In Search of Lost Time (36 page)

– Ah, if Madame Verdurin begins fondling the bronzes, we won't hear any music tonight, said the painter.

– You be quiet. You're a rascal. In fact, she said, turning to Swann, we women are forbidden to do things far less voluptuous than this. But no flesh can compare to it! When M. Verdurin did me the honour of being jealous of me – come now, be polite at least, don't say you never were…

– But I said absolutely nothing. Doctor, be my witness: did I say anything?

Swann was feeling the bronzes to be polite and did not dare stop right away.

– Come, you can caress them later; now you're the one who's going to be caressed. Your ears are going to be caressed; you'll like that, I think; here's the dear young man who'll be doing it.

Now after the pianist had played, Swann was even friendlier to him than to the others who were present. This is why:

The year before, at a soirée, he had heard a piece of music performed on the piano and violin. At first, he had experienced only the physical quality of the sounds secreted by the instruments. And it had been a keen pleasure when, below the little line of the violin, slender, unyielding, compact and commanding, he had seen the mass of the piano part all at once struggling to rise in a liquid swell, multiform, undivided, smooth and colliding like the purple tumult of the waves when the moonlight charms them and lowers their pitch by half a tone. But at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish an outline clearly, or give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly charmed, he had tried to gather up and hold on to the phrase or harmony – he himself did not know which – that was passing by him and that had opened his soul so much wider, the way the smells of certain roses circulating in the damp evening air have the property of dilating our nostrils. Maybe it was because of his ignorance of music that he had been
capable of receiving so confused an impression, the kind of impression that is, however, perhaps the only one which is purely musical, immaterial, entirely original, irreducible to any other order of impression. An impression of this kind, is for an instant, so to speak,
sine materia
. No doubt the notes we hear then tend already, depending on their loudness and their quantity, to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to give us sensations of breadth, tenuousness, stability, whimsy. But the notes vanish before these sensations are sufficiently formed in us not to be submerged by those already excited by the succeeding or even simultaneous notes. And this impression would continue to envelop with its liquidity and its ‘mellowness' the motifs that at times emerge from it, barely discernible, immediately to dive under and disappear, known only by the particular pleasure they give, impossible to describe, recall, name, ineffable – if memory, like a labourer working to put down lasting foundations in the midst of the waves, by fabricating for us facsimiles of these fleeting phrases, did not allow us to compare them to those that follow them and to differentiate them. And so, scarcely had the delicious sensation which Swann had felt died away than his memory at once furnished him with a transcription that was summary and temporary but at which he could glance while the piece continued, so that already, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer impossible to grasp. He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical groupings, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him this thing which is no longer pure music, which is drawing, architecture, thought, and which allows us to recall the music. This time he had clearly distinguished one phrase rising for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had immediately proposed to him particular sensual pleasures which he had never imagined before hearing it, which he felt could be introduced to him by nothing else, and he had experienced for it something like an unfamiliar love.

With a slow rhythm it led him first here, then there, then elsewhere, towards a happiness that was noble, unintelligible and precise. And then suddenly, having reached a point from which he was preparing to follow it, after an instant's pause, abruptly it changed direction, and
with a new movement, quicker, slighter, more melancholy, incessant and sweet, it carried him off with it towards unfamiliar vistas. Then it disappeared. He wished passionately to see it a third time. And it did indeed reappear but without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a sensual pleasure that was less profound. But once he was back at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a woman he has glimpsed for only a moment as she passed by has introduced the image of a new sort of a beauty that increases the value of his own sensibility, without his even knowing if he will ever see this woman again whom he loves already and of whom he knows nothing, not even her name.

It even seemed, for a moment, that this love for a phrase of music would have to open in Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation. He had for so long given up directing his life towards an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that he believed, without ever saying so formally to himself, that this would not change as long as he lived; much worse, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in their reality, though without being able to deny it altogether. Thus he had acquired the habit of taking refuge in unimportant thoughts that allowed him to ignore the fundamental essence of things. Just as he did not ask himself if it would have been better for him not to go into society, but on the other hand knew quite certainly that if he had accepted an invitation he ought to go and that if he did not pay a call afterwards he must at least leave cards, so in his conversation he endeavoured never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about things, but to furnish material details that had some sort of value in themselves and allowed him not to show his real capacities. He was extremely precise when it came to the recipe for a dish, the date of a painter's birth or death, the nomenclature of his works. Now and then, despite everything, he went so far as to utter a judgment on a work, on someone's interpretation of life, but he would then give his remarks an ironic tone, as if he did not entirely subscribe to what he was saying. Now, like certain confirmed invalids in whom, suddenly, a country they have arrived in, a different diet, sometimes a spontaneous and mysterious organic development seem to bring on such a regression of their ailment that
they begin to envisage the unhoped-for possibility of belatedly starting a completely different life, Swann found within himself, in the recollection of the phrase he had heard, in certain sonatas he asked people to play for him, to see if he would not discover it in them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as if the music had had a sort of sympathetic influence on the moral dryness from which he suffered, he felt in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life. But, since he had not succeeded in finding out who had composed the work he had heard, he had not been able to acquire it for himself and had ended by forgetting it. True, during the week he had encountered several people who had been with him at that party and he had asked them about it; but many had arrived after the music or left before; some were indeed there while it was performed but had gone into the other drawing-room to talk, and others, who had stayed to listen, had heard no more of it than had the first group. As for the master and mistress of the house, they knew it was a recent work which the musicians whom they had hired had asked to play; since the latter had gone off on a tour, Swann could not find out anything more. He had many friends who were musicians, but though he recalled the special and inexpressible pleasure the phrase had given him, and saw before his eyes the shapes it outlined, he was not able to sing it for them. Then he stopped thinking about it.

Now, scarcely a few minutes after the young pianist had begun playing at Mme Verdurin's, suddenly, after a high note held for a long time through two measures, he saw it approaching, escaping from under that prolonged sonority stretched like a curtain of sound hiding the mystery of its incubation, he recognized it, secret, murmuring and divided, the airy and redolent phrase that he loved. And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend's drawing-room a person whom he had admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again. In the end, diligent, purposeful, it receded through the ramifications of its perfume, leaving on Swann's face the reflection of its smile. But now he could ask the name of his stranger (they told him it was the andante from the Sonata for piano
and violin by Vinteuil), he possessed it, he could have it in his house as often as he liked, try to learn its language and its secret.

And so when the pianist had finished, Swann went up to him to express a gratitude whose warmth was very pleasing to Mme Verdurin.

– He's a charmer, isn't he? she said to Swann. You might say he knows a thing or two about that sonata, the little devil. You didn't know the piano could achieve such things. It's everything – except a piano! My word! I'm startled by it every time; I think I'm hearing an orchestra. Though it's even more beautiful than an orchestra, more complete.

The young pianist bowed, and with a smile, stressing the words as if he were making a witty remark:

– You're very generous to me, he said.

And while Mme Verdurin was saying to her husband: ‘Come, give him some orangeade, he certainly deserves it,' Swann was describing to Odette how he had been in love with that little phrase. When Mme Verdurin said, from a little way off: ‘Well now, it seems to me someone is saying sweet things to you, Odette,' she answered: ‘Yes, very sweet,' and Swann found her simplicity delightful. Meanwhile, he was asking for information about Vinteuil, about his work, about the period of his life in which he had composed this sonata, about what the little phrase could have meant to him, this was what he would have liked to know most of all.

But all these people who professed to admire that musician (when Swann had said that his sonata was truly beautiful, Mme Verdurin had exclaimed: ‘I should say it's beautiful! But one simply doesn't admit that one does not know Vinteuil's sonata, one is not allowed not to know it,' and the painter had added: ‘Ah, yes! It's a work of genius, isn't it? It may not be what you would call “obvious” or “popular”, is it? But it makes a very great impression on us artists'), these people seemed never to have asked themselves these questions, for they were incapable of answering them.

In answer to one or two particular remarks that Swann made about his favourite phrase, Mme Verdurin went so far as to say:

– Well now, that's funny, I never paid any attention. I'll tell you, I don't very much enjoy nit-picking or discussing fine points; we don't
waste our time splitting hairs here, it's not that kind of a house, while Doctor Cottard watched her with speechless admiration and zealous studiousness as she frolicked in this billow of stock expressions. He and Mme Cottard, however, with a kind of good sense which is also possessed by certain people from humble backgrounds, carefully refrained from offering an opinion or feigning admiration for a sort of music which they confessed to each other, once they were back home, they did not understand any more than the painting of ‘Monsieur Biche'. Since, of the charm, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the clichés of an art slowly assimilated, and since an original artist begins by rejecting these clichés, M. and Mme Cottard, being in this sense typical of the public, found neither in Vinteuil's sonata, nor in the painter's portraits, what for them created the harmony of music and the beauty of painting. It seemed to them when the pianist played the sonata that he was randomly attaching to the piano notes that were not in fact connected to the forms they were used to, and that the painter was randomly hurling colours on to his canvases. When they were able to recognize a form in these canvases, they found it heavy and vulgarized (that is, lacking the elegance of the school of painting through which they viewed all living creatures, even in the street), and lacking truth, as if Monsieur Biche did not know how a shoulder was constructed or that women do not have lavender hair.

However, when the regulars had dispersed, the doctor felt this was a favourable opportunity, and while Mme Verdurin was saying a last word about Vinteuil's sonata, like a beginning swimmer who throws himself into the water in order to learn but chooses a moment when there are not too many people to see him, he exclaimed with sudden determination:

– Now, this is what one calls a musician
di primo cartello!
¹⁵

Swann learned only that the recent appearance of Vinteuil's sonata had made a strong impression on a school of very advanced tendencies, but was entirely unknown to the larger public.

– I know someone quite well named Vinteuil, said Swann, thinking of the piano-teacher who had taught my grandmother's sisters.

– Perhaps it's him, exclaimed Mme Verdurin.

– Oh, no! Swann answered, laughing. If you had ever spent just a minute or two with him, you wouldn't ask.

– Then, to ask the question is to answer it? said the doctor.

– But he could be a relative, Swann went on. That would be rather sad, but the fact is, a man of genius can be cousin to an old fool. If this is so, I confess I would submit to any kind of torture to get the old fool to introduce me to the composer of that sonata: starting with the torture of associating with the old fool, which would be frightful.

The painter knew that Vinteuil was very ill at the moment and that Doctor Potain was afraid he would not be able to save him.

– What! cried Mme Verdurin. Are there people who still go to Potain?

– Ah, Madame Verdurin! said Cottard, in a tone of witty repartee, you forget that you're talking about one of my colleagues, I should say one of my teachers.