The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (156 page)

I felt that I displeased her by crossing her path every morning; but even if I had had the heart to refrain from doing so for two or three days consecutively, Mme de Guermantes might not have noticed that abstention, which would have represented so great a sacrifice on my part, or might have attributed it to some obstacle beyond my control. And indeed I could not have brought myself to cease to dog her footsteps except by arranging that it should be impossible for me to do so, for the perpetually recurring need to meet her, to be for a moment the object of her attention, the person to whom her greeting was addressed, was stronger than my fear of arousing her displeasure. I should have had to go away for some time; and for that I had not the heart. I did think of it more than once. I would then tell Françoise to pack my boxes, and immediately afterwards to unpack them. (And as the spirit of imitation, the desire not to appear behind the times, alters the most natural and most positive form of oneself, Françoise, borrowing the expression from her daughter’s vocabulary, used to remark that I was “dippy.”) She did not approve of my tergiversations; she said that I was always “balancing,” for when she was not aspiring to rival the moderns, she employed the very language of Saint-Simon. It is true that she liked it still less when I spoke to her authoritatively. She knew that this was not natural to me, and did not suit me, a condition which she expressed in the phrase “where there isn’t a will.” I should never have had the heart to leave Paris except in a direction that would bring me closer to Mme de Guermantes. This was by no means an impossibility. Would I not indeed find myself nearer to her than I was in the morning, in the street, solitary, humiliated, feeling that not a single one of the thoughts which I should have liked to convey to her ever reached her, in that weary marking time of my daily walks, which might go on indefinitely without getting me any further, if I were to go miles away from Mme de Guermantes, but to someone of her acquaintance, someone whom she knew to be particular in the choice of his friends and who appreciated me, who might speak to her about me, and if not obtain from her at least make her aware of what I wanted, someone thanks to whom at all events, simply because I should discuss with him whether or not it would be possible for him to convey this or that message to her, I should give to my solitary and silent meditations a new form, spoken, active, which would seem to me an advance, almost a realisation? What she did during the mysterious daily life of the “Guermantes” that she was—this was the constant object of my thoughts; and to break into that life, even by indirect means, as with a lever, by employing the services of a person who was not excluded from the Duchess’s house, from her parties, from prolonged conversation with her, would not that be a contact more distant but at the same time more effective than my contemplation of her every morning in the street?

The friendship and admiration that Saint-Loup had shown me seemed to me undeserved and had hitherto left me unmoved. All at once I set great store by them; I would have liked him to disclose them to Mme de Guermantes, was quite prepared even to ask him to do so. For when we are in love, we long to be able to divulge to the woman we love all the little privileges we enjoy, as the deprived and the tiresome do in everyday life. We are distressed by her ignorance of them and we seek to console ourselves with the thought that precisely because they are never visible she has perhaps added to the opinion which she already has of us this possibility of further undisclosed virtues.

Saint-Loup had not for a long time been able to come to Paris, either, as he himself claimed, because of his military duties, or, as was more likely, because of the trouble he was having with his mistress, with whom he had twice now been on the point of breaking off. He had often told me what a pleasure it would be to him if I came to visit him in that garrison town the name of which, a couple of days after his leaving Balbec, had caused me so much joy when I had read it on the envelope of the first letter I had received from my friend. Not so far from Balbec as its wholly inland surroundings might have led one to think, it was one of those little fortified towns, aristocratic and military, set in a broad expanse of country over which on fine days there floats so often in the distance a sort of intermittent blur of sound which—as a screen of poplars by its sinuosities outlines the course of a river which one cannot see—indicates the movements of a regiment on manoeuvre that the very atmosphere of its streets, avenues and squares has been gradually tuned to a sort of perpetual vibrancy, musical and martial, and the most commonplace sound of cartwheel or tramway is prolonged in vague trumpet calls, indefinitely repeated, to the hallucinated ear, by the silence. It was not too far away from Paris for me to be able, if I took the express, to return to my mother and grandmother and sleep in my own bed. As soon as I realised this, troubled by a painful longing, I had too little will-power to decide not to return to Paris but rather to stay in the little town; but also too little to prevent a porter from carrying my luggage to a cab and not to adopt, as I walked behind him, the destitute soul of a traveller looking after his belongings with no grandmother in attendance, not to get into the carriage with the complete detachment of a person who, having ceased to think of what it is that he wants, has the air of knowing what he wants, and not to give the driver the address of the cavalry barracks. I thought that Saint-Loup might come and sleep that night in the hotel at which I should be staying, in order to make the first shock of contact with this strange town less painful for me. One of the guard went to find him, and I waited at the barracks gate, in front of that huge ship of stone, booming with the November wind, out of which, every moment, for it was now six o’clock, men were emerging in pairs into the street, staggering as if they were coming ashore in some exotic port where they found themselves temporarily anchored.

Saint-Loup appeared, moving like a whirlwind, his monocle spinning in the air before him. I had not given my name, and was eager to enjoy his surprise and delight.

“Oh, what a bore!” he exclaimed, suddenly catching sight of me, and blushing to the tips of his ears. “I’ve just had a week’s leave, and I shan’t be off duty again for another week.”

And, preoccupied by the thought of my having to spend this first night alone, for he knew better than anyone my bed-time agonies, which he had often noticed and soothed at Balbec, he broke off his lamentation to turn and look at me, coax me with little smiles, with tender though unsymmetrical glances, half of them coming directly from his eye, the other half through his monocle, but both sorts alike testifying to the emotion that he felt on seeing me again, testifying also to that important matter which I still did not understand but which now vitally concerned me, our friendship.

“I say, where are you going to sleep? Really, I can’t recommend the hotel where we mess; it’s next to the Exhibition ground, where there’s a show just starting; you’ll find it beastly crowded. No, you’d better go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it’s a little eighteenth-century palace with old tapestries. It’s quite the (
ça fait assez
) ‘old historical dwelling.’ ”

Saint-Loup employed in every connexion the verb
faire
for “have the air of,” because the spoken language, like the written, feels from time to time the need of these alterations in the meanings of words, these refinements of expression. And just as journalists often have not the least idea what school of literature the “turns of phrase” they use originate from, so the vocabulary, the very diction of Saint-Loup were formed in imitation of three different aesthetes none of whom he knew but whose modes of speech had been indirectly inculcated into him. “Besides,” he concluded, “the hotel I mean is more or less adapted to your auditory hyperaesthesia. You will have no neighbours. I quite see that it’s a slender advantage, and as, after all, another guest may arrive tomorrow, it would not be worth your while to choose that particular hotel on such precarious grounds. No, it’s for its appearance that I recommend it. The rooms are rather attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there’s something reassuring about it.” But to me, less of an artist than Saint-Loup, the pleasure that an attractive house might give one was superficial, almost non-existent, and could not calm my incipient anguish, as painful as that which I used to feel long ago at Combray when my mother did not come upstairs to say good night, or that which I felt on the evening of my arrival at Balbec in the room with the unnaturally high ceiling, which smelt of vetiver. Saint-Loup read all this in my fixed stare.

“A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor fellow; you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking to you about tapestries which you won’t even have the heart to look at. I know the room they’ll put you in; personally I find it most cheerful, but I can quite understand that it won’t have the same effect on you with your sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t understand you. I don’t feel the same myself, but I can put myself in your place.”

At that moment a sergeant who was exercising a horse on the square, entirely absorbed in making the animal jump, disregarding the salutes of passing troopers, but hurling volleys of oaths at such as got in his way, turned with a smile to Saint-Loup and, seeing that he had a friend with him, saluted us. But his horse, frothing, at once reared. Saint-Loup flung himself at its head, caught it by the bridle, succeeded in quieting it and returned to my side.

“Yes,” he resumed, “I assure you that I fully understand and sympathise with what you are going through. I feel wretched,” he went on, laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder, “when I think that if I could have stayed with you tonight, I might have been able, by chatting to you till morning, to relieve you of a little of your unhappiness. I could lend you some books, but you won’t want to read if you’re feeling like that. And I shan’t be able to get anyone else to stand in for me here: I’ve done it twice running because my girl came down to see me.”

And he knitted his brows with vexation and also in the effort to decide, like a doctor, what remedy he might best apply to my disease.

“Run along and light the fire in my quarters,” he called to a trooper who passed by. “Hurry up; get a move on!”

Then, once more, he turned towards me, and once more his monocle and his peering, myopic gaze testified to our great friendship.

“No, really, you here, in these barracks where I’ve thought so much about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes, I feel I must be dreaming! But how is your health on the whole? A little better, I hope. You must tell me all about yourself presently. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang about too long on the square, there’s the devil of a wind. I don’t feel it now myself, but you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your catching cold. And what about your work? Have you settled down to it yet? No? You are an odd fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing. What a pity it is that it’s the second-raters like me who are always ready to work, while the ones who could, don’t want to! There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is. Her Proudhon never leaves me.”

A tall, handsome, majestic officer emerged with slow and solemn steps from the foot of a staircase. Saint-Loup saluted him and arrested the perpetual mobility of his body for the time it took him to hold his hand against the peak of his cap. But he had flung himself into the action with such force, straightening himself with so sharp a movement, and, the salute ended, brought his hand down with so abrupt a release, altering all the positions of shoulder, leg and monocle, that this moment was one not so much of immobility as of a vibrant tension in which the excessive movements which he had just made and those on which he was about to embark were neutralised. Meanwhile the officer, without coming any nearer, calm, benevolent, dignified, imperial, representing, in short, the direct opposite of Saint-Loup, also raised his hand, but unhurriedly, to the peak of his cap.

“I must just say a word to the Captain,” whispered Saint-Loup. “Be a good fellow, and go and wait for me in my room. It’s the second on the right, on the third floor. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

And setting off at the double, preceded by his monocle which fluttered in every direction, he made straight for the slow and stately captain whose horse had just been brought round and who, before preparing to mount, was giving orders with a studied nobility of gesture as in some historical painting, and as though he were setting forth to take part in some battle of the First Empire, whereas he was simply going to ride home, to the house which he had taken for the period of his service at Doncières, and which stood in a square that was named, as though in an ironical anticipation of the arrival of this Napoleonid, Place de la République. I started to climb the staircase, nearly slipping on each of its nail-studded steps, catching glimpses of barrack-rooms, their bare walls bordered with a double line of beds and kits. I was shown Saint-Loup’s room. I stood for a moment outside its closed door, for I could hear movement—something stirring, something being dropped. I felt the room was not empty, that there was somebody there. But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning to burn. It could not keep quiet; it kept shifting its logs about, and very clumsily. As I entered the room, it let one roll into the fender and set another smoking. And even when it was not moving, like an ill-bred person it made noises all the time, which, from the moment I saw the flames rising, revealed themselves to me as noises made by a fire, although if I had been on the other side of a wall I should have thought that they came from someone who was blowing his nose and walking about. I sat down in the room and waited. Liberty hangings and old German stuffs of the eighteenth century preserved it from the smell exuded by the rest of the building, a coarse, stale, mouldy smell like that of wholemeal bread. It was here, in this charming room, that I could have dined and slept with a calm and happy mind. Saint-Loup seemed almost to be present in it by reason of the text-books which littered his table, between his photographs, among which I recognised my own and that of the Duchesse de Guermantes, by reason of the fire which had at length grown accustomed to the grate, and, like an animal crouching in an ardent, noiseless, faithful watchfulness, merely let fall now and then a smouldering log which crumbled into sparks, or licked with a tongue of flame the sides of the chimney. I heard the tick of Saint-Loup’s watch, which could not be far away. This tick changed place every moment, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to come from behind, from in front of me, from my right, from my left, sometimes to die away as though it were a long way off. Suddenly I caught sight of the watch on the table. Then I heard the tick in a fixed place from which it did not move again. That is to say, I thought I heard it at this place; I did not hear it there, I saw it there, for sounds have no position in space. At least we associate them with movements, and in that way they serve the purpose of warning us of those movements, of appearing to make them necessary and natural. True, it sometimes happens that a sick man whose ears have been stopped with cotton-wool ceases to hear the noise of a fire such as was crackling at that moment in Saint-Loup’s fireplace, labouring at the formation of brands and cinders, which it then dropped into the fender, nor would he hear the passage of the tram-cars whose music rose at regular intervals over the main square of Doncières. Then, if the sick man reads, the pages will turn silently as though fingered by a god. The ponderous rumble of a bath being filled becomes thin, faint and distant, like a celestial twittering. The withdrawal of sound, its dilution, rob it of all its aggressive power; alarmed a moment ago by hammer-blows which seemed to be shattering the ceiling above our head, we take pleasure now in receiving them, light, caressing, distant, like the murmur of leaves playing by the roadside with the passing breeze. We play games of patience with cards which we do not hear, so much so that we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them, have begun to play with us. And in this connexion we may wonder whether, in the case of love (to which we may even add the love of life and the love of fame, since there are, it appears, persons who are acquainted with these latter sentiments), we shouldn’t act like those who, when a noise disturbs them, instead of praying that it may cease, stop their ears; and, in emulation of them, bring our attention, our defences, to bear on ourselves, give them as an object to subdue not the external being whom we love, but our capacity for suffering through that being.