The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (157 page)

To return to the problem of sound, we have only to thicken the wads which close the aural passages, and they confine to a pianissimo the girl who has been playing a boisterous tune overhead; if we go further, and steep one of these wads in grease, at once the whole household must obey its despotic rule; its laws extend even beyond our portals. Pianissimo is no longer enough; the wad instantly closes the piano and the music lesson is abruptly ended; the gentleman who was walking up and down in the room above breaks off in the middle of his beat; the movement of carriages and trams is interrupted as though a sovereign were expected to pass. And indeed this attenuation of sounds sometimes disturbs our sleep instead of protecting it. Only yesterday the incessant noise in our ears, by describing to us in a continuous narrative all that was happening in the street and in the house, succeeded at length in sending us to sleep like a boring book; today, on the surface of silence spread over our sleep, a shock louder than the rest manages to make itself heard, gentle as a sigh, unrelated to any other sound, mysterious; and the demand for an explanation which it exhales is sufficient to awaken us. On the other hand, take away for a moment from the sick man the cotton-wool that has been stopping his ears and in a flash the broad daylight, the dazzling sun of sound dawns afresh, blinding him, is born again in the universe; the multitude of exiled sounds comes hastening back; we are present, as though it were the chanting of choirs of angels, at the resurrection of the voice. The empty streets are filled for a moment with the whirr of the swift and recurrent wings of the singing tram-cars. In the bedroom itself the sick man has created, not, like Prometheus, fire, but the sound of fire. And when we increase or reduce the wads of cotton-wool, it is as though we were pressing alternately one and then the other of the two pedals which we have added to the sonority of the outer world.

Only there are also suppressions of sound which are not temporary. The man who has become completely deaf cannot even heat a pan of milk by his bedside without having to keep an eye open to watch, on the tilted lid, for the white hyperborean reflexion, like that of a coming snowstorm, which is the premonitory sign it is wise to obey by cutting off (as the Lord stilled the waves) the electric current; for already the fitfully swelling egg of the boiling milk is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong undulations, puffs out and fills a few drooping sails that had been puckered by the cream, sending a nacreous spinnaker bellying out in the hurricane, until the cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is exorcised in time, will make them all twirl round on themselves and scatter like magnolia petals. But should the sick man not have been quick enough in taking the necessary precautions, presently, his drowned books and watch scarcely emerging from the milky tidal wave, he will be obliged to call the old nurse, who, for all that he is an eminent statesman or a famous writer, will tell him that he has no more sense than a child of five. At other times in the magic chamber, standing inside the closed door, a person who was not there a moment ago will have made his appearance; it is a visitor who has entered unheard, and who merely gesticulates, like a figure in one of those little puppet theatres, so restful for those who have taken a dislike to the spoken tongue. And for this stone-deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he walks now upon an earth become almost an Eden, in which sound has not yet been created. The highest waterfalls unfold for his eyes alone their sheets of crystal, stiller than the glassy sea, pure as the cascades of Paradise. Since sound was for him, before his deafness, the perceptible form which the cause of a movement assumed, objects moved soundlessly now seem to be moved without cause; deprived of the quality of sound, they show a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt, become alight of their own accord. Of their own accord they vanish in the air like the winged monsters of prehistory. In the solitary and neighbourless house of the deaf man, the service which, before his infirmity was complete, was already showing more reserve, was being executed silently, is now carried out, with a sort of surreptitious deftness, by mutes, as at the court of a fairy-tale king. And again as on the stage, the building which the deaf man looks out on from his window—whether barracks, church, or town hall—is only so much scenery. If one day it should fall to the ground, it may emit a cloud of dust and leave visible ruins; but, less substantial even than a palace on the stage, though it has not the same exiguity, it will subside in the magic universe without letting the fall of its heavy blocks of stone tarnish the chastity of the prevailing silence with the vulgarity of noise.

The silence, altogether more relative, which reigned in the little barrack-room where I sat waiting was now broken. The door opened and Saint-Loup rushed in, dropping his monocle.

“Ah, Robert, how comfortable it is here,” I said to him. “How good it would be if one were allowed to dine and sleep here.”

And indeed, had it not been against the regulations, what repose untinged by sadness I could have enjoyed there, guarded by that atmosphere of tranquillity, vigilance and gaiety which was maintained by a thousand ordered and untroubled wills, a thousand carefree minds, in that great community called a barracks where, time having taken the form of action, the sad bell that tolled the hours outside was replaced by the same joyous clarion of those martial calls, the ringing memory of which was kept perpetually alive in the paved streets of the town, like the dust that floats in a sunbeam—a voice sure of being heard, and musical because it was the command not only of authority to obedience but of wisdom to happiness.

“So you’d rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.

“Oh, Robert, it’s cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I answered. “You know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched I shall be over there.”

“Well, you flatter me!” he replied. “Because it actually occurred to me that you’d rather stay here tonight. And that is precisely what I went to ask the Captain.”

“And he has given you leave?” I cried.

“He hadn’t the slightest objection.”

“Oh! I adore him!”

“No, that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold of my batman and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on, while I turned away to hide my tears.

We were several times interrupted by the entry of one or other of Saint-Loup’s comrades. He drove them all out again.

“Get out of here. Buzz off!”

I begged him to let them stay.

“No, really, they would bore you stiff. They’re absolutely uncouth people who can talk of nothing but racing or stable shop. Besides, I don’t want them here either; they would spoil these precious moments I’ve been looking forward to. Mind you, when I tell you that these fellows are brainless, it isn’t that everything military is devoid of intellectuality. Far from it. We have a major here who’s an admirable man. He’s given us a course in which military history is treated like a demonstration, like a problem in algebra. Even from the aesthetic point of view there’s a curious beauty, alternately inductive and deductive, about it which you couldn’t fail to appreciate.”

“That’s not the officer who’s given me leave to stay here tonight?”

“No, thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a service is the biggest fool that ever walked the face of the earth. He’s perfect at looking after messing, and at kit inspections; he spends hours with the senior sergeant and the master tailor. There you have his mentality. Besides, he has a vast contempt, like everyone here, for the excellent major in question, whom no one speaks to because he’s a freemason and doesn’t go to confession. The Prince de Borodino would never have an outsider like that in his house. Which is pretty fair cheek, when all’s said and done, from a man whose great-grandfather was a small farmer, and who would probably be a small farmer himself if it hadn’t been for the Napoleonic wars. Not that he isn’t a little aware of his own rather ambiguous position in society, neither flesh nor fowl. He hardly ever shows his face at the Jockey, it makes him feel so deuced awkward, this so-called Prince,” added Robert, who, having been led by the same spirit of imitation to adopt the social theories of his teachers and the worldly prejudices of his relatives, unconsciously combined a democratic love of humanity with a contempt for the nobility of the Empire.

I looked at the photograph of his aunt, and the thought that, since Saint-Loup had this photograph in his possession, he might perhaps give it to me, made me cherish him all the more and long to do him a thousand services, which seemed to me a very small exchange for it. For this photograph was like a supplementary encounter added to all those that I had already had with Mme de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by a sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my leisure at that rounded cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of memory); and the contemplation of them, as well as of the bare throat and arms of a woman whom I had never seen save in a high-necked and long-sleeved dress, was to me a voluptuous discovery, a priceless favour. Those forms, which had seemed to me almost a forbidden spectacle, I could study there as in a text-book of the only geometry that had any value for me. Later on, looking at Robert, it struck me that he too was a little like the photograph of his aunt, by a mysterious process which I found almost as moving, since, if his face had not been directly produced by hers, the two had nevertheless a common origin. The features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, which were pinned to my vision of Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes, seemed to have served also as a pattern for the cutting out—in another copy analogous and slender, with too delicate a skin—of Robert’s face, which might almost be superimposed upon his aunt’s. I looked longingly at those features of his so characteristic of the Guermantes, of that race which had remained so individual in the midst of a world in which it remained isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seemed to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess with a bird.

Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by my evident affection. This was moreover increased by the sense of well-being inspired in me by the heat of the fire and by the champagne which simultaneously bedewed my forehead with beads of sweat and my eyes with tears; it washed down some young partridges which I ate with the wonderment of a layman, of whatever sort he may be, who finds in a way of life with which he is not familiar what he has supposed it to exclude—the wonderment, for instance, of an atheist who sits down to an exquisitely cooked dinner in a presbytery. And next morning, when I awoke, I went over to Saint-Loup’s window, which being at a great height overlooked the whole countryside, curious to make the acquaintance of my new neighbour, the landscape which I had not been able to see the day before, having arrived too late, at an hour when it was already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak of night. And yet, early as it had awoken, I could see it, when I opened the window and looked out, only as though from the window of a country house overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its soft white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make out anything at all. But I knew that, before the troopers who were busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them, it would have cast its gown aside. In the meantime, I could see only a bare hill, raising its lean and rugged flanks, already swept clear of darkness, over the back of the barracks. Through the translucent screen of hoar-frost I could not take my eyes from this stranger who was looking at me too for the first time. But when I had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say scarcely believing any longer in their existence, caused its reflected form, even without my realising it, to be silhouetted against the slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first morning, the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of chocolate, prepared by Saint-Loup’s batman in this comfortable room, which seemed like a sort of optical centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of doing anything else but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it, being rendered impossible by this same mist. Imbued with the shape of the hill, associated with the taste of hot chocolate and with the whole web of my fancies at that particular time, this mist, without my having given it the least thought, came to infuse all my thoughts of that time, just as a massive and unmelting lump of gold had remained allied to my impressions of Balbec, or as the proximity of the outside steps of sandstone gave a greyish background to my impressions of Combray. It did not, however, persist late into the day; the sun began by hurling at it in vain a few darts which sprinkled it with brilliants, then finally overcame it. The hill might expose its grizzled rump to the sun’s rays, which, an hour later, when I went into the town, gave to the russet tints of the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues of the election posters pasted on the walls, an exaltation which raised my spirits also and made me stamp, singing as I went, on the paving-stones from which I could hardly keep myself from jumping in the air for joy.

But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel. And I knew beforehand that I was doomed to find sadness there. It was like an unbreathable aroma which all my life long had been exhaled for me by every new bedroom, that is to say by every bedroom—for in the one which I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained elsewhere and sent mere Habit to take its place. But I could not employ this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look after things for me in a new place, where I preceded him, where I arrived alone, where I must bring into contact with its environment that “Self” which I rediscovered only at year-long intervals, but always the same, not having grown at all since Combray, since my first arrival at Balbec, weeping inconsolably on the edge of an unpacked trunk.