In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (18 page)

In the Zoo, how proud I was, when we had left the carriage, to be walking by the side of Mme Swann! As she strolled negligently along, letting her cloak stream in the air behind her, I kept eyeing her with an admiring gaze to which she coquettishly responded in a lingering smile. And now, were we to meet one or other of Gilberte’s friends, boy or girl, who greeted us from afar, it was my turn to be looked upon by them as one of those happy creatures whose lot I had envied, one of those friends of Gilberte who knew her family and had a share in that other part of her life, the part which was not spent in the Champs-Elysées.

Often upon the paths of the Bois or the Zoo we would be greeted by some distinguished lady who was a friend of Swann’s, whom sometimes he had not at first seen and who would be pointed out to him by his wife: “Charles! Don’t you see Mme de Montmorency?” And Swann, with that amicable smile bred of a long and intimate friendship, would none the less doff his hat with a sweeping gesture, and with a grace peculiarly his own. Sometimes the lady would stop, glad of an opportunity to show Mme Swann a courtesy which would set no tiresome precedent, of which they all knew that she would never take advantage, so thoroughly had Swann trained her in reserve. She had even so acquired all the manners of polite society, and however elegant, however stately the lady might be, Mme Swann was invariably a match for her; halting for a moment before the friend whom her husband had recognised and was addressing, she would introduce us, Gilberte and myself, with so much ease of manner, would remain so free, so relaxed in her affability, that it would have been hard to say, looking at them both, which of the two was the aristocrat.

The day on which we went to inspect the Singhalese, on our way home we saw coming in our direction, and followed by two others who seemed to be acting as her escort, an elderly but still handsome lady enveloped in a dark overcoat and wearing a little bonnet tied beneath her chin with a pair of ribbons. “Ah! here’s someone who will interest you!” said Swann. The old lady, who was now within a few yards of us, smiled at us with a caressing sweetness. Swann doffed his hat. Mme Swann swept to the ground in a curtsey and made as if to kiss the hand of the lady, who, standing there like a Winterhalter portrait, drew her up again and kissed her cheek. “Come, come, will you put your hat on, you!” she scolded Swann in a thick and almost growling voice, speaking like an old and familiar friend. “I’m going to present you to Her Imperial Highness,” Mme Swann whispered.

Swann drew me aside for a moment while his wife talked to the Princess about the weather and the animals recently added to the Zoo. “That is the Princesse Mathilde,” he told me, “you know who I mean, the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas. Just fancy, she’s the niece of Napoleon I. She had offers of marriage from Napoleon III and the Emperor of Russia. Isn’t that interesting? Talk to her a little. But I hope she won’t keep us standing here for an hour! . . . I met Taine the other day,” he went on, addressing the Princess, “and he told me Your Highness was vexed with him.” “He’s behaved like a perfect peeg!” she said gruffly, pronouncing the word
cochon
as though she referred to Joan of Arc’s contemporary, Bishop Cauchon. “After his article on the Emperor I left my card on him with p. p. c. on it.”
⁶

I felt the surprise that one feels on opening the correspondence of that Duchesse d’Orléans who was by birth a Princess Palatine. And indeed Princesse Mathilde, animated by sentiments so entirely French, expressed them with a straightforward bluntness that recalled the Germany of an older generation, and was inherited, doubtless, from her Württemberger mother. This somewhat rough and almost masculine frankness she softened, as soon as she began to smile, with an Italian languor. And the whole person was clothed in an outfit so typically Second Empire that—for all that the Princess wore it simply and solely, no doubt, from attachment to the fashions that she had loved when she was young—she seemed to have deliberately planned to avoid the slightest discrepancy in historic colour, and to be satisfying the expectations of those who looked to her to evoke the memory of another age. I whispered to Swann to ask her whether she had known Musset. “Very slightly, Monsieur,” was the answer, given in a tone which seemed to feign annoyance at the question, and of course it was by way of a joke that she called Swann Monsieur, since they were intimate friends. “I had him to dine once. I had invited him for seven o’clock. At half-past seven, as he had not appeared, we sat down to dinner. He arrived at eight, bowed to me, took his seat, never opened his lips, and went off after dinner without letting me hear the sound of his voice. Of course he was dead drunk. That hardly encouraged me to make another attempt.” We were standing a little way off, Swann and I. “I hope this little audience is not going to last much longer,” he muttered, “the soles of my feet are hurting. I can’t think why my wife keeps on making conversation. When we get home it will be she who complains of being tired, and she knows I simply cannot go on standing like this.”

For Mme Swann, who had had the news from Mme Bontemps, was in the process of telling the Princess that the Government, having at last begun to realise the depth
of its shoddiness, had decided to send her an invitation to be present on the platform in a few days’ time, when the Tsar Nicholas was to visit the Invalides. But the Princess who, in spite of appearances, in spite of the character of her entourage, which consisted mainly of artists and literary people, had remained at heart and showed herself, whenever she had to take action, the niece of Napoleon, replied: “Yes, Madame, I received it this morning and I sent it back to the Minister, who must have had it by now. I told him that I had no need of an invitation to go to the Invalides. If the Government desires my presence there, it will not be on the platform but in our vault, where the Emperor’s tomb is. I have no need of a card to admit me there. I have my own keys. I go in and out when I choose. The Government has only to let me know whether it wishes me to be present or not. But if I do go to the Invalides, it will be down below or nowhere at all.”

At that moment we were saluted, Mme Swann and I, by a young man who greeted her without stopping, and whom I was not aware that she knew; it was Bloch. When I asked her about him, she told me that he had been introduced to her by Mme Bontemps, and that he was employed in the Minister’s secretariat, which was news to me. At all events, she could not have seen him often—or perhaps she had not cared to utter the name Bloch, hardly “smart” enough for her liking, for she told me that he was called M. Moreul. I assured her that she was mistaken, that his name was Bloch.

The Princess gathered up the train that flowed out behind her, and Mme Swann gazed at it with admiring eyes. “Yes, as it happens, it’s a fur that the Emperor of Russia sent me,” she explained, “and as I’ve just been to
see him I put it on to show him that I’d managed to have it made up as a coat.” “I hear that Prince Louis has joined the Russian Army; the Princess will be very sad at losing him,” went on Mme Swann, not noticing her husband’s signs of impatience. “He
would
go and do that! As I said to him, ‘Just because there’s been a soldier in the family there’s no need to follow suit,’ ” replied the Princess, alluding with this abrupt simplicity to Napoleon the Great.

But Swann could hold out no longer: “Ma’am, it is I that am going to play the Royal Highness and ask your permission to retire; but you see, my wife hasn’t been too well, and I don’t like her to stand around for too long.” Mme Swam curtseyed again, and the Princess conferred upon us all a celestial smile, which she seemed to have summoned out of the past, from among the graces of her girlhood, from the evenings at Compiègne, a smile which stole, sweet and unbroken, over her hitherto surly face. Then she went on her way, followed by the two ladies in waiting, who had confined themselves, in the manner of interpreters, of children’s or invalids’ nurses, to punctuating our conversation with meaningless remarks and superfluous explanations. “You should go and write your name in her book one day this week,” Mme Swam counselled me. “One doesn’t leave cards upon these ‘Royalties,’ as the English call them, but she will invite you to her house if you put your name down.”

Sometimes in those last days of winter, before proceeding on our expedition we would go into one of the small picture-shows that were beginning to open and where Swann, as a collector of note, was greeted with special deference by the dealers in whose galleries they were held. And in that still wintry weather the old longing to set out for the South of France and Venice would be reawakened in me by those rooms in which a springtime, already well advanced, and a blazing sun cast violet shadows upon the roseate Alpilles and gave the intense transparency of emeralds to the Grand Canal. If the weather was bad, we would go to a concert or a theatre, and afterwards to one of the fashionable tea-rooms. There, whenever Mme Swann had anything to say to me which she did not wish the people at the next table or even the waiters who brought our tea to understand, she would say it in English, as though that had been a secret language known to our two selves alone. As it happened everyone in the place knew English—I alone had not yet learned the language, and was obliged to say so to Mme Swann in order that she might cease to make, about the people who were drinking tea or serving us with it, remarks which I guessed to be uncomplimentary without either my understanding or the person referred to missing a single word.

Once, in connexion with a matinée at the theatre, Gilberte gave me a great surprise. It was precisely the day of which she had spoken to me in advance, on which fell the anniversary of her grandfather’s death. We were to go, she and I, with her governess, to hear selections from an opera, and Gilberte had dressed with a view to attending this performance, wearing the air of indifference with which she was in the habit of treating whatever we might be going to do, saying that it might be anything in the world, no matter what, provided that it amused me and had her parents’ approval. Before lunch, her mother drew us aside to tell her that her father was vexed at the thought of our going to a concert on that particular day. This seemed to be only natural. Gilberte remained impassive, but grew pale with an anger which she was unable to conceal, and uttered not a word. When M. Swann joined us his wife took him to the other end of the room and said something in his ear. He called Gilberte, and they went together into the next room. We could hear their raised voices. Yet I could not bring myself to believe that Gilberte, so submissive, so loving, so thoughtful, would resist her father’s appeal, on such a day and for so trifling a matter. At length Swann reappeared with her, saying: “You heard what I said. Now do as you like.”

Gilberte’s features remained contracted in a frown throughout luncheon, after which she retired to her room. Then suddenly, without hesitating and as though she had never at any point hesitated over her course of action: “Two o’clock!” she exclaimed, “You know the concert begins at half-past.” And she told her governess to make haste.

“But,” I reminded her, “won’t your father be cross with you?”

“Not the least little bit!”

“Surely he was afraid it would look odd, because of the anniversary.”

“What do I care what people think? I think it’s perfectly absurd to worry about other people in matters of sentiment. We feel things for ourselves, not for the public. Mademoiselle has very few pleasures, and she’s been looking forward to going to this concert. I’m not going to deprive her of it just to satisfy public opinion.”

“But, Gilberte,” I protested, taking her by the arm, “it’s not to satisfy public opinion, it’s to please your father.”

“You’re not going to start scolding me, I hope,” she said sharply, plucking her arm away.

A favour still more precious than their taking me with them to the Zoo or a concert, the Swanns did not exclude me even from their friendship with Bergotte, which had been at the root of the attraction that I had found in them when, before I had even seen Gilberte, I reflected that her intimacy with that godlike elder would have made her, for me, the most enthralling of friends, had not the disdain that I was bound to inspire in her forbidden me to hope that she would ever take me, in his company, to visit the towns that he loved. And then, one day, Mme Swann invited me to a big luncheon-party. I did not know who the guests were to be. On my arrival I was disconcerted, as I crossed the hall, by an alarming incident. Mme Swann seldom missed an opportunity of adopting any of those customs which are thought fashionable for a season, and then, failing to catch on, are presently abandoned (as, for instance, many years before, she had had her
hansom cab
, or had printed in English upon a card inviting people to luncheon the words
To meet
, followed by the name of some more or less important personage). Often enough these usages implied nothing mysterious and required no initiation. For instance, a minor innovation of those days, imported from England: Odette had made her husband have some visiting cards printed on which the name Charles Swann was preceded by “Mr.” After the first visit that I paid her, Mme Swann had left at my door one of these “pasteboards,” as she called them. No one had ever left a card on me before, and I felt at once so much pride, emotion and gratitude that, scraping together all the money I possessed, I ordered a superb basket of camellias and sent it round to Mme Swann. I implored my father to go and leave a card on her, but first, quickly, to have some printed on which his name should bear the prefix “Mr.” He complied with neither of my requests. I was in despair for some days, and then asked myself whether he might not after all have been right. But this use of “Mr.,” if it meant nothing, was at least intelligible. Not so with another that was revealed to me on the occasion of this luncheon-party, but revealed without any indication of its purport. At the moment when I was about to step from the hall into the drawing-room, the butler handed me a thin, oblong envelope upon which my name was inscribed. In my surprise I thanked him; but I eyed the envelope with misgivings. I no more knew what I was expected to do with it than a foreigner knows what to do with one of those little utensils that they lay in his place at a Chinese banquet. Noticing that it was gummed down, I was afraid of appearing indiscreet were I to open it then and there, and so I thrust it into my pocket with a knowing air. Mme Swann had written to me a few days before, asking me to come to “a small, informal luncheon.” There were, however, sixteen people, among whom I never suspected for a moment that I was to find Bergotte. Mme Swann, who had already “named” me, as she called it, to several of her guests, suddenly, after my name, in the same tone that she had used in uttering it (and as though we were merely two of the guests at her luncheon who ought to each feel equally flattered on meeting the other), pronounced that of the gentle Bard with the snowy locks. The name Bergotte made me start, like the sound of a revolver fired at me point blank, but instinctively, to keep my countenance, I bowed: there, in front of me, like one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock-coats, in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon had just fluttered, my greeting was returned by a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard. I was cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the explosion was not only the languorous old man, of whom no vestige now remained, but also the beauty of an immense work which I had contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had constructed, like a temple, expressly for it, but for which no room was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with blood-vessels, bones, glands, sinews, of the little man with the snub nose and black beard who stood before me. The whole of the Bergotte whom I had slowly and delicately elaborated for myself, drop by drop, like a stalactite, out of the transparent beauty of his books, ceased (I could see at once) to be of any possible use, the moment I was obliged to include in him the snail-shell nose and to utilise the goatee beard—just as we must reject as worthless the solution we have found for a problem the terms of which we had not read in full and so failed to observe that the total must amount to a specified figure. The nose and beard were elements similarly ineluctable, and all the more aggravating in that, while forcing me to reconstruct entirely the personage of Bergotte, they seemed further to imply, to produce, to secrete incessantly a certain quality of mind, alert and self-satisfied, which was not fair, for such a mind had no connexion whatever with the sort of intelligence that was diffused throughout those books, so intimately familiar to me, which were permeated by a gentle and godlike wisdom. Starting from them, I should never have arrived at that snail-shell nose; but starting from the nose, which did not appear to be in the slightest degree ashamed of itself, but stood out alone there like a grotesque ornament fastened on his face, I found myself proceeding in a totally different direction from the work of Bergotte, and must arrive, it would seem, at the mentality of a busy and preoccupied engineer, of the sort who when you accost them in the street think it correct to say: “Thanks, and you?” before you have actually inquired of them how they are, or else, if you assure them that you have been delighted to make their acquaintance, respond with an abbreviation which they imagine to be smart, intelligent and up-to-date, inasmuch as it avoids any waste of precious time on vain formalities: “Same here!” Names, no doubt, are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the real world, our senses being little more endowed than our imagination with the art of portraiture—so little, indeed, that the final and approximately lifelike pictures which we manage to obtain of reality are at least as different from the visible world as that was from the imagined). But in Bergotte’s case, my preconceived idea of him from his name troubled me far less than my familiarity with his work, to which I was obliged to attach, as to the cord of a balloon, the man with the goatee beard, without knowing whether it would still have the strength to raise him from the ground. It seemed clear, however, that it really was he who had written the books that I had so loved, for Mme Swann having thought it incumbent upon her to tell him of my admiration for one of these, he showed no surprise that she should have mentioned this to him rather than to any other guest, and did not seem to regard it as due to a misapprehension, but, swelling out the frock-coat which he had put on in honour of all these distinguished guests with a body avid for the coming meal, while his mind was completely occupied by other, more important realities, it was only as at some finished episode in his life, and as though one had alluded to a costume as the Duc de Guise which he had worn, one season, at a fancy dress ball, that he smiled as he bore his mind back to the idea of his books; which at once began to fall in my estimation (bringing down with them the whole value of Beauty, of the world, of life itself), until they seemed to have been merely the casual recreation of a man with a goatee beard. I told myself that he must have taken pains over them, but that, if he had lived on an island surrounded by beds of pearl-oysters, he would instead have devoted himself with equal success to the pearling trade. His work no longer appeared to me so inevitable. And then I asked myself whether originality did indeed prove that great writers are gods, ruling each over a kingdom that is his alone, or whether there is not an element of sham in it all, whether the differences between one man’s books and another’s were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between diverse personalities.