In Search of Lost Time (19 page)

I was not quite Bergotte's only admirer; he was also the favourite writer of a friend of my mother's, a very well-read woman, while Doctor du Boulbon would keep his patients waiting as he read Bergotte's most recent book; and it was from his consulting room, and from a park near Combray, that some of the first seeds of that predilection for Bergotte took flight, a rare species then, now universally widespread, so that all through Europe, all through America, even in the smallest village, one can find its ideal and common flower. What my mother's friend and, it seems, Doctor du Boulbon liked
above all in Bergotte's books, as I did, was that same melodic flow, those old-fashioned expressions, a few others which were very simple and familiar, but which enjoyed, to judge from the places in which he focused attention on them, a particular preference on his part; lastly, in the sad passages, a certain brusqueness, a tone that was almost harsh. And no doubt he himself must have felt that these were his greatest charms. For in the books that followed, if he had found out some great truth, or the name of a famous cathedral, he would interrupt his narrative and, in an invocation, an apostrophe, a long prayer, he would give vent to those exhalations which in his early works remained interior to his prose, revealed only by the undulations of its surface, even sweeter, perhaps, more harmonious, when they were thus veiled and one could not have pointed out precisely where their murmur rose, where it died. These passages in which he took such pleasure were our favourite passages. I myself knew them by heart. I was disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative. Each time he talked about something whose beauty had until then been hidden from me, about pine forests, about hail, about Notre-Dame Cathedral, about
Athalie
or
Phèdre
,
²²
with one image he would make that beauty explode into me. And so, realizing how many parts of the universe there were that my feeble perception would not be able to distinguish if he did not bring them close to me, I wanted to possess an opinion of his, a metaphor of his, for everything in the world, especially those things that I would have an opportunity of seeing myself, and, of the latter, particularly for some of the historic buildings of France and certain seascapes, because the insistence with which he mentioned them in his books proved that he considered them rich in meaning and beauty. Unfortunately, about almost everything in the world I did not know what his opinion was. I did not doubt that it was entirely different from my own, since it came down from an unknown world towards which I was trying to rise: persuaded that my thoughts would have looked like pure ineptitude to that perfect mind, I had made such a clean sweep of them all that, when by chance I happened to encounter in one of his books a thought that I had already had myself, my heart would swell as though a god in his goodness had given it back to me, had declared it legitimate and beautiful. It happened now and then that
a page of his would say the same things that I often wrote to my grandmother and my mother at night when I could not sleep, so that this page by Bergotte seemed like a collection of epigraphs to be placed at the beginnings of my letters. Later still, when I began writing a book, and the quality of certain sentences was not high enough to convince me to continue it, I would find their equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his book, that I could enjoy them; when I was the one composing them, anxious that they should reflect exactly what I perceived in my thoughts, afraid I would not ‘make a good likeness', I hardly had time to ask myself whether what I was writing was agreeable! But in fact there was no other sort of sentence, no other sort of idea, that I really loved. My uneasy and dissatisfied efforts were themselves a sign of love, a love without pleasure but profound. And so, when I suddenly found sentences like these in a book by another person, that is, without having to suffer my usual qualms, my usual severity, without having to torment myself, I would at last abandon myself with delight to my partiality for them, like a cook who, when for once he does not have to cook, at last finds the time to be a glutton. One day, when I encountered in a book by Bergotte a joke about an old servant woman which the writer's magnificent and solemn language made even more ironical, but which was the same joke I had often made to my grandmother when talking about Françoise, another time when I saw that he did not think it unworthy to portray in one of those mirrors of truth which were his books a remark similar to one I had had occasion to make about our friend M. Legrandin (remarks about Françoise and M. Legrandin that were certainly among those I would most resolutely have sacrificed to Bergotte, persuaded that he would find them uninteresting), it seemed to me suddenly that my humble life and the realms of the truth were not as widely separated as I had thought, that they even coincided at certain points, and from confidence and joy I wept over the writer's pages as though in the arms of a father I had found again.

From his books, I imagined Bergotte to be a frail, disappointed old man who had lost several of his children and never recovered. And so I would read, I would sing his prose to myself, more
dolce
, more
lento
perhaps than it was written, and the simplest sentence spoke to me
with a more tender intonation. Above all else I loved his philosophy, I had pledged myself over to it for life. It made me impatient to reach the age when I would enter secondary school and enroll in the class called Philosophy. But I did not want to do anything else there but live according to Bergotte's ideas exclusively, and, had I been told that the metaphysicians to whom I would be devoting myself by then would not resemble him at all, I would have felt the despair of a lover who wants his love to be lifelong and to whom one talks about the other mistresses he will have later.

One Sunday, as I was reading in the garden, I was disturbed by Swann, who had come to see my parents.

– What are you reading? May I look? Well, well! Bergotte! Now, who told you about his books? I said it was Bloch.

– Ah, yes! The boy I saw here once, who looks so much like the portrait of Mohammed II by Bellini.
²³
Oh, it's quite striking! He has the same circumflex eyebrows, the same curved nose, the same jutting cheekbones. When he has a goatee, he'll be the same person. Well, he has good taste, in any case, because Bergotte is quite enchanting. And seeing how much I appeared to admire Bergotte, Swann, who never talked about the people he knew, out of kindness made an exception and said to me:

– I know him very well. If you would like him to write a few words in the front of your book, I could ask him.'

I did not dare accept his offer, but asked Swann some questions about Bergotte. ‘Could you tell me which is his favourite actor?'

– Actor? I don't know. But I do know that he doesn't consider any man on the stage equal to La Berma; he puts her above everyone else. Have you seen her?

– No, Monsieur, my parents don't allow me to go to the theatre.

– That's unfortunate. You ought to ask them. La Berma in
Phèdre
, in
Le Cid
,
²⁴
is only an actress, you might say, but you know, I'm not much of a believer in the ‘
hierarchy!
' of the arts (and I noticed, as had often struck me in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that when he talked about serious things, when he used an expression that seemed to imply an opinion about an important subject, he took care to isolate it in a tone of voice that was particularly mechanical
and ironic, as though he had put it between quotation marks, seeming not to want to take responsibility for it, as though saying: ‘
hierarchy
, you know, as it is called by silly people?' But then if it was so silly, why did he say hierarchy?). A moment later, he added: ‘It will give you as noble a vision as any masterpiece, I don't know, really… as – and he began to laugh – the Queens of Chartres!'
²⁵
Until then his horror of ever expressing a serious opinion had seemed to me a thing that must be elegant and Parisian and that was the opposite of the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I also suspected it was a form of wit in the social circles in which Swann moved, where, in reaction to the lyricism of earlier generations, they went to an extreme in rehabilitating those small, precise facts formerly reputed to be vulgar, and proscribed ‘fine phrases'. But now I found something shocking in this attitude of Swann's towards things. He appeared not to dare to have an opinion and to be at his ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information. But if that was the case, he did not realize that to postulate that the accuracy of these details was important was to profess an opinion. I thought again of that dinner at which I was so sad because Mama would not be coming up to my room and at which he had said that the balls given by the Princesse de Léon were of no importance whatsoever. But it was to just that sort of pleasure that he devoted his life. I found all this contradictory. For what other lifetime was he reserving the moment when he would at last say seriously what he thought of things, formulate opinions that he did not have to put between quotation marks, and no longer indulge with punctilious politeness in occupations which he declared at the same time to be ridiculous? I also noticed in the way Swann talked to me about Bergotte something that was, on the other hand, not peculiar to him, but shared at the time by all the writer's admirers, by my mother's friend, by Doctor du Boulbon. Like Swann, they said about Bergotte: ‘He's quite enchanting, so individual, he has his own way of saying things which is a little overly elaborate, but so pleasing. You don't need to see the signature, you know right away that it's by him.' But none of them would have gone so far as to say: ‘He's a great writer, he has a great talent.' They did not even say he had talent. They did not say it because they did not know it. We
are very slow to recognize in the particular features of a new writer the model that is labelled ‘great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Precisely because these features are new, we do not think they fully resemble what we call talent. Instead, we talk about originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realize that all of this is, in fact, talent.

– Are there any books by Bergotte in which he talks about La Berma? I asked M. Swann.

– I think so, in his slim little volume on Racine, but it must be out of print. There may have been a reissue, though. I'll find out. I can also ask Bergotte anything you like; there isn't a week in the whole year when he doesn't come to dinner at our house. He's my daughter's greatest friend. They go off together visiting old towns, cathedrals, castles.

Since I had no notion of social hierarchy, for a long time the fact that my father found it impossible for us to associate with Mme and Mlle Swann had had the effect above all, by making me imagine a great distance between them and us, of giving them prestige in my eyes. I was sorry my mother did not dye her hair and put lipstick on her lips as I had heard our neighbour Mme Sazerat say that Mme Swann did in order to please, not her husband, but M. de Charlus, and I thought we must be an object of scorn to her, which distressed me most of all because of Mlle Swann, who, from what I had been told, was such a pretty little girl and about whom I often dreamed, giving her each time the same arbitrary and charming face. But when I learned that day that Mlle Swann was a creature of so rare a condition, bathing as though in her natural element in the midst of such privileges, that when she asked her parents if anyone was coming to dinner, she would be answered by those syllables filled with light, by the name of that golden dinner guest who was for her only an old friend of the family: Bergotte; that for her the intimate talk at the table, the equivalent for me of my great-aunt's conversation, would be Bergotte's words on all the subjects he had not been able to broach in his books, and on which I would have liked to hear him pronounce his oracles; and that, lastly, when she went to visit other towns, he would walk along next to her, unknown and glorious, like the Gods who descended among mortals;
then I was conscious both of the worth of a creature like Mlle Swann and also of how crude and ignorant I would appear to her, and I felt so keenly the sweetness and the impossibility of my being her friend that I was filled at once with desire and despair. Most often, now, when I thought of her, I would see her in front of a cathedral porch, explaining to me what the statues meant and, with a smile that said good things about me, introducing me as her friend to Bergotte. And always the charm of all those ideas awakened in me by the cathedrals, the charm of the hills of Île-de-France and the plains of Normandy, cast reflections which overflowed on to the picture I was forming of Mlle Swann: this was what it meant to be quite ready to fall in love with her. Our belief that a person participates in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest. Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face; they think that under the breast-plate they are kissing a different heart, adventurous and sweet; and a young sovereign, a crown prince, may make the most flattering conquests in the foreign countries he visits without needing the regular profile that would perhaps be indispensable to a stockbroker.

While I read in the garden, something my great-aunt would not have understood my doing except on a Sunday, a day when it is forbidden to occupy oneself with anything serious and when she did not sew (on a weekday, she would have said to me ‘What? Still
amusing
yourself with a book? This isn't Sunday, you know,' giving the word amusement the meaning of childishness and waste of time), my Aunt Léonie would gossip with Françoise, waiting until it was time for Eulalie. She would announce that she had just seen Mme Goupil go by ‘without an umbrella, in that silk dress she had made for her at Châteaudun. If she has far to go before Vespers, she could very well get it properly drenched.'