In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (23 page)

“Oh! he said that he found you intelligent,” repeated my mother. “I’m glad to hear that, because he’s a man of talent.”

“What! he said that, did he?” my father joined in . . . “I don’t for a moment deny his literary distinction, before which the whole world bows; only it’s a pity that he should lead that disreputable existence to which old Norpois made a guarded allusion,” he went on, not seeing that against the sovereign virtue of the magic words which I had just pronounced, the depravity of Bergotte’s morals was scarcely more capable of holding out any longer than the falsity of his judgment.

“But, my dear,” Mamma interrupted, “we’ve no proof that it’s true. People say all sorts of things. Besides, M. de Norpois may have the most perfect manners in the world, but he’s not always very good-natured, especially about people who are not exactly his sort.”

“That’s quite true; I’ve noticed it myself,” my father admitted.

“And then, too, a great deal ought to be forgiven Bergotte since he thinks well of my little son,” Mamma went on, stroking my hair and fastening upon me a long and pensive gaze.

My mother had not in fact awaited this verdict from Bergotte before telling me that I might ask Gilberte to tea whenever I had friends coming. But I dared not do so for two reasons. The first was that at Gilberte’s nothing else but tea was ever served. Whereas at home Mamma insisted on there being hot chocolate as well. I was afraid that Gilberte might regard this as common and so conceive a great contempt for us. The other reason was a formal difficulty, a question of procedure which I could never succeed in settling. When I arrived at Mme Swann’s she used to ask me: “And how is your mother?”

I had made several overtures to Mamma to find out whether she would do the same when Gilberte came to us, a point which seemed to me more serious than, at the Court of Louis XIV, the use of “Monseigneur.” But Mamma would not hear of it for a moment.

“Certainly not. I do not know Mme Swann.”

“But neither does she know you.”

“I never said she did, but we’re not obliged to behave in exactly the same way about everything. I shall find other ways of being nice to Gilberte than Mme Swann does with you.”

But I remained unconvinced, and preferred not to invite Gilberte.

Leaving my parents, I went upstairs to change my clothes and on emptying my pockets came suddenly upon the envelope which the Swann’s butler had handed me before showing me into the drawing-room. I was now alone. I opened it; inside was a card on which was indicated the name of the lady whom I ought to have taken in to luncheon.

It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, as it happened, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by assuring me that, contrary to all that I had believed at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for anything better than to make love. He added to this service a second, the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later: it was he who took me for the first time into a house of assignation. He had indeed told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might enjoy. But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those houses were to enable me to substitute actual human features. So that if I owed to Bloch—for his “good tidings” that happiness and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things that we have made a meaningless sacrifice in renouncing for ever—a debt of gratitude of the same kind as that we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher who has given us reason to hope for longevity in this world and not to be entirely cut off from it when we shall have passed into another, the houses of assignation which I frequented some years later—by furnishing me with samples of happiness, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to invent, which is something more than a mere summary of former beauties, that present indeed divine, the only one that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which all the logical creations of our intellect pale, and which we can seek from reality alone: an individual charm—deserved to be ranked by me with those other benefactors more recent in origin but of comparable utility (before finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the seductive charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, on the basis of our knowledge of other painters, other composers, other cities): namely illustrated editions of the Old Masters, symphony concerts, and guidebooks to historic towns. But the house to which Bloch took me (and which he himself in fact had long ceased to visit) was of too inferior a grade and its personnel too mediocre and too little varied to be able to satisfy my old or to stimulate new curiosities. The mistress of this house knew none of the women with whom one asked her to negotiate, and was always suggesting others whom one did not want. She boasted to me of one in particular, of whom, with a smile full of promise (as though this was a great rarity and a special treat), she would say: “She’s Jewish. How about that?” (It was doubtless for this reason that she called her Rachel.) And with an inane affectation of excitement which she hoped would prove contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of sensual satisfaction: “Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn’t that be thrilling? Rrrr!” This Rachel, of whom I caught a glimpse without her seeing me, was dark, not pretty, but intelligent-looking, and would pass the tip of her tongue over her lips as she smiled with a look of boundless impertinence at the customers who were introduced to her and whom I could hear making conversation. Her thin and narrow face was framed with curly black hair, irregular as though outlined in pen-strokes upon a wash-drawing in Indian ink. Every evening I promised the madame, who offered her to me with a special insistence, boasting of her superior intelligence and her education, that I would not fail to come some day on purpose to make the acquaintance of Rachel, whom I had nicknamed “Rachel when from the Lord.”
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But the first evening I had heard her say to the madame as she was leaving the house: “That’s settled then. I shall be free tomorrow, so if you have anyone you won’t forget to send for me.”

And these words had prevented me from recognising her as a person because they had made me classify her at once in a general category of women whose habit, common to all of them, was to come there in the evening to see whether there might not be a louis or two to be earned. She would simply vary her formula, saying indifferently: “If you need me” or “If you need anybody.”

The madame, who was not familiar with Halévy’s opera, did not know why I always called the girl “Rachel when from the Lord.” But failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing, and it was always with a wholehearted laugh that she would say to me:

“Then there’s nothing doing tonight? When am I going to fix you up with ‘Rachel when from the Lord’? How do you say that: ‘Rachel when from the Lord’? Oh, that’s a nice one, that is. I’m going to make a match of you two. You won’t regret it, you’ll see.”

Once I nearly made up my mind, but she had “gone to press,” another time she was in the hands of the “hair-dresser,” an old gentleman who never did anything to the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and then comb it. And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the humbler denizens of the place (so-called working girls, though they always seemed to be out of work) had come to make tea for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of my interlocutors gave an attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to this house because, anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her a few pieces—notably a big sofa—which I had inherited from my aunt Léonie. I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I saw them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that pervaded my aunt’s room at Combray at once appeared to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their defencelessness! Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive and to be appealing to me, like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance. Besides, as our memory does not as a rule present things to us in their chronological sequence but as it were by a reflection in which the order of the parts is reversed, I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie had left her room.

A whole lot more of my aunt Léonie’s things, and notably a magnificent set of old silver plate, I sold, against my parents’ advice, so as to have more money to spend, and to be able to send more flowers to Mme Swann who would greet me, after receiving an immense basket of orchids, with: “If I were your father, I should have you up before the magistrate for this.” How could I suppose that one day I might particularly regret the loss of my silver plate, and rank certain other pleasures more highly than that (which might perhaps have shrunk to nothing) of paying courtesies to Gilberte’s parents. Similarly, it was with Gilberte in my mind, and in order not to be separated from her, that I had decided not to enter upon a career of diplomacy abroad. It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions. I could scarcely imagine that that strange substance which was housed in Gilberte, and which radiated from her parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to all things else, could be liberated, could migrate into another person. Unquestionably the same substance, and yet one that would have a wholly different effect on me. For the same sickness evolves; and a delicious poison can no longer be taken with the same impunity when, with the passing of the years, the heart’s resistance has diminished.

My parents meanwhile would have liked to see the intelligence that Bergotte had discerned in me made manifest in some outstanding piece of work. When I still did not know the Swanns I thought that I was prevented from working by the state of agitation into which I was thrown by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte when I chose. But now that their door stood open to me, scarcely had I sat down at my desk than I would get up and hurry round to them. And after I had left them and was back at home, my isolation was apparent only, my mind was powerless to swim against the stream of words on which I had allowed myself mechanically to be borne for hours on end. Sitting alone, I continued to fashion remarks such as might have pleased or amused the Swanns, and to make this pastime more entertaining I myself took the parts of those absent players, putting to myself fictitious questions so chosen that my brilliant epigrams served simply as apt repartee. Though conducted in silence, this exercise was none the less a conversation and not a meditation, my solitude a mental social round in which it was not I myself but imaginary interlocutors who controlled my choice of words, and in which, as I formulated, instead of the thoughts that I believed to be true, those that came easily to my mind and involved no retrogression from the outside inwards, I experienced the sort of pleasure, entirely passive, which sitting still affords to anyone who is burdened with a sluggish digestion.

Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intentions would be realised without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient for a few hours and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realised at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realisation: I began again to stay up late, having no longer, to oblige me to go to bed early one evening, the certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my creative energy, a few days of relaxation, and the only time my grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned tone, to frame the reproach: “Well, this famous work, don’t we even speak about it any more?”, I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see that my decision was irrevocably made, she had further and perhaps for a long time postponed its execution by the shock which her denial of justice had administered to my nerves and under the impact of which I should be disinclined to begin my work. She felt that her scepticism had stumbled blindly against a genuine intention. She apologised, kissing me: “I’m sorry, I shan’t say another word,” and, so that I should not be discouraged, assured me that as soon as I was quite well again, the work would come of its own accord to boot.

Besides, I said to myself, in spending all my time with the Swanns, am I not doing exactly what Bergotte does? To my parents it seemed almost as though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the same salon as a great writer, the life most favourable to the growth of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed from having to create that talent for himself, from within himself, and can acquire it from someone else, is as erroneous as to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health (in spite of neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst excesses) merely by dining out often in the company of a physician. The person, incidentally, who was most completely taken in by this illusion which misled me as well as my parents, was Mme Swann. When I explained to her that I was unable to come, that I must stay at home and work, she looked as though she felt that I was making a great fuss about nothing, that I was being rather stupidly pretentious: