In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (65 page)

The assuagement brought about by the probability of my now being able to meet the little band whenever I chose was all the more precious to me because I should not have been able to keep watch for them during the next few days, which were taken up with preparations for Saint-Loup’s departure. My grandmother was anxious to offer my friend some token of her gratitude for all the kindnesses that he had shown to her and myself. I told her that he was a great admirer of Proudhon, and this put it into her head to send for a collection of autograph letters by that philosopher which she had once bought. Saint-Loup came to the hotel to look at them on the day of their arrival, which was also his last day at Balbec. He read them eagerly, fingering each page with reverence, trying to get the sentences by heart; and then, rising from the table, was beginning to apologise to my grandmother for having stayed so long, when he heard her say: “No, no, take them with you, they are for you to keep. That was why I sent for them, to give them to you.”

He was overwhelmed by a joy which he could no more control than we can a physical condition that arises without the intervention of our will. He blushed scarlet as a child who has just been punished, and my grandmother was far more touched to see all the efforts he made (without success) to contain the joy that convulsed him than she would have been to hear any words of thanks that he could have uttered. But he, fearing that he had failed to show his gratitude properly, begged me to make his excuses to her again, next day, leaning from the window of the little local train which was to take him back to his regiment. The distance was, as a matter of fact, nothing. He had thought of going by road, as he had frequently done that summer, when he was to return the same evening and was not encumbered with baggage. But this time he would in any case have had to put all his heavy luggage in the train. And he found it simpler to take the train himself too, following the advice of the manager who, on being consulted, replied that “Carriage or train, it was more or less equivocal.” He meant it to be understood that they were equivalent (in fact, very much what Françoise would have expressed as “coming to the same as makes no difference”). “Very well,” Saint-Loup had decided, “I shall take the ‘little crawler.’ ” I should have taken it too, had I not been tired, and gone with my friend to Doncières; failing this I kept on promising, all the time we waited in Balbec station—the time, that is to say, which the driver of the little train spent waiting for unpunctual friends, without whom he refused to start, and also in seeking some refreshment for himself—to go over there and see him several times a week. As Bloch had also come to the station—much to Saint-Loup’s disgust—the latter, seeing that our companion could hear him begging me to come to luncheon, to dinner, to stay altogether at Doncières, finally turned to him and, in the most forbidding tone, intended to counteract the forced civility of the invitation and to prevent Bloch from taking it seriously: “If you ever happen to be passing through Doncières any afternoon when I’m off duty, you might ask for me at the barracks; but I hardly ever am off duty.” Perhaps, also, Robert was afraid that I might not come alone, and, thinking that I was more intimate with Bloch than I made out, was providing me in this way with a travelling companion, one who would urge me on.

I was afraid that this tone, this manner of inviting a person while advising him not to come, might have wounded Bloch, and felt that Saint-Loup would have done better to say nothing. But I was mistaken, for after the train had gone, while we were walking back together as far as the crossroads where we had to separate, one road going to the hotel, the other to the Blochs’ villa, he never stopped asking me on what day we should go to Doncières, for after “all the civility that Saint-Loup had shown” him, it would be “too rude” on his part not to accept his invitation. I was glad that he had not noticed, or was so little displeased as to wish to let it be thought that he had not noticed, in what a less than pressing, indeed barely polite, tone the invitation had been issued. At the same time I should have liked Bloch, for his own sake, to refrain from making a fool of himself by going over at once to Doncières. But I dared not offer a piece of advice which could only have offended him by hinting that Saint-Loup had been less pressing than he himself was impressed. He was a great deal too ready to respond, and even if all his faults of this nature were atoned for by remarkable qualities which others, with more reserve than he, would never have possessed, he carried tactlessness to a pitch that was almost maddening. According to him, the week must not pass without our going to Doncières (he said “our” for I think that he counted to some extent on my presence there as an excuse for his own). All the way home, opposite the gymnasium in its grove of trees, opposite the tennis courts, the mayor’s office, the shellfish stall, he stopped me, imploring me to fix a day, and, as I did not, left me in anger, saying: “As your lordship pleases. For my part, I am obliged to go since he has invited me.”

Saint-Loup was still so afraid of not having thanked my grandmother properly that he charged me once again to express his gratitude to her a day or two later in a letter I received from him from the town in which he was quartered, a town which seemed, on the envelope where the post-mark had stamped its name, to be hastening to me across country, to tell me that within its walls, in the Louis XVI cavalry barracks, he was thinking of me. The paper was embossed with the arms of Marsantes, in which I could make out a lion surmounting a coronet closed by the cap of a peer of France.

“After a journey which,” he wrote, “passed pleasantly enough, with a book I bought at the station, by Arvède Barine
¹³
(a Russian author, I fancy; it seemed to me remarkably well written for a foreigner, but you shall give me your critical opinion, since you are bound to know all about it, you who are a fount of knowledge and have read everything), here I am again in the thick of this debased existence, where, alas, I feel a sad exile, not having here what I left behind at Balbec; this life in which I can find no affectionate memory, no intellectual attraction; an environment which you would no doubt despise yet which has a certain charm. Everything seems to have changed since I left it, for in the interval one of the most important periods in my life, that from which our friendship dates, has begun. I hope that it may never come to an end. I have spoken of our friendship, of you, to one person only, to the friend I told you of, who has just paid me a surprise visit here. She would very much like to know you, and I feel that you would get on well together, for she too is extremely literary. Otherwise, to go over in my mind all our talks, to relive those hours which I never shall forget, I have shut myself off from my comrades, excellent fellows, but altogether incapable of understanding that sort of thing. This remembrance of the moments I spent with you I should almost have preferred, on my first day here, to conjure up for my own solitary enjoyment, without writing to you. But I was afraid lest, with your subtle mind and ultra-sensitive heart, you might needlessly torment yourself if you did not hear from me, if, that is to say, you still condescend to occupy your thoughts with this blunt trooper whom you will have a hard task to polish and refine and make a little more subtle and worthier of your company.”

On the whole this letter, in its affectionate spirit, was not at all unlike those which, when I did not yet know Saint-Loup, I had imagined that he would write to me, in those day-dreams from which the coldness of his first greeting had shaken me by bringing me face to face with an icy reality which was not, however, to last. Once I had received this letter, every time the post was brought in, at lunch-time, I could tell at once when it was from him that a letter came, for it had always that second face which a person assumes when he is absent, in the features of which (the characters of the handwriting) there is no reason why we should not suppose that we can detect an individual soul just as much as in the line of a nose or the inflexions of a voice.

I would now happily remain at the table while it was being cleared, and, if it was not a moment at which the girls of the little band might be passing, it was no longer solely towards the sea that I would turn my eyes. Since I had seen such things depicted in water-colours by Elstir, I sought to find again in reality, I cherished as though for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin into which the sun introduced a patch of yellow velvet, the half-empty glass which thus showed to greater advantage the noble sweep of its curved sides and, in the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as frozen daylight, some dregs of wine, dark but glittering with reflected lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation of liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colours of the plums which passed from green to blue and from blue to golden yellow in the half-plundered dish, the promenade of the antiquated chairs that came twice daily to take their places round the white cloth spread on the table as on an altar at which were celebrated the rites of the palate, and where in the hollows of the oyster-shells a few drops of lustral water had remained as in tiny holy-water stoups of stone; I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of “still life.”

When, some days after Saint-Loup’s departure, I had succeeded in persuading Elstir to give a small party at which I should meet Albertine, the freshness of appearance and elegance of attire, both quite momentary, which were to be observed in me at the moment of my starting out from the Grand Hotel (and which were due respectively to a longer rest than usual and to special pains over my toilet) were such that I regretted my inability to reserve them (and also the credit accruing from Elstir’s friendship) for the captivation of some other, more interesting person, I regretted having to use them all up on the simple pleasure of making Albertine’s acquaintance. My brain assessed this pleasure at a very low value now that it was assured. But, inside, my will did not for a moment share this illusion, that will which is the persevering and unalterable servant of our successive personalities; hidden away in the shadow, despised, downtrodden, untiringly faithful, toiling incessantly, and with no thought for the variability of the self, to ensure that the self may never lack what is needed. While, at the moment when we are about to start on an eagerly awaited journey, our intelligence and our sensibility begin to ask themselves whether it is really worth the trouble, the will, knowing that those lazy masters would at once begin to consider that journey the most wonderful experience if it became impossible for us to undertake it, leaves them arguing outside the station, vying with each other in their hesitations; but it busies itself with buying the tickets and putting us into the carriage before the train starts. It is as invariable as the intelligence and the sensibility are fickle, but since it is silent, gives no account of its actions, it seems almost non-existent; it is by its dogged determination that the other constituent parts of our personality are led, but without seeing it, whereas they distinguish clearly all their own uncertainties. So my intelligence and my sensibility began a discussion as to the real value of the pleasure that there would be in knowing Albertine, while I studied in the glass vain and perishable attractions which they would have preserved intact for use on some other occasion. But my will would not let the hour pass at which I must start, and it was Elstir’s address that it called out to the driver. My intelligence and my sensibility were at liberty, now that the die was cast, to think this a pity. If my will had given the man a different address, they would have been properly had.

When I arrived at Elstir’s a few minutes later, I thought at first that Mlle Simonet was not in the studio. There was certainly a girl sitting there in a silk frock, bareheaded, but one whose marvellous hair, whose nose, whose complexion, meant nothing to me, in whom I did not recognise the human entity that I had extracted from a young cyclist in a polo-cap strolling past between myself and the sea. Nevertheless it was Albertine. But even when I knew it to be her, I gave her no thought. On entering any social gathering, when one is young, one loses consciousness of one’s old self, one becomes a different man, every drawing-room being a fresh universe in which, coming under the sway of a new moral perspective, we fasten our attention, as if they were to matter to us for all time, on people, dances, card-tables, all of which we shall have forgotten by the morning. Obliged to follow, if I was to arrive at the goal of conversation with Albertine, a route in no way of my own planning, which first brought me to a halt in front of Elstir, passed by other groups of guests to whom I was presented, then along the buffet table, at which I was offered, and where I ate, a strawberry tart or two, while I listened, motionless, to the music that had begun in another part of the room, I found myself giving to these various incidents the same importance as to my introduction to Mlle Simonet, an introduction which was now nothing more than one among several such incidents, having entirely forgotten that it had been, but a few minutes since, my sole object in coming there. But is it not thus, in the bustle of daily life, with every true happiness, every great sorrow? In a room full of other people we receive from the woman we love the answer, auspicious or fatal, which we have been awaiting for the last year. But we must go on talking, ideas come flocking one after another, unfolding a smooth surface which is pricked now and then at the very most by a dull throb from the memory, infinitely more profound but very narrow, that misfortune has come upon us. If, instead of misfortune, it is happiness, it may be that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the most important event in our emotional life occurred without our having time to give it any prolonged attention, or even to become aware of it almost, at a social gathering to which we had gone solely in expectation of that event.