The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (167 page)

Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of needlework which she will hurriedly put aside if anyone comes in, she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by me. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence—there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to hail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. So it is when some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness. And—like a sick man who, not having looked at his own reflexion for a long time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink protuberance of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt—I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories, suddenly, in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of Time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, an overburdened old woman whom I did not know.

My request to be allowed to inspect the Elstirs in Mme de Guermantes’s collection had been met by Saint-Loup with: “I’ll answer for her.” And indeed, unfortunately, it was he and he alone who did answer. We answer readily enough for other people when, setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate these to suit our fancy. No doubt even then we take into account the difficulties due to another person’s nature being different from our own, and we do not fail to appeal to motives with the power to influence that nature—self-interest, persuasion, emotion—which will neutralise any contrary tendencies. But it is still our own nature which imagines these divergences from our nature; it is we who remove these difficulties; it is we who measure these compelling motives. And when we wish to see the other person perform in real life the actions which in our mind’s eye we have made him rehearse, the case is altered, we come up against unseen resistances which may prove insuperable. One of the strongest is doubtless that which may be developed in a woman who does not love, by the rank and unconquerable repulsion she feels for the man who loves her: during the long weeks in which Saint-Loup still did not come to Paris, his aunt, to whom I had no doubt of his having written begging her to do so, never once asked me to call at her house to see the Elstirs.

I perceived signs of coldness on the part of another occupant of the building. This was Jupien. Did he consider that I ought to have gone in and said good-day to him, on my return from Doncières, before even going upstairs to our own flat? My mother said that it was nothing to be surprised about. Françoise had told her that he was like that, subject to sudden fits of ill-humour, without any cause. These invariably passed off after a while.

Meanwhile the winter was drawing to an end. One morning, after several weeks of showers and storms, I heard in my chimney—instead of the formless, elastic, sombre wind which stirred in me a longing to go to the sea—the cooing of the pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day. That morning, I caught myself humming a music-hall tune which had never entered my head since the year when I had been due to go to Florence and Venice—so profoundly, and so unpredictably, does the atmosphere act on our organism and draw from dim reserves where we had forgotten them the melodies written there which our memory has failed to decipher. Presently a more conscious dreamer accompanied this musician to whom I was listening inside myself, without even having recognised at first what he was playing.

I realised that it was not for any reason peculiar to Balbec that on my arrival there I had failed to find in its church the charm which it had had for me before I knew it; that in Florence or Parma or Venice my imagination could no more take the place of my eyes when I looked at the sights there. I realised this; similarly, one New Year’s evening at nightfall, standing before a column of playbills, I had discovered the illusion that lies in our thinking that certain feast-days differ essentially from the other days in the calendar. And yet I could not prevent my memory of the time during which I had looked forward to spending Easter in Florence from continuing to make that festival the atmosphere, so to speak, of the City of Flowers, to give at once to Easter Day something Florentine and to Florence something paschal. Easter was still a long way off; but in the range of days that stretched out before me the days of Holy Week stood out more clearly at the end of those that came between. Touched by a ray, like certain houses in a village which one sees from a distance when the rest are in shadow, they had caught and kept all the sun.

The weather had now become milder. And my parents themselves, by urging me to take more exercise, gave me an excuse for continuing my morning walks. I had wanted to give them up, since they meant my meeting Mme de Guermantes. But it was for that very reason that I kept thinking all the time of those walks, and this induced me to go on finding fresh reasons for taking them, reasons which had no connexion with Mme de Guermantes and which easily convinced me that, had she never existed, I should still have gone for a walk at that hour every morning.

Alas, if for me meeting any person other than herself would have been a matter of indifference, I felt that, for her, meeting anyone in the world except myself would have been only too endurable. It happened that, in the course of her morning walks, she received the salutations of plenty of fools whom she regarded as such. But the appearance of these in her path seemed to her, if not to hold out any promise of pleasure, to be at any rate the result of mere accident. And she stopped them at times, for there are moments in which one wants to escape from oneself, to accept the hospitality offered by the soul of another, provided always that this soul, however modest and plain it may be, is a different soul, whereas in my heart she felt with exasperation that what she would have found was herself. And so, even when I had another reason for taking the same route than my desire to see her, I trembled like a guilty man as she came past; and sometimes, in order to neutralise what might seem to be excessive in my overtures, I would barely acknowledge her salute, or would stare at her without raising my hat, and succeed only in irritating her even more and making her begin to regard me as insolent and ill-bred besides.

She was now wearing lighter, or at any rate brighter clothes, and would come strolling down the street in which already, as though it were spring, in front of the narrow shops that were squeezed in between the spacious fronts of the old aristocratic mansions, over the booths of the butter-woman and the fruit-woman and the vegetable-woman, awnings were spread to protect them from the sun. I told myself that the woman whom I could see in the distance, walking, opening her sunshade, crossing the street, was, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge, the greatest living exponent of the art of performing those movements and of making of them something exquisite. Meanwhile she advanced towards me, and, unconscious of this widespread reputation, her narrow, refractory body, which had absorbed nothing of it, was arched forward under a scarf of violet silk; her clear, sullen eyes looked absently in front of her, and had perhaps caught sight of me; she was biting the corner of her lip; I watched her adjust her muff, give alms to a beggar, buy a bunch of violets from a flower-seller, with the same curiosity that I should have felt in watching the brush-strokes of a great painter. And when, as she passed me, she gave me a bow that was accompanied sometimes by a faint smile, it was as though she had sketched for me, adding a personal dedication, a water-colour that was a masterpiece of art. Each of her dresses seemed to me her natural and necessary setting, like the projection of a particular aspect of her soul. On one of these Lenten mornings, when she was on her way out to lunch, I met her wearing a dress of bright red velvet, cut slightly low at the neck. Her face appeared dreamy beneath its pile of fair hair. I was less sad than usual because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of claustration which the startling hue of her dress set between her and the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this comforted me. The dress struck me as being the materialisation round about her of the scarlet rays of a heart which I did not recognise in her and might perhaps have been able to console; sheltered in the mystical light of the garment with its soft folds, she reminded me of some saint of the early ages of Christianity. After which I felt ashamed of inflicting my presence on this holy martyr. “But, after all, the streets belong to everybody.”

The streets belong to everybody, I repeated to myself, giving a different meaning to the words, and marvelling that indeed in the crowded street, often soaked with rain, which gave it a precious lustre like the streets, at times, in the old towns of Italy, the Duchesse de Guermantes mingled with the public life of the world moments of her own secret life, showing herself thus in all her mystery to everyone, jostled by all and sundry, with the splendid gratuitousness of the greatest works of art. As I often went out in the morning after staying awake all night, in the afternoon my parents would tell me to lie down for a little and try to get some sleep. There is no need, when one is trying to find sleep, to give much thought to the quest, but habit is very useful, and even the absence of thought. But in these afternoon hours I lacked both. Before going to sleep, I devoted so much time to thinking that I should be unable to do so that even after I was asleep a little of my thought remained. It was no more than a glimmer in the almost total darkness, but it was enough to cast a reflexion in my sleep, first of the idea that I could not sleep, and then, a reflexion of this reflexion, that it was in my sleep that I had had the idea that I was not asleep, then, by a further refraction, my awakening … to a fresh doze in which I was trying to tell some friends who had come into my room that, a moment earlier, when I was asleep, I had imagined that I was not asleep. These shadows were barely distinguishable; it would have required a keen—and quite useless—delicacy of perception to seize them. Similarly, in later years, in Venice, long after the sun had set, when it seemed to be quite dark, I have seen, thanks to the echo, itself imperceptible, of a last note of light held indefinitely on the surface of the canals as though by the effect of some optical pedal, the reflexions of the palaces displayed as though for all time in a darker velvet on the crepuscular greyness of the water. One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a Gothic city rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a stained-glass window. An arm of the sea divided the town in two; the green water stretched to my feet; on the opposite shore it washed round the base of an oriental church, and beyond it houses which existed already in the fourteenth century, so that to go across to them would have been to ascend the stream of time. This dream in which nature had learned from art, in which the sea had turned Gothic, this dream in which I longed to attain, in which I believed that I was attaining to the impossible, was one that I felt I had often dreamed before. But as it is the nature of what we imagine in sleep to multiply itself in the past, and to appear, even when new, to be familiar, I supposed that I was mistaken. I noticed, however, that I did indeed frequently have this dream.