In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (29 page)

Some days later, at Balbec, while we were in the ballroom of the casino, there entered Bloch’s sister and cousin, who had both turned out extremely pretty, but whom I refrained from greeting on account of my girl friends, because the younger one, the cousin, was notoriously living with the actress whose acquaintance she had made during my first visit. Andrée, at a whispered allusion to this scandal, said to me: “Oh! about that sort of thing I’m like Albertine; there’s nothing we both loathe so much as that sort of thing.” As for Albertine, sitting down to talk to me on the sofa, she had turned her back on the disreputable pair. I had noticed, however, that, before she changed her position, at the moment when Mlle Bloch and her cousin appeared, a look of deep attentiveness had momentarily flitted across her eyes, a look that was wont to impart to the face of this mischievous girl a serious, indeed a solemn air, and left her pensive afterwards. But Albertine had at once turned back towards me a gaze which nevertheless remained strangely still and dreamy. Mlle Bloch and her cousin having finally left the room after laughing very loud and uttering the most unseemly cries, I asked Albertine whether the little fair one (the one who was the friend of the actress) was not the gift who had won the prize the day before in the procession of flowers. “I don’t know,” said Albertine, “is one of them fair? I must confess they don’t interest me particularly, I never looked at them. Is one of them fair?” she asked her friends with a detached air of inquiry. When applied to people whom Albertine passed every day on the front, this ignorance seemed to me too extreme to be entirely genuine. “They didn’t appear to be looking at us much either,” I said to Albertine, perhaps (on the assumption, which I did not however consciously envisage, that Albertine loved her own sex) to free her from any regret by pointing out to her that she had not attracted the attention of these girls and that, generally speaking, it is not customary even for the most depraved of women to take an interest in girls whom they do not know. “They weren’t looking at us?” Albertine replied without thinking. “Why, they did nothing else the whole time.” “But you can’t possibly tell,” I said to her, “you had your back to them.” “Well then, what about that?” she replied, pointing out to me, set in the wall in front of us, a large mirror which I had not noticed and upon which I now realised that my friend, while talking to me, had never ceased to fix her beautiful preoccupied eyes.

From the day when Cottard accompanied me into the little casino at Incarville, although I did not share the opinion that he had expressed, Albertine seemed to me to be different; the sight of her made me angry. I myself had changed, quite as much as she had changed in my eyes. I had ceased to wish her well; to her face, behind her back when there was a chance of my words being repeated to her, I spoke of her in the most wounding terms. There were, however, moments of respite. One day I learned that Albertine and Andrée had both accepted an invitation to Elstir’s. Feeling certain that this was in order that they might, on the return journey, amuse themselves like schoolgirls on holiday by imitating the manners of fast young women, and in so doing find an unmaidenly pleasure the thought of which tormented me, without announcing my intention, to embarrass them and to deprive Albertine of the pleasure on which she was counting, I paid an unexpected call at Elstir’s studio. But I found only Andrée there. Albertine had chosen another day when her aunt was to go there with her. Then I told myself that Cottard must have been mistaken; the favourable impression that I received from Andrée’s presence there without her friend remained with me and made me feel more kindly disposed towards Albertine. But this feeling lasted no longer than the healthy moments of those delicate people who are subject to intermittent recoveries, and are prostrated again by the merest trifle. Albertine incited Andrée to actions which, without going very far, were perhaps not altogether innocent; pained by this suspicion, I would finally succeed in banishing it. No sooner was I cured of it than it revived under another form. I had just seen Andrée, with one of those graceful gestures that came naturally to her, lay her head lovingly on Albertine’s shoulder and kiss her on the neck, half shutting her eyes; or else they had exchanged a glance; or a remark had been made by somebody who had seen them going down together to bathe: little trifles such as habitually float in the surrounding atmosphere where the majority of people absorb them all day long without injury to their health or alteration of their mood, but which have a morbid effect and breed fresh suffering in a nature predisposed to receive them. Sometimes even without my having seen Albertine, without anyone having spoken to me about her, I would suddenly call to mind some memory of her with Gisèle in a posture which had seemed to me innocent at the time but was enough now to destroy the peace of mind that I had managed to recover; I had no longer any need to go and breathe dangerous germs outside—I had, as Cottard would have said, supplied my own toxin. I thought then of all that I had been told about Swann’s love for Odette, of the way in which Swann had been tricked all his life. Indeed, when I come to think of it, the hypothesis that made me gradually build up the whole of Albertine’s character and give a painful interpretation to every moment of a life that I could not control in its entirety, was the memory, the rooted idea of Mme Swann’s character, as it had been described to me. These accounts contributed towards the fact that, in the future, my imagination played with the idea that Albertine might, instead of being the good girl that she was, have had the same immorality, the same capacity for deceit as a former prostitute, and I thought of all the sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me if I had happened to love her.

One day, outside the Grand Hotel, where we were gathered on the front, I had just been addressing Albertine in the harshest, most humiliating language, and Rosemonde was saying: “Ah, how you’ve changed towards her; she used to be the only one who counted, it was she who ruled the roost, and now she isn’t even fit to be thrown to the dogs.” I was proceeding, in order to make my attitude towards Albertine still more marked, to say all the nicest possible things to Andrée, who, if she was tainted with the same vice, seemed to me more excusable since she was sickly and neurasthenic, when we saw Mme de Cambremer’s barouche, drawn by its two horses at a jog-trot, coming into the side street at the corner of which we were standing. The judge, who at that moment was advancing towards us, sprang back upon recognising the carriage, in order not to be seen in our company; then, when he thought that the Marquise’s eye might catch his, bowed to her with an immense sweep of his hat. But the carriage, instead of continuing along the Rue de la Mer as might have been expected, disappeared through the gate of the hotel. It was quite ten minutes later when the liftboy, out of breath, came to announce to me: “It’s the Marquise de Camembert who’s come to see Monsieur. I’ve been up to the room, I looked in the reading-room, I couldn’t find Monsieur anywhere. Luckily I thought of looking on the beach.” He had barely ended his speech when, followed by her daughter-in-law and by an extremely ceremonious gentleman, the Marquise advanced towards me, having probably come on from some tea-party in the neighbourhood, bowed down not so much by age as by the mass of costly trinkets with which she felt it more sociable and more befitting her rank to cover herself, in order to appear as “dressed up” as possible to the people whom she went to visit. It was in fact that “descent” of the Cambremers on the hotel which my grandmother had so greatly dreaded when she wanted us not to let Legrandin know that we might perhaps be going to Balbec. Then Mamma used to laugh at these fears inspired by an event which she considered impossible. And here it was actually happening, but by different channels and without Legrandin’s having had any part in it. “Do you mind my staying here, if I shan’t be in your way?” asked Albertine (in whose eyes there lingered, brought there by the cruel things I had just been saying to her, a few tears which I observed without seeming to see them, but not without rejoicing inwardly at the sight), “there’s something I want to say to you.” A hat with feathers, itself surmounted by a sapphire pin, was perched haphazardly on Mme de Cambremer’s wig, like a badge the display of which was necessary but sufficient, its position immaterial, its elegance conventional and its stability superfluous. Notwithstanding the heat, the good lady had put on a jet-black cloak, like a bishop’s vestment, over which hung an ermine stole the wearing of which seemed to depend not upon the temperature and season, but upon the nature of the ceremony. And on Mme de Cambremer’s bosom a baronial crest, fastened to a chain, dangled like a pectoral cross. The gentleman was an eminent barrister from Paris, of noble family, who had come down to spend a few days with the Cambremers. He was one of those men whose consummate professional experience inclines them to look down upon their profession, and who say, for instance: “I know I plead well, so it no longer amuses me to plead,” or: “I’m no longer interested in operating, because I know I operate well.” Intelligent, “artistic,” they see themselves in their maturity, richly endowed by success, shining with that “intelligence,” that “artistic” nature which their professional brethren acknowledge in them and which confer upon them an approximation of taste and discernment. They develop a passion for the paintings not of a great artist, but of an artist who nevertheless is highly distinguished, and spend upon the purchase of his work the fat incomes that their career procures for them. Le Sidaner was the artist chosen by the Cambremers’ friend, who incidentally was extremely agreeable. He talked well about books, but not about the books of the true masters, those who have mastered themselves. The only irritating defect that this amateur displayed was his constant use of certain ready-made expressions, such as “for the most part,” which gave an air of importance and incompleteness to the matter of which he was speaking. Mme de Cambremer had taken advantage, she told me, of a party which some friends of hers had been giving that afternoon in the Balbec direction to come and call upon me, as she had promised Robert de Saint-Loup. “You know he’s coming down to these parts quite soon for a few days. His uncle Charlus is staying near here with his sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, and M. de Saint-Loup means to take the opportunity of paying his aunt a visit and going to see his old regiment, where he is very popular, highly respected. We often have visits from officers who are never tired of singing his praises. How nice it would be if you and he would give us the pleasure of coming together to Féterne.”

I presented Albertine and her friends. Mme de Cambremer introduced us all to her daughter-in-law. The latter, so frigid towards the petty nobility with whom her seclusion at Féterne forced her to associate, so reserved, so afraid of committing herself, held out her hand to me with a radiant smile, feeling secure and delighted at seeing a friend of Robert de Saint-Loup, whom he, possessing a sharper social intuition than he allowed himself to betray, had mentioned to her as being a great friend of the Guermantes. So, unlike her mother-in-law, the young Mme de Cambremer employed two vastly different forms of politeness. It was at the most the former kind, curt and insufferable, that she would have conceded me had I met her through her brother Legrandin. But for a friend of the Guermantes she had not smiles enough. The most convenient room in the hotel for entertaining visitors was the reading-room, that place once so terrible into which I now went a dozen times every day, emerging freely, my own master, like those mildly afflicted lunatics who have so long been inmates of an asylum that the superintendent trusts them with a latch-key. And so I offered to take Mme de Cambremer there. And as this room no longer filled me with shyness and no longer held any charm for me, since the faces of things change for us like the faces of people, it was without any trepidation that I made this suggestion. But she declined it, preferring to remain out of doors, and we sat down in the open air, on the terrace of the hotel. I found there and rescued a volume of Mme de Sévigné which Mamma had not had time to carry off in her precipitate flight, when she heard that visitors had called for me. No less than my grandmother, she dreaded these invasions of strangers, and, in her fear of being too late to escape if she let herself be cornered, would flee with a rapidity which always made my father and me laugh at her. Mme de Cambremer carried in her hand, together with the handle of a sunshade, a number of embroidered bags, a hold-all, a gold purse from which there dangled strings of garnets, and a lace handkerchief. I could not help thinking that it would be more convenient for her to deposit them on a chair; but I felt that it would be improper and useless to ask her to lay aside the ornaments of her pastoral round and her social ministry. We gazed at the calm sea upon which, here and there, a few gulls floated like white petals. Because of the level of mere “medium” to which social conversation reduces us, and also of our desire to please not by means of those qualities of which we are ourselves unaware but of those which we think likely to be appreciated by the people who are with us, I began instinctively to talk to Mme de Cambremer née Legrandin in the strain in which her brother might have talked. “They have,” I said, referring to the gulls, “the immobility and whiteness of water-lilies.” And indeed they did appear to be offering a lifeless object to the little waves which tossed them about, so much so that the waves, by contrast, seemed in their pursuit of them to be animated by a deliberate intention, to have become imbued with life. The dowager Marquise could not find words enough to do justice to the superb view of the sea that we had from Balbec, and envied me, since from La Raspelière (where in fact she was not living that year), she had only such a distant glimpse of the waves. She had two remarkable habits, due at once to her exalted passion for the arts (especially for music) and to her want of teeth. Whenever she talked of aesthetic subjects her salivary glands—like those of certain animals when in rut—became so overcharged that the old lady’s toothless mouth allowed to trickle from the corners of her faintly mustachioed lips a few drops of misplaced moisture. Immediately she drew it in again with a deep sigh, like a person recovering his breath. Secondly, if some overwhelming musical beauty was at issue, in her enthusiasm she would raise her arms and utter a few summary opinions, vigorously masticated and if necessary issuing from her nose. Now it had never occurred to me that the vulgar beach at Balbec could indeed offer a “seascape,” and Mme de Cambremer’s simple words changed my ideas in that respect. On the other hand, as I told her, I had always heard people praise the matchless view from La Raspelière, perched on the summit of the hill, where, in a great drawing-room with two fireplaces, one whole row of windows swept the gardens and, through the branches of the trees, the sea as far as Balbec and beyond, and another row the valley. “How nice of you to say so, and how well you put it: the sea through the branches. It’s exquisite—reminiscent of . . . a painted fan.” And I gathered, from a deep breath intended to catch the falling spittle and dry the moustaches, that the compliment was sincere. But the Marquise
née
Legrandin remained cold, to show her contempt not for my words but for those of her mother-in-law. Indeed she not only despised the latter’s intellect but deplored her affability, being always afraid that people might not form a sufficiently high idea of the Cambremers.