In Search of Lost Time (9 page)

I did not take my eyes off my mother, I knew that when we were at the table, they would not let me stay during the entire dinner and that, in order not to annoy my father, Mama would not let me kiss her several times in front of the company, as though we were in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they were beginning dinner and I felt the hour approaching, I would do everything I could do alone in advance of this kiss which would be so brief and furtive, choose with my eyes the place on her cheek that I would kiss, prepare my thoughts so as to be able, by means of this mental beginning of the kiss, to devote the whole of the minute Mama would grant me to feeling her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can obtain only short sittings prepares his palette and does in advance from memory, guided by his notes, everything for which he could if necessary manage without the presence of the model. But now before
the dinner-bell rang my grandfather had the unwitting brutality to say: ‘The boy looks tired, he ought to go up to bed. We're dining late tonight anyway.' And my father, who was not as scrupulous as my grandmother and my mother about honouring treaties, said: ‘Yes, go on now, up to bed with you.' I tried to kiss Mama, at that moment we heard the dinner-bell. ‘No, really, leave your mother alone, you've already said goodnight to each other as it is, these demonstrations are ridiculous. Go on now, upstairs!' And I had to leave without my viaticum; I had to climb each step of the staircase, as the popular expression has it, ‘against my heart',
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climbing against my heart which wanted to go back to my mother because she had not, by kissing me, given it licence to go with me. That detested staircase which I always entered with such gloom exhaled an odour of varnish that had in some sense absorbed, fixated, the particular sort of sorrow I felt every evening and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it took that olfactory form, my intelligence could no longer share in it. When we are asleep and a raging toothache is as yet perceived by us only in the form of a girl whom we attempt two hundred times in a row to pull out of the water or a line by Molière that we repeat to ourselves incessantly, it is a great relief to wake up so that our intelligence can divest the idea of raging toothache of its disguise of heroism or cadence. It was the opposite of this relief that I experienced when my sorrow at going up to my room entered me in a manner infinitely swifter, almost instantaneous, at once insidious and abrupt, through the inhalation – far more toxic than the intellectual penetration – of the smell of varnish peculiar to that staircase. Once in my room, I had to stop up all the exits, close the shutters, dig my own grave by undoing my covers, put on the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which they had added to the room because I was too hot in the summer under the rep curtains of the big bed, I had a fit of rebelliousness, I wanted to attempt the ruse of a condemned man. I wrote to my mother begging her to come upstairs for something serious that I could not tell her in my letter. My fear was that Françoise, my aunt's cook who was charged with looking after me when I was at Combray, would refuse to take my note. I suspected that, for her, delivering a message to my mother
when there was company would seem as impossible as for a theatre porter to hand a letter to an actor while he was on stage. With respect to things that could or could not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, extensive, subtle and intransigent about distinctions that were impalpable or otiose (which made it resemble those ancient laws which, alongside such fierce prescriptions as the massacre of children at the breast, forbid one with an exaggerated delicacy to boil a kid in its mother's milk, or to eat the sinew from an animal's thigh). This code, to judge from her sudden obstinacy when she did not wish to do certain errands that we gave her, seemed to have anticipated social complexities and worldly refinements such that nothing in Françoise's associations or her life as a village domestic could have suggested them to her; and we had to say to ourselves that in her there was a very old French past, noble and ill understood, as in those manufacturing towns where elegant old houses testify that there was once a court life, and where the employees of a factory for chemical products work surrounded by delicate sculptures representing the miracle of Saint Théophile or the four sons of Aymon.
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In this particular case, the article of the code which made it unlikely that except in case of fire Françoise would go and bother Mama in the presence of M. Swann for so small a personage as myself simply asserted the respect she professed not only for the family – as for the dead, for priests and for kings – but also for the visitor to whom one was offering one's hospitality, a respect that would perhaps have touched me in a book but that always irritated me on her lips, because of the solemn and tender tones she adopted in speaking of it, and especially so this evening, when the sacred character she conferred on the dinner might have the effect of making her refuse to disturb its ceremonial. But to give myself a better chance, I did not hesitate to lie and tell her that it was not in the least I who had wanted to write to Mama, but that it was Mama who, as she said goodnight to me, had exhorted me not to forget to send her an answer concerning an object she had asked me to look for; and she would certainly be very annoyed if this note was not delivered to her. I think Françoise did not believe me, for, like those primitive men whose senses were so much more powerful than ours, she could immediately discern, from signs imperceptible to us, any truth that we
wanted to hide from her; she looked at the envelope for five minutes as if the examination of the paper and the appearance of the writing would inform her about the nature of the contents or tell her which article of her code she ought to apply. Then she went out with an air of resignation that seemed to signify: ‘If it isn't a misfortune for parents to have a child like that!' She came back after a moment to tell me that they were still only at the ice cream stage, that it was impossible for the butler to deliver the letter right away in front of everyone, but that, when the mouth-rinsing bowls were put round, they would find a way to hand it to Mama. Instantly my anxiety subsided; it was now no longer, as it had been a moment ago, until tomorrow that I had left my mother, since my little note, though it would no doubt annoy her (and doubly so because this stratagem would make me ridiculous in Swann's eyes), would allow me, invisible and enraptured, at least to enter the same room, would whisper about me in her ear; since that forbidden, hostile dining-room, where, just a moment before, even the ice cream – the ‘
granité
'
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– and the rinsing bowls seemed to me to contain pleasures that were noxious and mortally sad because Mama was enjoying them so far away from me, was opening itself to me and, like a fruit that has turned sweet and bursts its skin, was about to propel, to project, all the way to my intoxicated heart, Mama's attention while she read my lines. Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down, an exquisite thread joined us. And that was not all: Mama would probably come!

I thought that Swann would surely have laughed at the anguish I had just suffered if he had read my letter and guessed its purpose; yet, on the contrary, as I learned later, a similar anguish was the torment of long years of his life and no one, perhaps, could have understood me as well as he; in his case, the anguish that comes from the feeling that the person you love is in a place of enjoyment where you are not, where you cannot follow, came to him through love, to which it is in some sense predestined, by which it will be hoarded, appropriated; but when, as in my case, this anguish comes into us before love has made its appearance in our life, it drifts as it waits for it, indeterminate and free, without a particular assignment, at the service of one feeling one day, of another the next, sometimes of filial tenderness or affection for
a friend. And the joy with which I served my first apprenticeship when Françoise came back to tell me my letter would be delivered Swann too had known well, that deceptive joy which some friend, some relative of the woman we love can give us when, arriving at the house or theatre where she is, for some dance, gala evening or première at which he is going to meet her, this friend sees us wandering outside, desperately waiting for some opportunity to communicate with her. He recognizes us, speaks to us familiarly, asks us what we are doing there. And when we invent the story that we have something urgent to say to his relative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be simpler, brings us into the hall and promises to send her to us in five minutes. How we love him, as at that moment I loved Françoise – the well-intentioned intermediary who with a single word has just made tolerable, human and almost propitious the unimaginable, infernal festivity into the thick of which we had been imagining that hostile, perverse and exquisite vortices of pleasure were carrying away from us and inspiring with derisive laughter the woman we love! If we are to judge by him, the relative who has come up to us and is himself also one of the initiates in the cruel mysteries, the other guests at the party cannot have anything very demoniacal about them. Those inaccessible and excruciating hours during which she was about to enjoy unknown pleasures – now, through an unhoped-for breach, we are entering them; now, one of the moments which, in succession, would have composed those hours, a moment as real as the others, perhaps even more important to us, because our mistress is more involved in it, we can picture to ourselves, we possess it, we are taking part in it, we have created it almost: the moment in which he will tell her we are here, downstairs. And no doubt the other moments of the party would not have been essentially very different from this one, would not have had anything more delectable about them that should make us suffer so, since the kind friend has said to us: ‘Why, she'll be delighted to come down! It'll be much nicer for her to chat with you than to be bored up there.' Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third person have no power over a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a party by someone she does not love. Often, the friend comes back down alone.

My mother did not come, and with no consideration for my pride (which was invested in her not denying the story that she was supposed to have asked me to let her know the results of some search) asked Françoise to say these words to me: ‘There is no answer,' words I have so often since then heard the doormen in grand hotels or the footmen in bawdy-houses bring back to some poor girl who exclaims in surprise: ‘What, he said nothing? Why, that's impossible! Did you really give him my note? All right, I'll go on waiting.' And – just as she invariably assures him she does not need the extra gas-jet which the doorman wants to light for her, and remains there, hearing nothing further but the few remarks about the weather exchanged by the doorman and a lackey whom he sends off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put a customer's drink on ice – having declined Françoise's offer to make me some tea or to stay with me, I let her return to the servants' hall, I went to bed and closed my eyes, trying not to hear the voices of my family, who were having their coffee in the garden. But after a few seconds, I became aware that, by writing that note to Mama, by approaching, at the risk of angering her, so close to her that I thought I could touch the moment when I would see her again, I had closed off for myself the possibility of falling asleep without seeing her again, and the beating of my heart grew more painful each minute because I was increasing my agitation by telling myself to be calm, to accept my misfortune. Suddenly my anxiety subsided, a happiness invaded me as when a powerful medicine begins to take effect and our pain vanishes: I had just formed the resolution not to continue trying to fall asleep without seeing Mama again, to kiss her whatever the cost, even though it was with the certainty of being on bad terms with her for a long time after, when she came up to bed. The calm that came with the end of my distress filled me with an extraordinary joy, quite as much as did my expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger. I opened the window noiselessly and sat down on the foot of my bed; I hardly moved so that I would not be heard from below. Outdoors, too, things seemed frozen in a silent intentness not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating and distancing each thing by extending its shadow before it, denser and more concrete than itself, had at once thinned and enlarged the landscape like a map that had been folded
and was now opened out. What needed to move, some leaves of the chestnut tree, moved. But their minute quivering, complete, executed even in its slightest nuances and ultimate refinements, did not spill over on to the rest, did not merge with it, remained circumscribed. Exposed against this silence, which absorbed nothing of them, the most distant noises, those that must have come from gardens that lay at the other end of town, could be perceived detailed with such ‘finish' that they seemed to owe this effect of remoteness only to their pianissimo, like those muted motifs so well executed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although you do not lose a single note, you nonetheless think you are hearing them far away from the concert hall and all the old subscribers – my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had given them his seats – strained their ears as if they were listening to the distant advances of an army on the march that had not yet turned the corner of the rue de Trévise.

I knew that of all possible positions the one I was now placing myself in was the one that could provoke the gravest consequences for me, coming from my parents, much graver in truth than a stranger would have supposed, the sort he would have believed could be produced only by truly shameful misdeeds. But in my upbringing, the order of misdeeds was not the same as in that of other children, and I had become accustomed to placing before all others (because there were probably none from which I needed to be more carefully protected) those whose common characteristic I now understand was that you give in to them by yielding to a nervous impulse. But at the time no one uttered this word, no one revealed this cause, which might have made me believe I was excusable for succumbing to them or even perhaps incapable of resisting them. But I recognized them clearly from the anguish that preceded them as well as from the rigour of the punishment that followed them; and I knew that the one I had just committed was in the same family as others for which I had been severely punished, though infinitely graver. When I went and placed myself in my mother's path at the moment she was going up to bed, and when she saw that I had stayed up to say goodnight to her again in the hallway, they would not let me continue to live at home, they would send me off to school the next day, that much was certain. Well!
even if I had had to throw myself out of the window five minutes later, I still preferred this. What I wanted now was Mama, to say goodnight to her, I had gone too far along the road that led to the fulfilment of that desire to be able to turn back now.