The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (151 page)

“Then you won’t be going down to Guermantes Castle this year?”

“It’s the first time we shan’t be going there: it’s because of Monsieur le Duc’s rheumatics, the doctor says he’s not to go there till the radiators are in, but we’ve been there every year till now, right on to January. If the radiators aren’t ready, perhaps Madame will go for a few days to Cannes to the Duchesse de Guise, but nothing’s settled yet.”

“And do you ever go to the theatre?”

“We go now and then to the Opéra, usually on the evenings when the Princesse de Parme has her box, that’s once a week. It seems it’s a fine show they give there, plays, operas, everything. Madame refused to rent a box herself, but we go all the same to the boxes Madame’s friends take, now one, now another, often the Princesse de Guermantes, the Duke’s cousin’s lady. She’s sister to the Duke of Bavaria … And so you’ve got to run upstairs again now, have you?” went on the footman, who, though identified with the Guermantes, looked upon “masters” in general as a political estate, a view which allowed him to treat Françoise with as much respect as if she too were in service with a duchess. “You enjoy good health, ma’am.”

“Oh, if it wasn’t for these cursed legs of mine! On the plain I can still get along” (“on the plain” meant in the courtyard or in the streets, where Françoise was not averse from walking, in other words on flat ground), “but it’s these confounded stairs. Good day to you. Perhaps we’ll meet again this evening.”

She was all the more anxious to continue her conversations with the footman after learning from him that the sons of dukes often bore a princely title which they retained until their fathers were dead. Evidently the cult of the nobility, blended with and accommodating itself to a certain spirit of revolt against it, must, springing hereditarily from the soil of France, be very strongly implanted still in her people. For Françoise, to whom you might speak of the genius of Napoleon or of wireless telegraphy without succeeding in attracting her attention, and without her pausing for a moment in the job she was doing, whether clearing the grate or laying the table, if she learnt of these peculiarities and that the younger son of the Duc de Guermantes was generally called the Prince d’Oléron, would exclaim: “Now isn’t that nice!” and stand there bemused, as though in front of a stained-glass window.

Françoise learned also from the Prince d’Agrigente’s valet, who had become friends with her by often calling round with notes for the Duchess, that he had been hearing a great deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle d’Ambresac, and that it was practically settled.

That villa, that opera-box, into which Mme de Guermantes transfused the current of her life, must, it seemed to me, be places no less magical than her home. The names of Guise, of Parme, of Guermantes-Bavière, differentiated from all possible others the holiday places to which the Duchess resorted, the daily festivities which the track of her carriage wheels linked to her mansion. If they told me that the life of Mme de Guermantes consisted of a succession of such holidays and such festivities, they brought no further light to bear on it. Each of them gave to the life of the Duchess a different determination, but merely brought it a change of mystery without allowing any of its own mystery to evaporate, so that it simply floated, protected by a watertight covering, enclosed in a bell, amid the waves of others’ lives. The Duchess might have lunch on the shore of the Mediterranean at Carnival time, but in the villa of Mme de Guise, where the queen of Parisian society was no more, in her white piqué dress, among numberless princesses, than a guest like any other, and on that account more moving still to me, more herself by being thus made new, like a star of the ballet who in the intricacies of a dance figure takes the place of each of her humbler sisters in succession; she might look at shadow-theatre shows, but at a party given by the Princesse de Parme; listen to tragedy or opera, but from the Princesse de Guermantes’s box.

Since we localise in the body of a person all the potentialities of his or her life, the memory of the people he or she knows and has just left or is on the way to join, if, having learned from Françoise that Mme de Guermantes was going on foot to luncheon with the Princesse de Parme, I saw her emerge from the house about midday in a gown of flesh-coloured satin above which her face was of the same shade, like a cloud at sunset, it was all the pleasures of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that I saw before me, contained in that small compass, as though between the glossy pearl-pink valves of a shell.

My father had a friend at the Ministry, one A. J. Moreau, who, to distinguish himself from the other Moreaus, took care always to prefix his name with these two initials, with the result that people called him “A.J.” for short. For some reason or other, this A.J. found himself in possession of a stall for a gala night at the Opéra. He sent the ticket to my father, and since Berma, whom I had not seen again since my first disappointment, was to give an act of
Phèdre
, my grandmother persuaded my father to pass it on to me.

Truth to tell, I set little store by this opportunity of seeing and hearing Berma which, a few years earlier, had plunged me into such a state of agitation. And it was not without a sense of melancholy that I registered to myself my indifference to what at one time I had put before health, comfort, everything. It was not that there had been any diminution in my desire to be able to contemplate at first hand the precious particles of reality which my imagination envisioned. But it no longer located them in the diction of a great actress; since my visits to Elstir, it was on to certain tapestries, certain modern paintings that I had transferred the inner faith I had once had in the acting, the tragic art of Berma; my faith and my desire no longer coming forward to pay incessant worship to the diction and the presence of Berma, the “double” that I possessed of them in my heart had gradually shrivelled, like those other “doubles” of the dead in ancient Egypt which had to be fed continually in order to maintain their originals in eternal life. That art had become a poor and pitiable thing. It was no longer inhabited by a deep-rooted soul.

That evening, as, armed with the ticket my father had received from his friend, I was climbing the grand staircase of the Opéra, I saw in front of me a man whom I took at first for M. de Charlus, whose bearing he had; when he turned his head to ask some question of an attendant I saw that I had been mistaken, but I nevertheless had no hesitation in placing the stranger in the same class of society, from the way not only in which he was dressed but in which he spoke to the man who took the tickets and to the box-openers who were keeping him waiting. For, apart from individual characteristics, there was still at this period a very marked difference between any rich and well-dressed man of that section of the aristocracy and any rich and well-dressed man of the world of finance or “big business.” Where one of the latter would have thought he was giving proof of his exclusiveness by adopting a sharp and haughty tone in speaking to an inferior, the nobleman, affable and mild, gave the impression of considering, of practising an affectation of humility and patience, a pretence of being just an ordinary member of the audience, as a prerogative of his good breeding. It is probable that on seeing him thus dissemble behind a smile overflowing with good nature the inaccessible threshold of the little world apart which he carried in his person, more than one wealthy banker’s son, entering the theatre at that moment, would have taken this nobleman for a person of humble condition if he had not remarked in him an astonishing resemblance to the portrait that had recently appeared in the illustrated papers of a nephew of the Austrian Emperor, the Prince of Saxony, who happened to be in Paris at the time. I knew him to be a great friend of the Guermantes. As I myself reached the ticket attendant I heard the Prince of Saxony (or his double) say with a smile: “I don’t know the number. My cousin told me I had only to ask for her box.”

He may well have been the Prince of Saxony; it was perhaps the Duchesse de Guermantes (whom, in that event, I should be able to watch in the process of living one of the moments of her unimaginable life in her cousin’s box) that he saw in his mind’s eye when he referred to “my cousin who told me I had only to ask for her box,” so much so that that distinctive smiling gaze and those so simple words caressed my heart (far more than any abstract reverie would have done) with the alternative antennae of a possible happiness and a vague glamour. At least, in uttering this sentence to the attendant, he grafted on to a commonplace evening in my everyday life a potential entry into a new world; the passage to which he was directed after having spoken the word “box” and along which he now proceeded was moist and fissured and seemed to lead to subaqueous grottoes, to the mythological kingdom of the water-nymphs. I had before me a gentleman in evening dress who was walking away from me, but I kept playing upon and around him, as with a badly fitting projector, without ever succeeding in focusing it on him exactly, the idea that he was the Prince of Saxony and was on his way to join the Duchesse de Guermantes. And for all that he was alone, that idea, external to himself, impalpable, immense, unsteady as a searchlight beam, seemed to precede and guide him like that deity, invisible to the rest of mankind, who stands beside the Greek warrior in the hour of battle.

I took my seat, trying to recapture a line from
Phèdre
which I could not quite remember. In the form in which I repeated it to myself it did not have the right number of feet, but as I made no attempt to count them, between its unwieldiness and a classical line of poetry it seemed as though no common measure could exist. It would not have surprised me to learn that I must subtract at least half a dozen syllables from that portentous phrase to reduce it to alexandrine dimensions. But suddenly I remembered it, the irremediable asperities of an inhuman world vanished as if by magic; the syllables of the line at once filled up the requisite measure, and what there was in excess floated off with the ease, the dexterity of a bubble of air that rises to burst on the surface of the water. And, after all, this excrescence with which I had been struggling consisted of only a single foot.

A certain number of orchestra stalls had been offered for sale at the box office and bought, out of snobbishness or curiosity, by such as wished to study the appearance of people whom they might not have another opportunity of seeing at close quarters. And it was indeed a fragment of their true social life, ordinarily concealed, that one could examine here in public, for, the Princesse de Parme having herself distributed among her friends the seats in stalls, balconies and boxes, the house was like a drawing-room in which everyone changed places, went to sit here or there, next to friends.

Next to me were some vulgar people who, not knowing the regular seat-holders, were anxious to show that they were capable of identifying them and named them aloud. They went on to remark that these “regulars” behaved there as though they were in their own drawing-rooms, meaning that they paid no attention to what was being played. In fact it was the opposite that took place. A budding genius who has taken a stall in order to see Berma thinks only of not soiling his gloves, of not disturbing, of conciliating the neighbour whom chance has put beside him, of pursuing with an intermittent smile the fleeting glance, and avoiding with apparent want of politeness the intercepted glance, of a person of his acquaintance whom he has discovered in the audience and to whom, after endless indecisions, he makes up his mind to go and talk just as the three knocks from the stage, resounding before he has had time to reach his friend, force him to take flight, like the Hebrews in the Red Sea, through a heaving tide of spectators and spectatresses whom he has forced to rise to their feet and whose dresses he tears and boots he crushes as he passes. On the other hand, it was because the society people sat in their boxes (behind the tiered circle) as in so many little suspended drawing-rooms, the fourth walls of which had been removed, or in so many little cafés to which one might go for refreshment without letting oneself be intimidated by the mirrors in gilt frames or the red plush seats, in the Neapolitan style, of the establishment—it was because they rested an indifferent hand on the gilded shafts of the columns which upheld this temple of the lyric art—it was because they remained unmoved by the extravagant honours which seemed to be being paid them by a pair of carved figures which held out towards the boxes branches of palm and laurel, that they alone would have had the equanimity of mind to listen to the play, if only they had had minds.

At first there were only vague shadows, in which one suddenly caught—like the gleam of a precious stone which one cannot see—the phosphorescence of a pair of famous eyes, or, like a medallion of Henri IV on a dark background, the bent profile of the Duc d’Aumale, to whom an invisible lady was exclaiming “Your Royal Highness must allow me to take his coat,” to which the prince replied, “Oh, come, come! Really, Madame d’Ambresac.” She took it, in spite of this vague demurral, and was envied by one and all for being thus honoured.

But in the other boxes, almost everywhere, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had taken refuge against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they embroidered, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves. Beyond began the orchestra stalls, abode of mortals for ever separated from the sombre and transparent realm to which here and there, in their smooth liquid surface, the limpid, reflecting eyes of the water-goddesses served as frontier. For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced. Within the boundaries of their domain, however, the radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile up at the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or towards some aquatic demi-god whose skull was a polished stone on to which the tide had washed a smooth covering of seaweed, and his gaze a disc of rock crystal. They leaned towards these creatures, offering them sweetmeats; from time to time the flood parted to admit a new nereid who, belated, smiling, apologetic, had just floated into blossom out of the shadowy depths; then, the act ended, having no further hope of hearing the melodious sounds of earth which had drawn them to the surface, plunging back all at once, the several sisters vanished into the night. But of all these retreats to the thresholds of which their frivolous desire to behold the works of man brought the curious goddesses who let none approach them, the most famous was the cube of semi-darkness known to the world as the stage box of the Princesse de Guermantes.