In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (25 page)

She had the misfortune, on one of these pilgrimages during which she did not like to be disturbed, to meet on the beach a lady from Combray, accompanied by her daughters. Her name was, I think, Mme Poussin. But among ourselves we always referred to her as “Just You Wait,” for it was by the perpetual repetition of this phrase that she warned her daughters of the evils that they were laying up for themselves, saying for instance if one of them was rubbing her eyes: “Just you wait until you go and get ophthalmia.” She greeted my mother from afar with long, lachrymose bows, a sign not of condolence but of the nature of her social training. Had we not lost my grandmother and had we only had reasons to be happy, she would have done the same. Living in comparative retirement at Combray within the walls of her large garden, she could never find anything soft enough for her liking, and subjected words and even proper names to a softening process. She felt “spoon” to be too hard a word to apply to the piece of silverware which measured out her syrups, and said, in consequence, “spune”; she would have been afraid of offending the gentle bard of Télémaque by calling him bluntly Fénelon—as I myself did with every reason to know, having as my dearest friend the best, bravest, most intelligent of men, whom no one who knew him could forget: Bertrand de Fénelon—and invariably said “Fénélon,” feeling that the acute accent added a certain softness. The far from soft son-in-law of this Mme Poussin, whose name I have forgotten, having been notary public at Combray, ran off with the funds, and relieved my uncle, in particular, of a considerable sum of money. But most of the inhabitants of Combray were on such friendly terms with the rest of the family that no coolness ensued and people were merely sorry for Mme Poussin. She never entertained, but whenever people passed by her railings they would stop to admire the shade of her admirable trees, without being able to make out anything else. She hardly gave us any trouble at Balbec, where I encountered her only once, at a moment when she was saying to a daughter who was biting her nails: “Just you wait till you get a good whitlow.”

While Mamma sat reading on the beach I remained in my room by myself. I recalled the last weeks of my grandmother’s life, and everything connected with them, the outer door of the flat which had been propped open when I went out with her for the last time. In contrast with all this the rest of the world seemed scarcely real and my anguish poisoned everything in it. Finally my mother insisted on my going out. But at every step, some forgotten view of the casino, of the street along which, while waiting for her that first evening, I had walked as far as the Duguay-Trouin monument, prevented me, like a wind against which it is hopeless to struggle, from going further; I lowered my eyes in order not to see. And after I had recovered my strength a little I turned back towards the hotel, the hotel in which I knew that it was henceforth impossible that, however long I might wait, I should find my grandmother as I had found her there before, on the evening of our arrival. As it was the first time that I had gone out of doors, a number of servants whom I had not yet seen gazed at me curiously. On the very threshold of the hotel a young page took off his cap to greet me and at once put it on again. I supposed that Aimé had, to borrow his own expression, “tipped him the wink” to treat me with respect. But I saw a moment later that, as someone else entered the hotel, he doffed it again. The fact of the matter was that this young man had no other occupation in life than to take off and put on his cap, and did it to perfection. Having realised that he was incapable of doing anything else but excelled in that, he practised it as many times a day as possible, thus winning a discreet but widespread regard from the hotel guests, coupled with great regard from the hall porter upon whom devolved the duty of engaging the boys and who, until this rare bird alighted, had never succeeded in finding anyone who wasn’t sacked within a week, greatly to the astonishment of Aimé who used to say: “After all, in that job they’ve only got to be polite, which can’t be so very difficult.” The manager required in addition that they should have what he called a good “present,” meaning thereby that they should stay there, or more likely having misremembered the word “presence.” The appearance of the lawn behind the hotel had been altered by the creation of several flower-beds and by the removal not only of an exotic shrub but of the page who, at the time of my former visit, used to provide an external decoration with the supple stem of his figure and the curious colouring of his hair. He had gone off with a Polish countess who had taken him as her secretary, following the example of his two elder brothers and their typist sister, snatched from the hotel by persons of different nationality and sex who had been attracted by their charm. The only one remaining was the youngest, whom nobody wanted because he squinted. He was highly delighted when the Polish countess or the protectors of the other two brothers came on a visit to the hotel at Balbec. For, although he envied his brothers, he was fond of them and could in this way cultivate his family feelings for a few weeks in the year. Was not the Abbess of Fontevrault, deserting her nuns for the occasion, in the habit of going to partake of the hospitality which Louis XIV offered to that other Mortemart, his mistress, Madame de Montespan? The boy was still in his first year at Balbec; he did not as yet know me, but having heard his comrades of longer standing supplement the word “Monsieur” with my surname when they addressed me, he copied them from the first with an air of self-satisfaction, either at showing his familiarity with a person whom he supposed to be well-known, or at conforming with a usage of which five minutes earlier he had been unaware but which he felt it was imperative to observe. I could well appreciate the charm that this great hotel might have for certain persons. It was arranged like a theatre, and was filled to the flies with a numerous and animated cast. For all that the visitor was only a sort of spectator, he was perpetually involved in the performance, not simply as in one of those theatres where the actors play a scene in the auditorium, but as though the life of the spectator was going on amid the sumptuosities of the stage. The tennis-player might come in wearing a white flannel blazer, but the porter would have put on a blue frock-coat with silver braid in order to hand him his letters. If this tennis-player did not choose to walk upstairs, he was equally involved with the actors in having by his side, to propel the lift, its attendant no less richly attired. The corridors on each floor engulfed a flock of chambermaids and female couriers, fair visions against the sea, like the frieze of the Panathenaea, to whose modest rooms devotees of ancillary feminine beauty would penetrate by cunning detours. Downstairs, it was the masculine element that predominated and that made this hotel, in view of the extreme and idle youth of the servants, a sort of Judaeo-Christian tragedy given bodily form and perpetually in performance. And so I could not help reciting to myself, when I saw them, not indeed the lines of Racine that had come into my head at the Princesse de Guermantes’s while M. de Vaugoubert stood watching young embassy secretaries greet M. de Charlus, but other lines of Racine, taken this time not from
Esther
but from
Athalie
: for in the doorway of the hall, what in the seventeenth century was called the portico, “a flourishing race” of young pages clustered, especially at tea-time, like the young Israelites of Racine’s choruses. But I do not believe that a single one of them could have given even the vague answer that Joas finds to satisfy Athalie when she inquires of the infant Prince: “What is your office, then?” for they had none. At the most, if one had asked of any of them, like the old Queen: “But all these people shut within this place, what is it that they do?” he might have said: “I watch the solemn order of these ceremonies—and bear my part.” Now and then one of the young supers would approach some more important personage, then this young beauty would rejoin the chorus, and, unless it was the moment for a spell of contemplative relaxation, they would all interweave their useless, respectful, decorative, daily movements. For, except on their “day off,” “reared in seclusion from the world” and never crossing the threshold, they led the same ecclesiastical existence as the Levites in
Athalie
, and as I gazed at that “young and faithful troop” playing at the foot of the steps draped with sumptuous carpets, I felt inclined to ask myself whether I was entering the Grand Hotel at Balbec or the Temple of Solomon.

I went straight up to my room. My thoughts kept constantly turning to the last days of my grandmother’s illness, to her sufferings which I relived, intensifying them with that element, still harder to bear than even the sufferings of others, which is added to them by our cruel pity; when we believe we are merely re-creating the grief and pain of a beloved person, our pity exaggerates them; but perhaps it is our pity that speaks true, more than the sufferers’ own consciousness of their pain, they being blind to that tragedy of their existence which pity sees and deplores. But my pity would have transcended my grandmother’s sufferings in a new surge had I known then what I did not know until long afterwards, that on the eve of her death, in a moment of consciousness and after making sure that I was not in the room, she had taken Mamma’s hand, and, after pressing her fevered lips to it, had said: “Good-bye, my child, good-bye for ever.” And this may also perhaps have been the memory upon which my mother never ceased to gaze so fixedly. Then sweeter memories returned to me. She was my grandmother and I was her grandson. Her facial expressions seemed written in a language intended for me alone; she was everything in my life, other people existed merely in relation to her, to the opinion she would express to me about them. But no, our relations were too fleeting to have been anything but accidental. She no longer knew me, I should never see her again. We had not been created solely for one another; she was a stranger to me. This stranger was before my eyes at the moment in the photograph taken of her by Saint-Loup. Mamma, who had met Albertine, had insisted upon my seeing her because of the nice things she had said about my grandmother and myself. I had accordingly made an appointment with her. I told the manager that she was coming, and asked him to put her in the drawing-room to wait for me. He told me that he had known her for years, herself and her friends, long before they had attained “the age of purity,” but that he was annoyed with them because of certain things they had said about the hotel. “They can’t be very ‘illegitimate’ if they talk like that. Unless people have been slandering them.” I had no difficulty in guessing that “purity” here meant “puberty.” “Illegitimate” puzzled me more. Was it perhaps a confusion with “illiterate,” which in that case was a further confusion with “literate”? As I waited until it was time to go down and meet Albertine, I kept my eyes fixed, as on a drawing which one ceases to see by dint of staring at it, upon the photograph that Saint-Loup had taken, and all of a sudden I thought once again: “It’s grandmother, I am her grandson,” as a man who has lost his memory remembers his name, as a sick man changes his personality. Françoise came in to tell me that Albertine was there, and, catching sight of the photograph: “Poor Madame, it’s the very image of her, down to the beauty spot on her cheek; that day the Marquis took her picture, she was very poorly, she had been taken bad twice. ‘Whatever happens, Françoise,’ she says to me, ‘you mustn’t let my grandson know.’ And she hid it well, she was always cheerful in company. When she was by herself, though, I used to find that she seemed to be in rather monotonous spirits now and then. But she soon got over it. And then she says to me, she says: ‘If anything happened to me, he ought to have a picture of me to keep. And I’ve never had a single one made.’ So then she sent me along with a message to the Marquis, and he was never to let you know that it was she had asked him, but could he take her photograph. But when I came back and told her yes, she didn’t want it any longer, because she was looking so poorly. ‘It would be even worse,’ she says to me, ‘than no photograph at all.’ But she was a clever one, she was, and in the end she got herself up so well in that big pulled-down hat that it didn’t show at all when she was out of the sun. She was so pleased with her photograph, because at that time she didn’t think she would ever leave Balbec alive. It was no use me saying to her: ‘Madame, it’s wrong to talk like that, I don’t like to hear Madame talk like that,’ she’d got it into her head. And, lord, there were plenty of days when she couldn’t eat a thing. That was why she used to make Monsieur go and dine far out in the country with M. le Marquis. Then instead of going to table she’d pretend to be reading a book, and as soon as the Marquis’s carriage had started, up she’d go to bed. Some days she wanted to send word to Madame to come down so’s she could see her once more. And then she was afraid of alarming her, as she hadn’t said anything to her about it. ‘It will be better for her to stay with her husband, don’t you see, Françoise.’ ” Looking me in the face, Françoise asked me all of a sudden if I was “feeling queer.” I said that I was not; and she went on: “Here you are keeping me tied up chatting with you, and perhaps your visitor’s already here. I must go down. She’s not the sort of person to have here. Why, a fast one like that, she may be gone again by now. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Oh, nowadays, Mademoiselle Albertine, she’s somebody!” “You are quite wrong, she’s a very respectable person, too good for this place. But go and tell her that I shan’t be able to see her today.”

What compassionate declamations I should have provoked from Françoise if she had seen me cry. I carefully hid myself from her. Otherwise I should have had her sympathy. But I gave her mine. We do not put ourselves sufficiently in the place of these poor maidservants who cannot bear to see us cry, as though crying hurt us; or hurt them, perhaps, for Françoise used to say to me when I was a child: “Don’t cry like that, I don’t like to see you crying like that.” We dislike high-sounding phrases, asseverations, but we are wrong, for in that way we close our hearts to the pathos of country folk, to the legend which the poor serving woman, dismissed, unjustly perhaps, for theft, pale as death, grown suddenly more humble as if it were a crime merely to be accused, unfolds, invoking her father’s honesty, her mother’s principles, her grandmother’s admonitions. It is true that those same servants who cannot bear our tears will have no hesitation in letting us catch pneumonia because the maid downstairs likes draughts and it would not be polite to her to shut the windows. For it is necessary that even those who are right, like Françoise, should be wrong also, so that Justice may be made an impossible thing. Even the humble pleasures of servants provoke either the refusal or the ridicule of their masters. For it is always a mere nothing, but foolishly sentimental, unhygienic. And so they are in a position to say: “I only ask for this one thing in the whole year, and I’m not allowed it.” And yet their masters would allow them far more, provided it was not stupid and dangerous for them—or for the masters themselves. To be sure, the humility of the wretched maid, trembling, ready to confess the crime that she has not committed, saying “I shall leave tonight if you wish,” is a thing that nobody can resist. But we must learn also not to remain unmoved, despite the solemn and threatening banality of the things that she says, her maternal heritage and the dignity of the family “kaleyard,” at the sight of an old cook draped in the honour of her life and of her ancestry, wielding her broom like a sceptre, putting on a tragic act, her voice broken with sobs, drawing herself up majestically. That afternoon, I remembered or imagined scenes of this sort which I associated with our old servant, and from then onwards, in spite of all the harm that she might do to Albertine, I loved Françoise with an affection, intermittent it is true, but of the strongest kind, the kind that is founded upon pity.