightly of serious things: ‘What a lofty conversation we're having, he said ironically, I don't know why we're climbing to such “heights”' – and turning to my grandfather: ‘Well, Saint-Simon describes how Maulévrier
¹⁸
had the audacity to offer his hand to Saint-Simon's sons. You know, this is the same Maulévrier,
of whom he says: “Never did I see in that thick bottle anything but ill-humour, vulgarity and foolishness.” – Thick or not, I know some bottles in which there is something quite different,' said Flora vivaciously, determined that she too should thank Swann, because the gift of Asti was addressed to both of them. Céline laughed. Swann, disconcerted, went on: ‘“I cannot say whether it was ignorance or a trap,” wrote Saint-Simon. “He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.”' My grandfather was already in ecstasies over ‘ignorance or a trap', but Mlle Céline, in whom the name of Saint-Simon – a literary man – had prevented the complete anaesthesia of her auditory faculties, was already growing indignant: ‘What? You admire that? Well, that's a fine thing! But what can it mean; isn't one man as good as the next? What difference can it make whether he's a duke or a coachman, if he's intelligent and good-hearted? Your Saint-Simon had a fine way of raising his children, if he didn't teach them to give their hand to all decent people. Why, it's quite abominable. And you dare to quote that?' And my grandfather, terribly upset and sensing how impossible it would be, in the face of this obstruction, to try to get Swann to tell the stories that would have amused him, said quietly to Mama: ‘Now remind me of the line you taught me that comforts me so much at times like this. Oh, yes!: “What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!”
¹⁹
Oh, how good that is!'