In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (17 page)

If I did not understand the sonata, I was enchanted to hear Mme Swann play. Her touch appeared to me (like her wrapper, like the scent of her staircase, like her coats, like her chrysanthemums) to form part of an individual and mysterious whole, in a world infinitely superior to that in which reason is capable of analysing talent. “Isn’t it beautiful, that Vinteuil sonata?” Swann asked me. “The moment when night is falling among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling dew upon the earth. You must admit it’s lovely; it shows all the static side of moonlight, which is the essential part. It’s not surprising that a course of radiant heat such as my wife is taking should act on the muscles, since moonlight can prevent the leaves from stirring. That’s what is expressed so well in that little phrase, the Bois de Boulogne plunged in a cataleptic trance. By the sea it’s even more striking, because you have there the faint response of the waves, which, of course, you can hear quite distinctly since nothing else can move. In Paris it’s the other way round: at most, you may notice unfamiliar lights among the old buildings, the sky lit up as though by a colourless and harmless conflagration, a sort of vast news item of which you get a hint here and there. But in Vinteuil’s little phrase, and in the whole sonata for that matter, it’s not like that; the scene is laid in the Bois; in the
gruppetto
you can distinctly hear a voice saying: ‘I can almost see to read the paper!’ ”

These words of Swann’s might have distorted, later on, my impression of the sonata, music being too little exclusive to dismiss absolutely what other people suggest that we should find in it. But I understood from other remarks he made that this nocturnal foliage was simply that beneath whose shade, in many a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, he had listened on so many evenings to the little phrase. In place of the profound meaning that he had so often sought in it, what it now recalled to Swann were the leafy boughs, ordered, wreathed, painted round about it (which it gave him the desire to see again because it seemed to him to be their inner, their hidden self, as it were their soul), was the whole of one spring season which he had not been able to enjoy at the time, not having had—feverish and sad as he then was—the requisite physical and mental well-being, and which (as one puts by for an invalid the dainties that he has not been able to eat) it had kept for him. The charm that he had been made to feel by certain evenings in the Bois, a charm of which Vinteuil’s sonata served to remind him, he could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she, as well as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette had been merely by his side, not (as the phrase had been) within him, and so had seen nothing—nor would have, had she been a thousand times as comprehending—of that vision which for none of us (or at least I was long under the impression that this rule admitted of no exception) can be externalised.

“It’s rather a charming thought, don’t you think,” Swann continued, “that sound can reflect, like water, like a mirror. And it’s curious, too, that Vinteuil’s phrase now shows me only the things to which I paid no attention then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days, it recalls nothing, it has swapped things around.” “Charles, I don’t think that’s very polite to me, what you’re saying.” “Not polite? Really, you women are superb! I was simply trying to explain to this young man that what the music shows—to me, at least—is not ‘the triumph of the Will’ or ‘In Tune with the Infinite,’ but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock-coat in the palmhouse in the Zoological Gardens. Hundreds of times, without my leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me off to dine with it at Armenonville. Good God, it’s less boring, anyhow, than having to go there with Mme de Cambremer.”

Mme Swann laughed. “That is a lady who’s supposed to have been very much in love with Charles,” she explained, in the same tone in which, shortly before, when we were speaking of Vermeer of Delft, of whose existence I had been surprised to find her informed, she had replied to me: “I ought to explain that Monsieur Swann was very much taken up with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn’t that so, Charles dear?” “You’re not to start saying things about Mme de Cambremer,” Swann checked her, secretly flattered. “But I’m only repeating what I’ve been told. Besides, it seems that she’s extremely clever; I don’t know her myself. I believe she’s very
pushing
, which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone says that she was quite mad about you; there’s nothing hurtful in that.” Swann remained silent as a deaf-mute, which was a sort of confirmation, and a proof of his self-complacency.

“Since what I’m playing reminds you of the Zoo,” his wife went on, with a playful pretence of being offended, “we might drive this boy there this afternoon if it would amuse him. The weather’s lovely now, and you can recapture your fond impressions! Which reminds me, talking of the Zoo, do you know, this young man thought that we were devotedly attached to a person whom I cut as a matter of fact whenever I possibly can, Mme Blatin. I think it’s rather humiliating for us that she should be taken for a friend of ours. Just fancy, dear Dr Cottard, who never says a harsh word about anyone, declares that she’s positively repellent.” “A frightful woman! The one thing to be said for her is that she’s exactly like Savonarola. She’s the very image of that portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommeo.”

This mania of Swann’s for finding likenesses to people in pictures was defensible, for even what we call individual expression is—as we so painfully discover when we are in love and would like to believe in the unique reality of the beloved—something diffused and general, which can be found existing at different periods. But if one had listened to Swann, the retinues of the Magi, already so anachronistic when Benozzo Gozzoli introduced in their midst various Medicis, would have been even more so, since they would have included the portraits of a whole crowd of men, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, subsequent, that is to say, not only by fifteen centuries to the Nativity but by four to the painter himself. There was not missing from those cortèges, according to Swann, a single living Parisian of note, any more than there was from that act in one of Sardou’s plays, in which, out of friendship for the author and for the leading lady, and also because it was the fashion, all the notabilities of Paris, famous doctors, politicians, barristers, amused themselves, each on a different evening, by “walking on.”

“But what has she got to do with the Zoo?” “Everything!” “What? You don’t suggest that she’s got a sky-blue behind, like the monkeys?” “Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking of what the Singhalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles, it really is a gem.” “Oh, it’s too silly. You know Mme Blatin loves accosting people, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really condescending.” “What our good friends on the Thames call
patronising
,” interrupted Odette. “Exactly. Well, she went the other day to the Zoo, where they have some black-amoors—Singhalese I think I heard my wife say—she is much better at ethnology than I am.” “Now, Charles, don’t mock.” “I’m not mocking at all. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with ‘Good morning, nigger? . . .” “She’s a nothing!” Mme Swann interjected. “Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. ‘Me nigger,’ he said angrily to Mme Blatin, ‘me nigger; you old cow!’ ” “I do think that’s so delightful! I adore that story. Don’t you think it’s a good one. Can’t you see old Blatin standing there?: ‘Me nigger; you old cow!’ ”

I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Singhalese, one of whom had called Mme Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least. But I reflected that on the way to the Zoo, and again on our way home, we should pass through the Allée des Acacias in which I used to gaze so admiringly at Mme Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin’s mulatto friend, to whom I had never managed to exhibit myself in the act of saluting her, would see me there, seated at her side, as the victoria swept by.

During those minutes in which Gilberte, having gone to get ready, was not in the room with us, M. and Mme Swann would take delight in revealing to me all the rare virtues of their child. And everything that I myself observed seemed to prove the truth of what they said. I remarked that, as her mother had told me, she had not only for her friends but for the servants, for the poor, the most delicate attentions, carefully thought out, a desire to give pleasure, a fear of causing displeasure, expressed in all sorts of little things over which she often took a great deal of trouble. She had done a piece of needlework for our stall-keeper in the Champs-Elysées, and went out in the snow to give it to her with her own hands, so as not to lose a day. “You have no idea how kind-hearted she is, since she never lets it be seen,” her father assured me. Young as she was, she appeared far more sensible already than her parents. When Swann boasted of his wife’s grand friends Gilberte would turn away and remain silent, but without any appearance of reproaching him, for it seemed inconceivable to her that her father could be the object of the slightest criticism. One day, when I had spoken to her of Mlle Vinteuil, she said to me:

“I never want to know her, for a very good reason, and that is that she was not nice to her father, from what one hears, and made him very unhappy. You can’t understand that any more than I, can you? I’m sure you could no more live without your papa than I could, which is quite natural after all. How can one ever forget a person one has loved all one’s life?”

And once when she was being particularly loving with Swann, and I mentioned this to her when he was out of the room:

“Yes, poor Papa, it’s the anniversary of his father’s death round about now. You can understand what he must be feeling. You do understand, don’t you—you and I feel the same about things like that. So I just try to be a little less naughty than usual.” “But he doesn’t ever think you naughty. He thinks you’re quite perfect.” “Poor Papa, that’s because he’s far too good himself.”

But her parents were not content with singing the praises of Gilberte—that same Gilberte who, even before I had set eyes on her, used to appear to me standing in front of a church, in a landscape of the Ile-de-France, and later, awakening in me not dreams now but memories, was embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane that I took when I was going the Méséglise way. Once when I had asked Mme Swann (making an effort to assume the indifferent tone of a friend of the family, curious to know the preferences of a child) which among all her playmates Gilberte liked the best, Mme Swann replied: “But you ought to know a great deal better than I do, since you’re in her confidence, the great favourite, the
crack
, as the English say.”

Doubtless, in such perfect coincidences as this, when reality folds back and overlays what we have long dreamed of, it completely hides it from us, merges with it, like two equal superimposed figures which appear to be one, whereas, to give our happiness its full meaning, we would rather preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them—and to be quite certain that it is indeed they—the distinction of being intangible. And our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future. For years I had believed that the notion of going to Mme Swann’s was a vague, chimerical dream to which I should never attain; after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing-room, it was the time when I did not yet know her that had become chimerical and vague like a possibility which the realisation of an alternative possibility has destroyed. How could I ever dream again of her dining-room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not make the least movement in my mind without crossing the path of that inextinguishable ray cast backwards ad infinitum, into my own most distant past, by the lobster
à l’Américaine
which I had just been eating. And Swann must have observed in his own case a similar phenomenon: for this house in which he now entertained me might be regarded as the place into which had flowed, to merge and coincide, not only the ideal dwelling that my imagination had constructed, but another still, which his jealous love, as inventive as any fantasy of mine, had so often depicted to him, that dwelling common to Odette and himself which had appeared to him so inaccessible once, on an evening when Odette had taken him home with Forcheville to drink orangeade with her; and what had flowed in to be absorbed, for him, in the walls and furniture of the dining-room in which we now sat down to lunch was that unhoped-for paradise in which, in the old days, he could not without a pang imagine that he would one day be saying to
their
butler the very words, “Is Madame ready yet?” which I now heard him utter with a touch of impatience mingled with self-satisfaction. No more, probably, than Swann himself could I succeed in knowing my own happiness, and when Gilberte herself once broke out: “Who would ever have said that the little girl you watched playing prisoner’s base, without daring to speak to her, would one day be your greatest friend whose home you could go to whenever you liked?”, she spoke of a change which I could verify only by observing it from without, finding no trace of it within myself, for it was composed of two separate states which I could not, without their ceasing to be distinct from one another, succeed in imagining at one and the same time.

And yet this house, because it had been so passionately desired by Swann, must have kept for him some of its sweetness, if I was to judge by myself for whom it had not lost all its mystery. That singular charm in which I had for so long supposed the life of the Swanns to be bathed had not been entirely exorcised from their house on my being admitted to it: I had made it draw back, overwhelmed as it was by the sight of the stranger, the pariah that I had been, to whom now Mme Swann graciously pushed forward an exquisite, hostile and scandalised armchair for him to sit in; but all around me in my memory, I can perceive it still. Is it because, on the days when M. and Mme Swann invited me to lunch, to go out afterwards with them and Gilberte, I imprinted with my gaze—while I sat waiting for them alone—on the carpet, the sofas, the tables, the screens, the pictures, the idea engraved upon my mind that Mme Swann, or her husband, or Gilberte was about to enter? Is it because those objects have dwelt ever since in my memory side by side with the Swanns, and have gradually acquired something of their identity? Is it because, knowing that they spent their existence among these things, I made of them all as it were emblems of the life and habits of the Swanns from which I had too long been excluded for them not to continue to appear strange to me, even when I was allowed the privilege of sharing in them? However it may be, whenever I think of that drawing-room which Swann (not that the criticism implied on his part any intention to find fault with his wife’s taste) found so amorphous—because, while it was still conceived in the style, half conservatory half studio, which had been that of the rooms in which he had first known Odette, she had none the less begun to replace in this jumble a number of the Chinese ornaments which she now felt to be rather sham, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm of little chairs and stools and things draped in old Louis XVI silks; not to mention the works of art brought by Swann himself from his house on the Quai d’Orléans—it has kept in my memory, that composite, heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an individual charm that are not to be found even in the most complete, the least spoiled of the collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the most modern, alive and stamped with the imprint of a living personality; for we alone, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, can give to certain things we see a soul which they afterwards keep and which they develop in our minds. All the ideas that I had formed of the hours, different from those that exist for other men, passed by the Swanns in that house which was to their everyday life what the body is to the soul, and whose singularity it must have expressed, all those ideas were distributed, amalgamated—equally disturbing and indefinable throughout—in the arrangement of the furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the position of the windows, the ministrations of the servants. When, after lunch, we went to drink our coffee in the sunshine of the great bay window of the drawing-room, as Mme Swann was asking me how many lumps of sugar I took, it was not only the silk-covered stool which she pushed towards me that exuded, together with the agonising charm that I had long ago discerned—first among the pink hawthorn and then beside the clump of laurels—in the name of Gilberte, the hostility that her parents had shown to me and which this little piece of furniture seemed to have so well understood and shared that I felt myself unworthy and found myself almost reluctant to set my feet on its defenceless cushion; a personality, a soul was latent there which linked it secretly to the afternoon light, so different from any other light in the gulf which spread beneath our feet its sparkling tide of gold out of which the bluish sofas and vaporous tapestries emerged like enchanted islands; and there was nothing, not even the painting by Rubens that hung above the chimney-piece, that was not endowed with the same quality and almost the same intensity of charm as the laced boots of M. Swann and the hooded cape the like of which I had so dearly longed to wear, whereas Odette would now beg her husband to go and put on another, so as to appear smarter, whenever I did them the honour of driving out with them. She too went away to dress—not heeding my protestations that no “outdoor” clothes could be nearly so becoming as the marvellous garment of crêpe-de-Chine or silk, old rose, cherry-coloured, Tiepolo pink, white, mauve, green, red or yellow, plain or patterned, in which Mme Swann had sat down to lunch and which she was now going to take off. When I told her that she ought to go out in that costume, she laughed, either in mockery of my ignorance or from delight in my compliment. She apologised for having so many housecoats, explaining that they were the only kind of dress in which she felt comfortable, and left us to go and array herself in one of those regal toilettes which imposed their majesty on all beholders, and yet among which I was sometimes summoned to decide which I would prefer her to put on.