In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (18 page)

During those minutes in which Gilberte, having gone to 'get ready,'
was not in the room with us, M. and Mme. Swann would take delight in
revealing to me all the rare virtues of their child. And everything
that I myself observed seemed to prove the truth of what they said. I
remarked that, as her mother had told me, she had not only for her
friends but for the servants, for the poor, the most delicate
attentions carefully thought out, a desire to give pleasure, a fear of
causing annoyance, translated into all sorts of trifling actions which
must often have meant great inconvenience to her. She had done some
'work' for our stall–keeper in the Champs–Elysées, and went out in the
snow to give it to her with her own hands, so as not to lose a day.
"You have no idea how kind–hearted she is, she won't let it be seen,"
her father assured me. Young as she was, she appeared far more
sensible already than her parents. When Swann boasted of his wife's
grand friends Gilberte would turn away, and remain silent, but without
any air of reproaching him, for it seemed inconceivable to her that
her father could be subjected to the slightest criticism. One day,
when I had spoken to her of Mlle. Vinteuil, she said to me:

"I shall never know her, for a very good reason, and that is that she
was not nice to her father, by what one hears, she gave him a lot of
trouble. You can't understand that any more than I, can you; I'm sure
you could no more live without your papa than I could, which is quite
natural after all. How can one ever forget a person one has loved all
one's life?"

And once when she was making herself particularly endearing to Swann,
as I mentioned this to her when he was out of the room:

"Yes, poor Papa, it is the anniversary of his father's death, just
now. You can understand what he must be feeling; you do understand,
don't you; you and I feel the same about things like that. So I just
try to be a little less naughty than usual." "But he doesn't ever
think you naughty. He thinks you're quite perfect." "Poor Papa,
that's because he's far too good himself."

But her parents were not content with singing the praises of
Gilberte—that same Gilberte, who, even, before I had set eyes on her,
used to appear to me standing before a church, in a landscape of the
He de France, and later, awakening in me not dreams now but memories,
was embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane
that I took when I was going the Méséglise way. Once when I had asked
Mme. Swann (and had made an effort to assume the indifferent tone of a
friend of the family, curious to know the preferences of a child),
which among all her playmates Gilberte liked the best, Mme. Swann
replied: "But you ought to know a great deal better than I do. You are
in her confidence, her great favourite, her 'chum,' as the English
say."

It appears that in a coincidence as perfect as this was, when reality
is folded over to cover the ideal of which we have so long been
dreaming, it completely hides that ideal, absorbing it in itself, as
when two geometrical figures that are congruent are made to coincide,
so that there is but one, whereas we would rather, so as to give its
full significance to our enjoyment, preserve for all those separate
points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in
touching them, and so as to be quite certain that they are indeed
themselves, the distinction of being intangible. And our thought
cannot even reconstruct the old state so as to confront the new with
it, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance that we have
made, the memory of those first, unhoped–for moments, the talk to
which we have listened are there now to block the passage of our
consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more
than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past,
which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into
account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future. I had been
able to believe, year after year, that the right to visit Mme. Swann
was a vague and fantastic privilege to which I should never attain;
after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing–room, it was the
period in which I did not yet know her that was become fantastic and
vague like a possibility which the realisation of an alternative
possibility has made impossible. How was I ever to dream again of her
dining–room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not make the
least movement in my mind without crossing the path of that
inextinguishable ray cast backwards to infinity, even into my own most
distant past, by the lobster
à l'Américaine
which I had just been
eating? And Swann must have observed in his own case a similar
phenomenon; for this house in which he entertained me might be
regarded as the place into which had flowed, to coincide and be lost
in one another, not only the ideal dwelling that my imagination had
constructed, but another still, that which his jealous love, as
inventive as any fantasy of mine, had so often depicted to him, that
dwelling common to Odette and himself which had appeared so
inaccessible once, on evenings when Odette had taken him home with
Forcheville to drink orangeade with her; and what had flowed in to be
absorbed, for him, in the walls and furniture of the dining–room in
which we now sat down to luncheon was that unhoped–for paradise in
which, in the old days, he could not without a pang imagine that he
would one day be saying to
their
butler those very words, "Is Madame
ready yet?" which I now heard him utter with a touch of impatience
mingled with self–satisfaction. No more than, probably, Swann himself
could I succeed in knowing my own happiness, and when Gilberte once
broke out: "Who would ever have said that the little girl you watched
playing prisoners' base, without daring to speak to her, would one day
be your greatest friend, and you would go to her house whenever you
liked?" she spoke of a change the occurrence of which I could verify
only by observing it from without, finding no trace of it within
myself, for it was composed of two separate states on both of which I
could not, without their ceasing to be distinct from one another,
succeed in keeping my thoughts fixed at one and the same time.

And yet this house, because it had been so passionately desired by
Swann, must have kept for him some of its attraction, if I was to
judge by myself for whom it had not lost all its mystery. That
singular charm in which I had for so long supposed the life of the
Swanns to be bathed I had not completely exorcised from their house on
making my own way into it; I had made it, that charm, recoil,
overpowered as it must be by the sight of the stranger, the pariah
that I had been, to whom now Mme. Swann pushed forward graciously for
him to sit in it an armchair exquisite, hostile, scandalised; but all
round me that charm, in my memory, I can still distinguish. Is it
because, on those days on which M. and Mme. Swann invited me to
luncheon, to go out afterwards with them and Gilberte, I imprinted
with my gaze,—while I sat waiting for them there alone—on the
carpet, the sofas, the tables, the screens, the pictures, the idea
engraved upon my mind that Mme. Swann, or her husband, or Gilberte was
about to enter the room? Is it because those objects have dwelt ever
since in my memory side by side with the Swanns, and have gradually
acquired something of their personal character? Is it because, knowing
that the Swanns passed their existence among all those things, I made
of all of them as it were emblems of the private lives, of those
habits of the Swanns from which I had too long been excluded for them
not to continue to appear strange to me, even when I was allowed the
privilege of sharing in them? However it may be, always when I think
of that drawing–room which Swann (not that the criticism implied on
his part any intention to find fault with his wife's taste) found so
incongruous—because, while it was still planned and carried out in
the style, half conservatory, half studio, which had been that of the
rooms in which he had first known Odette, she had, none the less,
begun to replace in its medley a quantity of the Chinese ornaments,
which she now felt to be rather gimcrack, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm
of little chairs and stools and things upholstered in old Louis XIV
silks; not to mention the works of art brought by Swann himself from
his house on the Quai d'Orléans—it has kept in my memory, on the
contrary, that composite, heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an
individual charm never possessed even by the most complete, the least
spoiled of such collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the
most modern, alive and stamped with the imprint of a living
personality; for we alone can, by our belief that they have an
existence of their own, give to certain of the things that we see a
soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds. All
the ideas that I had formed of the hours, different from those that
exist for other men, passed by the Swanns in that house which was to
their life what the body is to the soul, and must give expression to
its singularity, all those ideas were rearranged, amalgamated—equally
disturbing and indefinite throughout—in the arrangement of the
furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the position of the windows,
the ministrations of the servants. When, after luncheon, we went in
the sunshine to drink our coffee in the great bay window of the
drawing–room, while Mme. Swann was asking me how many lumps of sugar I
took, it was not only the silk–covered stool which she pushed towards
me that emitted, with the agonising charm that I had long ago
felt—first among the pink hawthorn and then beside the clump of
laurels—in the name of Gilberte, the hostility that her parents had
shewn to me, which this little piece of furniture seemed to have so
well understood, to have so completely shared that I felt myself
unworthy, and found myself almost reluctant to set my feet on its
defenceless cushion; a personality, a soul was latent there which
linked it secretly to the light of two o'clock in the afternoon, so
different from any other light, in the gulf in which there played
about our feet its sparkling tide of gold out of which the bluish
crags of sofas and vaporous carpet beaches emerged like enchanted
islands; and there was nothing, even to the painting by Rubens hung
above the chimney–piece, that was not endowed with the same quality
and almost the same intensity of charm as the laced boots of M. Swann,
and that hooded cape, the like of which I had so dearly longed to
wear, whereas now Odette would beg her husband to go and put on
another, so as to appear more smart, whenever I did them the honour of
driving out with them. She too went away to change her dress—not
heeding my protestations that no 'outdoor' clothes could be nearly so
becoming as the marvellous garment of
crêpe–de–Chine
or silk, old
rose, cherry–coloured, Tiepolo pink, white, mauve, green, red or
yellow, plain or patterned, in which Mme. Swann had sat down to
luncheon and which she was now going to take off. When I assured her
that she ought to go out in that costume, she laughed, either in scorn
of my ignorance or from delight in my compliment. She apologised for
having so many wrappers, explaining that they were the only kind of
dress in which she felt comfortable, and left us, to go and array
herself in one of those regal toilets which imposed their majesty on
all beholders, and yet among which I was sometimes summoned to decide
which of them I preferred that she should put on.

In the Jardin d'Acclimatation, how proud I was when we had left the
carriage to be walking by the side of Mme. Swann! While she strolled
carelessly on, letting her cloak stream on the air behind her, I kept
eyeing her with an admiring gaze to which she coquettishly responded
in a lingering smile. And now, were we to meet one or other of
Gilberte's friends, boy or girl, who saluted us from afar, I would in
my turn be looked upon by them as one of those happy creatures whose
lot I had envied, one of those friends of Gilberte who knew her family
and had a share in that other part of her life, the part which was not
spent in the Champs–Elysées.

Often upon the paths of the Bois or the Jardin we passed, we were
greeted by some great lady who was Swann's friend, whom he perchance
did not see, so that his wife must rally him with a "Charles! Don't
you see Mme. de Montmorency?" And Swann, with that amicable smile,
bred of a long and intimate friendship, bared his head, but with a
slow sweeping gesture, with a grace peculiarly his own. Sometimes the
lady would stop, glad of an opportunity to shew Mme. Swann a courtesy
which would involve no tiresome consequences, by which they all knew
that she would never seek to profit, so thoroughly had Swann trained
her in reserve. She had none the less acquired all the manners of
polite society, and however smart, however stately the lady might be,
Mme. Swann was invariably a match for her; halting for a moment before
the friend whom her husband had recognised and was addressing, she
would introduce us, Gilberte and myself, with so much ease of manner,
would remain so free, so tranquil in her exercise of courtesy, that it
would have been hard to say, looking at them both, which of the two
was the aristocrat. The day on which we went to inspect the Cingalese,
on our way home we saw coming in our direction, and followed by two
others who seemed to be acting as her escort, an elderly but still
attractive woman cloaked in a dark mantle and capped with a little
bonnet tied beneath her chin with a pair of ribbons. "Ah! Here is
someone who will interest you!" said Swann. The old lady, who had come
within a few yards of us, now smiled at us with a caressing sweetness.
Swann doffed his hat. Mme. Swann swept to the ground in a curtsey and
made as if to kiss the hand of the lady, who, standing there like a
Winterhalter portrait, drew her up again and kissed her cheek. "There,
there; will you put your hat on, you!" she scolded Swann in a thick
and almost growling voice, speaking like an old and familiar friend.
"I am going to present you to Her Imperial Highness," Mme. Swann
whispered. Swann drew me aside for a moment while his wife talked of
the weather and of the animals recently added to the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, with the Princess. "That is the Princesse Mathilde,"
he told me; "you know who' I mean, the friend of Flaubert,
Sainte–Beuve, Dumas. Just fancy, she's the niece of Napoleon I. She
had offers of marriage from Napoleon III and the Emperor of Russia.
Isn't that interesting? Talk to her a little. But I hope she won't
keep us standing here for an hour!…I met Taine the other day," he
went on, addressing the Princess, "and he told me that your Highness
was vexed with him." "He's behaved like a perfect peeg!" she said
gruffly, pronouncing the word
cochon
as though she referred to Joan
of Arc's contemporary, Bishop Cauchon. "After his article on the
Emperor I left my card on him with p. p. c. on it." I felt the
surprise that one feels on opening the Correspondence of that Duchesse
d'Orléans who was by birth a Princess Palatine. And indeed Princesse
Mathilde, animated by sentiments so entirely French, expressed them
with a straightforward bluntness that recalled the Germany of an older
generation, and was inherited, doubtless, from her Wurtemberg
mother. This somewhat rude and almost masculine frankness she
softened, as soon as she began to smile, with an Italian languor. And
the whole person was clothed in a dress so typically 'Second Empire'
that—for all that the Princess wore it simply and solely, no doubt,
from attachment to the fashions that she had loved when she was
young—she seemed to have deliberately planned to avoid the slightest
discrepancy in historic colour, and to be satisfying the expectations
of those who looked to her to evoke the memory of another age. I
whispered to Swann to ask her whether she had known Musset. "Very
slightly, sir," was the answer, given in a tone which seemed to feign
annoyance at the question, and of course it was by way of a joke that
she called Swann 'Sir,' since they were intimate friends. "I had him
to dine once. I had invited him for seven o'clock. At half–past
seven, as he had not appeared, we sat down to dinner. He arrived at
eight, bowed to me, took his seat, never opened his lips, went off
after dinner without letting me hear the sound of his voice. Of
course, he was dead drunk. That hardly encouraged me to make another
attempt." We were standing a little way off, Swann and I. "I hope this
little audience is not going to last much longer," he muttered, "the
soles of my feet are hurting. I cannot think why my wife keeps on
making conversation. When we get home it will be she that complains of
being tired, and she knows I simply cannot go on standing like this."
For Mme. Swann, who had had the news from Mme. Bontemps, was in the
course of telling the Princess that the Government, having at last
begun to realise the depth of its depravity, had decided to send her
an invitation to be present on the platform in a few days' time, when
the Tsar Nicholas was to visit the Invalides. But the Princess who, in
spite of appearances, in spite of the character of her circle, which
consisted mainly of artists and literary people, had remained at heart
and shewed herself, whenever she had to take action, the niece of
Napoleon, replied: "Yes, Madame, I received it this morning, and I
sent it back to the Minister, who must have had it by now. I told him
that I had no need of an invitation to go to the Invalides. If the
Government desires my presence there, it will not be on the platform,
it will be in our vault, where the Emperor's tomb is. I have no need
of a card to admit me there. I have my keys. I go in and out when I
choose. The Government has only to let me know whether it wishes me to
be present or not. But if I do go to the Invalides, it will be down
below there or nowhere at all." At that moment we were saluted, Mme.
Swann and I, by a young man who greeted her without stopping, and whom
I was not aware that she knew; it was Bloch. I inquired about him, and
was told that he had been introduced to her by Mme. Bontemps, and that
he was employed in the Minister's secretariat, which was news to me.
Anyhow, she could not have seen him often—or perhaps she had not
cared to utter the name, hardly 'smart' enough for her liking, of
Bloch, for she told me that he was called M. Moreul. I assured her
that she was mistaken, that his name was Bloch. The Princess gathered
up the train that flowed out behind her, while Mme. Swann gazed at it
with admiring eyes. "It is only a fur that the Emperor of Russia sent
me," she explained, "and as I have just been to see him I put it on,
so as to shew him that I'd managed to have it made up as a mantle." "I
hear that Prince Louis has joined the Russian Army; the Princess will
be very sad at losing him," went on Mme. Swann, not noticing her
husband's signals of distress. "That was a fine thing to do. As I
said to him, 'Just because there's been a soldier, before, in the
family, that's no reason!'" replied the Princess, alluding with this
abrupt simplicity to Napoleon the Great. But Swann could hold out no
longer. "Ma'am, it is I that am going to play the Prince, and ask your
permission to retire; but, you see, my wife has not been so well, and
I do not like her to stand still for any time." Mme. Swann curtseyed
again, and the Princess conferred upon us all a celestial smile, which
she seemed to have summoned out of the past, from among the graces of
her girlhood, from the evenings at Compiègne, a smile which glided,
sweet and unbroken, over her hitherto so sullen face; then she went on
her way, followed by the two ladies in waiting, who had confined
themselves, in the manner of interpreters, of children's or invalids'
nurses, to punctuating our conversation with insignificant sentences
and superfluous explanations. "You should go and write your name in
her book, one day this week," Mme. Swann counselled me. "One doesn't
leave cards upon these 'Royalties,' as the English call them, but she
will invite you to her house if you put your name down."