In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (20 page)

“No,” I replied, “I told you a moment ago that I wouldn’t be free for the next three weeks—tomorrow no more than any other day.” “Very well, in that case . . . I shall come this very instant . . . It’s a nuisance, because I’m at a friend’s house, and she . . .” I sensed that she had not believed that I would accept her offer to come, which therefore was not sincere, and I decided to force her hand. “What do you suppose I care about your friend? Either come or don’t, it’s for you to decide. I’m not asking you to come, it was you who suggested it.” “Don’t be angry. I’ll jump into a cab now and I’ll be with you in ten minutes.”

Thus, from that nocturnal Paris out of whose depths the invisible message had already wafted into my very room, delimiting the field of action of a faraway person, what was now about to materialise, after this preliminary annunciation, was the Albertine whom I had known long ago beneath the sky of Balbec, when the waiters of the Grand Hotel, as they laid the tables, were blinded by the glow of the setting sun, when, the glass panels having been drawn wide open, the faintest evening breeze passed freely from the beach, where the last strolling couples still lingered, into the vast dining-room in which the first diners had not yet taken their places, and when, in the mirror placed behind the cashier’s desk, there passed the red reflexion of the hull and, lingering long, the grey reflexion of the smoke of the last steamer for Rivebelle. I had ceased to wonder what could have made Albertine late, and when Françoise came into my room to inform me: “Mademoiselle Albertine is here,” if I answered without even turning my head: “What in the world makes Mademoiselle Albertine come at this time of night?” it was only out of dissimulation. But then, raising my eyes to look at Françoise, as though curious to hear her answer which must corroborate the apparent sincerity of my question, I perceived, with admiration and fury, that, capable of rivalling Berma herself in the art of endowing with speech inanimate garments and the lines of her face, Françoise had taught their parts to her bodice, her hair—the whitest threads of which had been brought to the surface, were displayed there like a birth-certificate—and her neck, bent with fatigue and obedience. They commiserated with her for having been dragged from her sleep and from her warm bed, in the middle of the night, at her age, obliged to bundle into her clothes in haste, at the risk of catching pneumonia. And so, afraid that I might have seemed to be apologising for Albertine’s late arrival, I added: “Anyhow, I’m very glad she has come, it’s all for the best,” and I gave free vent to my profound joy. It did not long remain unclouded, when I had heard Françoise’s reply. Without uttering a word of complaint, seeming indeed to be doing her best to stifle an irrepressible cough, and simply folding her shawl over her bosom as though she felt cold, she began by telling me everything that she had said to Albertine, having not forgotten to ask after her aunt’s health. “I was just saying, Monsieur must have been afraid that Mademoiselle wasn’t coming, because this is no time to pay visits, it’s nearly morning. But she must have been in some place that she was having a good time because she never so much as said she was sorry she had kept Monsieur waiting, she answered me as saucy as you please: ‘Better late than never!’ ” And Françoise added these words that pierced my heart: “When she said that she gave herself away. Perhaps she would really have liked to hide herself, but . . .”

I had little cause for astonishment. I have said that Françoise rarely brought back word, when she was sent on an errand, if not of what she herself had said, on which she readily enlarged, at any rate of the awaited answer. But if, exceptionally, she repeated to us the words that our friends had said, however brief, she generally contrived, thanks if need be to the expression, the tone that, she assured us, had accompanied them, to make them somehow wounding. At a pinch, she would admit to having received a snub (probably quite imaginary) from a tradesman to whom we had sent her, provided that, being addressed to her as our representative, who had spoken in our name, it might rebound on us. The only thing then would be to tell her that she had misunderstood the man, that she was suffering from persecution mania and that the shopkeepers were not in league against her. However, their sentiments affected me little. Those of Albertine were a different matter. And in repeating the sarcastic words: “Better late than never!” Françoise at once evoked for me the friends with whom Albertine had finished the evening, thus preferring their company to mine. “She’s a comical sight, she has a little flat hat on, and with those big eyes of hers it does make her look funny, especially with her cloak which she did ought to have sent to the amender’s, for it’s all in holes. She makes me laugh,” Françoise added, as though mocking Albertine. Though she rarely shared my impressions, she felt the need to communicate her own. I refused even to appear to understand that this laugh was indicative of scorn and derision, but, to give tit for tat, replied, although I had never seen the little hat to which she referred: “What you call a ‘little flat hat’ is simply ravishing . . .” “That’s to say, it’s just a bit of rubbish,” said Françoise, giving expression, frankly this time, to her genuine contempt. Then (in a mild and leisurely tone so that my mendacious answer might appear to be the expression not of my anger but of the truth, though without wasting any time in order not to keep Albertine waiting) I addressed these cruel words to Françoise: “You are excellent,” I said to her in a honeyed voice, “you are kind, you have endless qualities, but you have never learned a single thing since the day you first came to Paris, either about ladies’ clothes or about how to pronounce words without making howlers.” And this reproach was particularly stupid, for those French words which we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only “howlers” made by Gaulish lips which mispronounced Latin or Saxon, our language being merely a defective pronunciation of several others. The genius of language in its living state, the future and past of French, that is what ought to have interested me in Françoise’s mistakes. Wasn’t “amender” for “mender” just as curious as those animals that survive from remote ages, such as the whale or the giraffe, and show us the states through which animal life has passed?

“And,” I went on, “since you haven’t managed to learn in all these years, you never will. But don’t let that distress you: it doesn’t prevent you from being a very good soul, and making spiced beef with jelly to perfection, and lots of other things as well. The hat that you think so simple is copied from a hat belonging to the Princesse de Guermantes which cost five hundred francs. In fact I mean to give Mlle Albertine an even finer one very soon.”

I knew that what would annoy Françoise more than anything was the thought of my spending money on people she disliked. She answered me in a few words which were made almost unintelligible by a sudden attack of breathlessness. When I discovered afterwards that she had a weak heart, how remorseful I felt that I had never denied myself the fierce and sterile pleasure of thus answering her back! Françoise detested Albertine, moreover, because, being poor, Albertine could not enhance what Françoise regarded as my superior position. She smiled benevolently whenever I was invited by Mme de Villeparisis. On the other hand, she was indignant that Albertine did not practise reciprocity. I found myself being obliged to invent fictitious presents from the latter, in the existence of which Françoise never for an instant believed. This want of reciprocity shocked her most of all in the matter of food. That Albertine should accept dinners from Mamma, when we were not invited to Mme Bontemps’s (who in any case spent half her time out of Paris, her husband accepting “posts” as in the old days when he had had enough of the Ministry), seemed to her an indelicacy on the part of my friend which she rebuked indirectly by repeating a saying current at Combray:

“Let’s eat my bread.”

“Ay, that’s the stuff.”

“Let’s eat thy bread.”

“I’ve had enough.”

I pretended to be writing.

“Who were you writing to?” Albertine asked me as she entered the room.

“To a pretty little friend of mine, Gilberte Swann. Don’t you know her?”

“No.”

I decided not to question Albertine as to how she had spent the evening, feeling that I should only reproach her and that we should have no time left, seeing how late it was already, to be reconciled sufficiently to proceed to kisses and caresses. And so it was with these that I chose to begin from the first moment. Besides, if I was a little calmer, I was not feeling happy. The loss of all equanimity, of all sense of direction, that we feel when we are kept waiting, persists after the arrival of the person awaited, and, taking the place inside us of the calm spirit in which we had been picturing her coming as so great a pleasure, prevents us from deriving any from it. Albertine was in the room: my disordered nerves, continuing to flutter, were still awaiting her.

“Can I have a nice kiss, Albertine?”

“As many as you like,” she said to me in her good-natured way. I had never seen her looking so pretty.

“Another one? You know it’s a great, great pleasure to me.”

“And a thousand times greater to me,” she replied. “Oh, what a pretty book-cover you have there!”

“Take it, I give it to you as a keepsake.”

“You really are nice . . .”

One would be cured for ever of romanticism if one could make up one’s mind, in thinking of the woman one loves, to try to be the man one will be when one no longer loves her. Gilberte’s book-cover and her agate marble must have derived their importance in the past from some purely inward state, since now they were to me a book-cover and a marble like any others.

I asked Albertine if she would like something to drink. “I seem to see oranges over there and water,” she said. “That will be perfect.” I was thus able to taste, together with her kisses, that refreshing coolness which had seemed to me to be superior to them at the Princesse de Guermantes’s. And the orange squeezed into the water seemed to yield to me, as I drank, the secret life of its ripening growth, its beneficent action upon certain states of that human body which belongs to so different a kingdom, its powerlessness to make that body live but on the other hand the process of irrigation by which it was able to benefit it—countless mysteries unveiled by the fruit to my sensory perception, but not at all to my intelligence.

When Albertine had gone, I remembered that I had promised Swann that I would write to Gilberte, and courtesy, I felt, demanded that I should do so at once. It was without emotion, and as though finishing off a boring school essay, that I traced upon the envelope the name
Gilberte Swann
with which at one time I used to cover my exercise-books to give myself the illusion that I was corresponding with her. For if, in the past, it had been I who wrote that name, now the task had been deputed by Habit to one of the many secretaries whom she employs. He could write down Gilberte’s name all the more calmly in that, placed with me only recently by Habit, having but recently entered my service, he had never known Gilberte, and knew only, without attaching any reality to the words, because he had heard me speak of her, that she was a girl with whom I had once been in love.

I could not accuse her of coldness. The person I now was in relation to her was the clearest possible proof of what she herself had been: the book-cover, the agate marble had simply become for me in relation to Albertine what they had been for Gilberte, what they would have been to anybody who had not suffused them with the glow of an internal flame. But now there was in me a new turmoil which in its turn distorted the real force of things and words. And when Albertine said to me, in a further outburst of gratitude: “I do love turquoises!” I answered her: “Don’t let these die,” entrusting to them as to some precious jewel the future of our friendship, which in fact was no more capable of inspiring a sentiment in Albertine than it had been of preserving the sentiment that had once bound me to Gilberte.

There occurred at about this time a phenomenon which deserves mention only because it recurs in every important period of history. At the very moment I was writing to Gilberte, M. de Guermantes, just home from his ball, still wearing his helmet, was thinking that next day he would be compelled to go into formal mourning, and decided to bring forward by a week the cure he was due to take at a spa. When he returned from it three weeks later (to anticipate for a moment, since I have only just finished my letter to Gilberte), those friends of his who had seen him, so indifferent at the start, turn into a fanatical anti-Dreyfusard, were left speechless with amazement when they heard him (as though the action of the cure had not been confined to his bladder) declare: “Oh, well, there’ll be a fresh trial and he’ll be acquitted. You can’t sentence a fellow without any evidence against him. Did you ever see anyone so gaga as Froberville? An officer leading the French people to the slaughter (meaning war)! Strange times we live in.” The fact was that, in the meantime, the Duke had met at the spa three charming ladies (an Italian princess and her two sisters-in-law). After hearing them make a few remarks about the books they were reading or a play that was being given at the Casino, the Duke had at once realised that he was dealing with women of superior intellect whom, as he expressed it, he “wasn’t up to.” He had been all the more delighted to be asked to play bridge by the princess. But, the moment he entered her sitting-room, as he began to say to her, in the fervour of his double-dyed anti-Dreyfusism: “Well, we don’t hear very much about the famous Dreyfus re-trial,” his stupefaction had been great when he heard the princess and her sisters-in-law say: “It’s becoming more certain every day. They can’t keep a man in prison who has done nothing.” “Eh? Eh?” the Duke had gasped at first, as at the discovery of a fantastic nickname employed in his household to turn to ridicule a person whom he had always regarded as intelligent. But, after a few days, just as, from cowardice and the spirit of imitation, we shout “Hallo, Jojotte” without knowing why at a great artist whom we hear so addressed by the rest of the household, the Duke, still greatly embarrassed by the novelty of this attitude, began nevertheless to say: “After all, if there’s no evidence against him.” The three charming ladies considered that he was not progressing rapidly enough and bullied him a bit: “But really, nobody with a grain of intelligence can ever have believed for a moment that there was anything.” Whenever any revelation came out that was “damning” to Dreyfus, and the Duke, supposing that now he was going to convert the three charming ladies, came to inform them of it, they burst out laughing and had no difficulty in proving to him, with great dialectic subtlety, that his argument was worthless and quite absurd. The Duke had returned to Paris a fanatical Dreyfusard. And of course we do not suggest that the three charming ladies were not, in this instance, messengers of truth. But it is to be observed that, every ten years or so, when we have left a man imbued with a genuine conviction, it so happens that an intelligent couple, or simply a charming lady, comes into his life and after a few months he is won over to the opposite camp. And in this respect there are many countries that behave like the sincere man, many countries which we have left full of hatred for another race and which, six months later, have changed their minds and reversed their alliances.