The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (172 page)

One number in the programme I found extremely painful. A young woman whom Rachel and some of her friends disliked was to make her debut with a recital of old songs—a debut on which she had based all her hopes for the future of herself and her family. This young woman was possessed of an unduly, almost grotesquely prominent rump and a pretty but too slight voice, reduced still further by her nervousness and in marked contrast to her muscular development. Rachel had posted among the audience a certain number of friends, male and female, whose business it was by their sarcastic comments to disconcert the novice, who was known to be timid, and to make her lose her head so that her recital should prove a complete fiasco, after which the manager would refuse to give her a contract. At the first notes uttered by the wretched woman, several of the male spectators, recruited for that purpose, began pointing to her hindquarters with jocular comments, several of the women who were also in the plot laughed out loud, and each fluty note from the stage increased the deliberate hilarity until it verged on the scandalous. The unhappy woman, sweating with anguish under her grease-paint, tried for a little longer to hold out, then stopped and gazed round the audience with a look of misery and rage which succeeded only in increasing the uproar. The instinct to imitate others, the desire to show off their own wit and daring, added to the party several pretty actresses who had not been forewarned but now exchanged with the others glances charged with malicious connivance, and gave vent to such violent peals of laughter that at the end of the second song, although there were still five more on the programme, the stage manager rang down the curtain. I did my utmost to pay no more heed to the incident than I had paid to my grandmother’s sufferings when my great-uncle, to tease her, used to give my grandfather brandy, the idea of deliberate unkindness being too painful for me to bear. And yet, just as our pity for misfortune is perhaps not very precise since in our imagination we re-create a whole world of grief by which the unfortunate who has to struggle against it has no thought of being moved to self-pity, so unkindness has probably not in the minds of the unkind that pure and voluptuous cruelty which we find it so painful to imagine. Hatred inspires them, anger prompts them to an ardour and an activity in which there is no great joy; sadism is needed to extract any pleasure from it; whereas unkind people suppose themselves to be punishing someone equally unkind. Rachel certainly imagined that the actress whom she had tortured was far from being of interest to anyone, and that in any case, by having her hissed off the stage, she was herself avenging an outrage on good taste and teaching an unworthy colleague a lesson. Nevertheless, I preferred not to speak of this incident since I had had neither the courage nor the power to prevent it, and it would have been too embarrassing for me, by speaking well of their victim, to make the sentiments which animated the tormentors of the novice look like gratifications of cruelty.

But the beginning of this performance interested me in quite another way. It made me realise in part the nature of the illusion of which Saint-Loup was a victim with regard to Rachel, and which had set a gulf between the images that he and I respectively had of his mistress, when we saw her that morning among the blossoming pear-trees. Rachel had scarcely more than a walking-on part in the little play. But seen thus, she was another woman. She had one of those faces to which distance—and not necessarily that between stalls and stage, the world being merely a larger theatre—gives form and outline and which, seen from close to, crumble to dust. Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milky way of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more. At a respectable distance, all this ceased to be visible and, from cheeks that withdrew, were reabsorbed into her face, there rose like a crescent moon a nose so fine and so pure that one would have liked to be the object of Rachel’s attention, to see her again and again, to keep her near one, provided that one had never seen her differently and at close range. This was not my case, but it had been Saint-Loup’s when he first saw her on the stage. Then he had asked himself how he might approach her, how get to know her, a whole miraculous world had opened up in his imagination—the world in which she lived—from which emanated an exquisite radiance but into which he could never penetrate. He had left the theatre in the little provincial town where this had happened several years before, telling himself that it would be madness to write to her, that she would not answer his letter, quite prepared to give his fortune and his name for the creature who now lived within him in a world so vastly superior to those too familiar realities, a world made beautiful by desire and dreams of happiness, when he saw emerging from the stage door the gay and charmingly hatted band of actresses who had just been playing. Young men who knew them were waiting for them outside. The number of pawns on the human chessboard being less than the number of combinations that they are capable of forming, in a theatre from which all the people we know and might have expected to find are absent, there turns up one whom we never imagined that we should see again and who appears so opportunely that the coincidence seems to us providential, although no doubt some other coincidence would have occurred in its stead had we been not in that place but in some other, where other desires would have been born and another old acquaintance forthcoming to help us to satisfy them. The golden portals of the world of dreams had closed upon Rachel before Saint-Loup saw her emerge from the theatre, so that the freckles and spots were of little importance. They displeased him nevertheless, especially as, being no longer alone, he had not now the same power to dream as in the theatre. But she, for all that he could no longer see her, continued to dictate his actions, like those stars which govern us by their attraction even during the hours in which they are not visible to our eyes. And so his desire for the actress with the delicate features which were not now even present in Robert’s memory caused him to fling himself at the old friend whom chance had brought to the spot and get himself introduced to the person with no features and with freckles, since she was the same person, telling himself that later on he would take care to find out which of the two the actress really was. She was in a hurry, she did not on this occasion address a single word to Saint-Loup, and it was only some days later that he finally induced her to leave her companions and allow him to escort her home. He loved her already. The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of, ensure that not much time is required before one entrusts all one’s chances of happiness to someone who a few days since was no more than a fortuitous, unknown, insignificant apparition on the boards of a theatre.

When, the curtain having fallen, we moved on to the stage, alarmed at finding myself there for the first time, I felt the need to begin a spirited conversation with Saint-Loup. In this way my demeanour, since I did not know which one to adopt in a setting that was new to me, would be entirely dominated by our talk, and people would think that I was so absorbed in it, so unobservant of my surroundings, that it was quite natural for me not to be wearing the facial expressions proper to a place in which, to judge by what I appeared to be saying, I was barely conscious of standing; and seizing, for the sake of speed, upon the first topic that came to my mind:

“You know,” I said, “I did come to say good-bye to you the day I left Doncières. I’ve never had a chance to mention it. I waved to you in the street.”

“Don’t speak about it,” he replied, “I was so sorry. I passed you just outside the barracks, but I couldn’t stop because I was late already. I assure you I felt quite wretched about it.”

So he had recognised me! I saw again in my mind the utterly impersonal salute which he had given me, raising his hand to his cap, without a glance to indicate that he knew me, without a gesture to show that he was sorry he could not stop. Evidently the fiction of not recognising me which he had adopted at that moment must have simplified matters for him greatly. But I was amazed that he had hit upon it so swiftly and before a reflex had betrayed his original impression. I had already observed at Balbec that, side by side with that childlike sincerity of his face, the skin of which by its transparency made visible the sudden surge of his emotions, his body had been admirably trained to perform a certain number of well-bred dissimulations, and that, like a consummate actor, he could, in his regimental and in his social life, play alternately quite different roles. In one of his roles he loved me tenderly, and behaved towards me almost as if he was my brother; my brother he had been, and was now again, but for a moment that day he had been another person who did not know me and who, holding the reins, his monocle screwed into his eye, without a look or a smile had lifted his disengaged hand to the peak of his cap to give me a correct military salute!

The stage sets, still in their place, among which I was passing, seen thus at close range and deprived of those effects of lighting and distance on which the eminent artist whose brush had painted them had calculated, were a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I came near her, was subjected to a no less destructive influence. The curves of her charming nostrils had remained in the perspective between auditorium and stage, like the relief of the scenery. It was no longer she: I recognised her only by her eyes, in which her identity had taken refuge. The form, the radiance of this young star, so brilliant a moment ago, had vanished. On the other hand—as though we were to look more closely at the moon so that it ceased to present the appearance of a disc of pink and gold—on this face that had seemed so smooth a surface I could now distinguish only protuberances, blemishes, hollows.

Yet in spite of the incoherence into which the woman’s face and likewise the painted backdrops dissolved when seen from close to, I was happy to be there, to stroll among the sets, in surroundings which in the past my love of nature would have made me find tiresome and artificial, but to which Goethe’s portrayal of them in
Wilhelm Meister
had given a certain beauty in my eyes. And I was delighted to observe, in the thick of a crowd of journalists or men of fashion, admirers of the actresses, who were greeting one another, talking, smoking, as though at a party in town, a young man in a black velvet cap and hortensia-coloured skirt, his cheeks chalked in red like a page from a Watteau album, who with smiling lips and eyes raised to the ceiling, describing graceful patterns with the palms of his hands and springing lightly into the air, seemed so entirely of another species from the sensible people in everyday clothes in the midst of whom he was pursuing like a madman the course of his ecstatic dream, so alien to the preoccupations of their life, so anterior to the habits of their civilisation, so enfranchised from the laws of nature, that it was as restful and refreshing a spectacle as watching a butterfly straying through a crowd to follow with one’s eyes, between the flats, the natural arabesques traced by his winged, capricious, painted curvetings. But at that moment Saint-Loup conceived the notion that his mistress was paying undue attention to this dancer, who was now engaged in a final rehearsal of a dance-figure for the ballet performance in which he was about to appear, and his face darkened.

“You might look the other way,” he said to her sombrely. “You know that those dancer-fellows are not worth the rope which one hopes they’ll fall off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of people who go about afterwards boasting that you’ve taken notice of them. Besides, you know very well you’ve been told to go to your dressing-room and change. You’ll be missing your call again.”

A group of men—journalists—noticing the look of fury on Saint-Loup’s face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what was being said. And as the stage-hands had just set up some scenery on our other side we were forced into close contact with them.

“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-Loup’s mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how beautifully made he is; just watch those little hands of his dancing away by themselves like the rest of him!”

The dancer turned his head towards her, and his human person appeared beneath the sylph that he was endeavouring to be, the clear grey jelly of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelashes stiff with paint, and a smile extended the corners of his mouth in a face plastered with rouge; then, to amuse the young woman, like a singer who obligingly hums the tune of the song in which we have told her that we admired her singing, he began to repeat the movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself with the subtlety of a mime and the good humour of a child.

“Oh, it’s too lovely, the way he mimics himself,” cried Rachel, clapping her hands.

“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-Loup broke in, in a tone of utter misery, “don’t make an exhibition of yourself, I can’t stand it. I swear if you say another word I won’t go with you to your room, I shall walk straight out. Come on, don’t be nasty … You oughtn’t to stand about in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill,” he added, turning to me, with the solicitude he had shown for me in our Balbec days.

“Oh! what bliss it would be if you did go.”

“I warn you, if I do, I shan’t come back.”

“That’s more than I should dare to hope.”

“Look here, I promised you the necklace if you behaved nicely to me, but since you treat me like this …”

“Ah! that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me a promise, but I ought to have known you’d never keep it. You want the whole world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not self-interested and money-grubbing like you. You can keep your blasted necklace; I know someone else who’ll give it to me.”

“No one else can possibly give it to you. I’ve told Boucheron he’s to keep it for me, and I have his promise not to sell it to anyone else.”

“So that’s it! You wanted to blackmail me, so you took all your precautions in advance. It’s just what they say: Marsantes,
Mater Semita
, it smells of the race,” retorted Rachel, quoting an etymology which was founded on a wild misinterpretation, for
Semita
means “path” and not “Semite,” but one which the Nationalists applied to Saint-Loup on account of the Dreyfusard views for which, as it happened, he was indebted to the actress. (She was less justified than anyone in applying the appellation of Jewess to Mme de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed in finding no trace of Jewishness apart from her kinship with the Lévy-Mirepoix family.) “But this isn’t the last of it, I can tell you. An agreement like that isn’t binding. You’ve behaved treacherously towards me. Boucheron shall be told of it and he’ll be paid twice as much for his necklace. You’ll hear from me before long, don’t you worry.”