The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (173 page)

Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circumstances are always so entangled that the man who is in the right a hundred times may have been once in the wrong. (Lord Derby himself acknowledges that England does not always seem right
vis-à-vis
Ireland.) And I could not help recalling that unpleasant and yet quite innocent remark he had made at Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”

“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made no formal promise. Once you start doing everything you possibly can to make me leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I shouldn’t give it to you. I fail to understand what treachery you can see in that, or in what way I’m supposed to be self-interested. You can’t seriously maintain that I brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m only a poor devil without a cent to my name. It’s foolish of you to take it that way, my sweet. How am I self-interested? You know very well that my one interest in life is you.”

“Yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the sweeping gesture of a barber wielding his razor.
¹¹
And turning towards the dancer:

“Isn’t he too wonderful with his hands! I couldn’t do the things he’s doing there, even though I’m a woman.” She went closer to him and, pointing to Robert’s stricken face: “Look, he’s hurt,” she murmured, in a momentary impulse of sadistic cruelty totally out of keeping with her genuine feelings of affection for Saint-Loup.

“Listen; for the last time, I swear to you that you can try as hard as you like, that in a week’s time you can have all the regrets in the world, but I shan’t come back, I’ve had enough, do you hear, it’s irrevocable; you’ll be sorry one day, when it’s too late.”

Perhaps he was sincere in saying this, and the torture of leaving his mistress may have seemed to him less cruel than that of remaining with her in certain circumstances.

“But, my dear boy,” he added, addressing me, “you oughtn’t to stay here, I tell you, you’ll start coughing.”

I pointed to the scenery which barred my way. He touched his hat and said to one of the journalists:

“Would you mind, sir, throwing away your cigar? The smoke is bad for my friend.”

His mistress, not waiting for him to accompany her, was on her way to the dressing-room when she turned round and addressed the dancer from the back of the stage, in an artificially melodious tone of girlish innocence:

“Do they do those tricks with women too, those nice little hands? You look just like a woman yourself. I’m sure I could have a wonderful time with you and a girl I know.”

“There’s no rule against smoking that I know of,” said the journalist. “If people aren’t well, they have only to stay at home.”

The dancer smiled mysteriously at the actress.

“Oh! Do stop! You’re driving me crazy,” she cried to him. “The larks we’ll have!”

“In any case, sir, you are not very civil,” observed Saint-Loup to the journalist, still in a mild and courteous tone, with the air of appraisal of a man judging retrospectively the rights and closed.

At that moment cally above his head wrongs of an incident that is already I saw Saint-Loup raise his arm vertias if he were making a sign to someone I could not see, or like the conductor of an orchestra, and indeed—without any greater transition than when, at a simple stroke of a violin bow, in a symphony or a ballet, violent rhythms succeed a graceful andante—after the courteous words that he had just uttered, he brought down his hand with a resounding smack upon the journalist’s cheek.

Now that to the measured conversations of the diplomats, to the smiling arts of peace, had succeeded the furious onthrust of war, since blows lead to blows, I should not have been surprised to see the combatants wading in one another’s blood. But what I could not understand (like people who feel that it is not according to the rules for war to break out between two countries when up till then it has been a question merely of the rectification of a frontier, or for a sick man to die when there was talk of nothing more serious than a swelling of the liver) was how Saint-Loup had contrived to follow up those words, which implied a hint of affability, with a gesture which in no way arose out of them, which they had not foreshadowed, the gesture of that arm raised in defiance not only of international law but of the principle of causality, in a spontaneous generation of anger, a gesture created
ex nihilo
. Fortunately the journalist who, staggering back from the violence of the blow, had turned pale and hesitated for a moment, did not retaliate. As for his friends, one of them had promptly turned away his head and was staring fixedly into the wings at someone who was evidently not there; the second pretended that a speck of dust had got into his eye, and began rubbing and squeezing his eyelid with every sign of being in pain; while the third had rushed off, exclaiming: “Good heavens, I believe the curtain’s going up; we shan’t get into our seats.”

I wanted to speak to Saint-Loup, but he was so full of his indignation with the dancer that it clung to the very surface of his eyeballs; like a subcutaneous integument it distended his cheeks, so that, his inner agitation expressing itself externally in total immobility, he had not even the elasticity, the “play” necessary to take in a word from me and to answer it. The journalist’s friends, seeing that the incident was at an end, gathered round him again, still trembling. But, ashamed of having deserted him, they were absolutely determined that he should be made to suppose that they had noticed nothing. And so they expatiated, one upon the speck of dust in his eye, one upon the false alarm which had made him think that the curtain was going up, the third upon the astonishing resemblance between a man who had just gone by and the speaker’s brother. Indeed they seemed quite to resent their friend’s not having shared their several emotions.

“What, didn’t it strike you? You must be going blind.”

“What I say is that you’re a pack of cowards,” growled the journalist who had been struck.

Forgetting the fictions they had adopted, to be consistent with which they ought—but they did not think of it—to have pretended not to understand what he meant, they fell back on certain expressions traditional in the circumstances: “What’s all the excitement? Keep your hair on, old chap. You seem to be rather het up.”

I had realised that morning beneath the pear blossom how illusory were the grounds upon which Robert’s love for “Rachel when from the Lord” was based. On the other hand, I was no less aware how very real was the pain to which that love gave rise. Gradually the pain he had suffered without ceasing for the last hour receded, withdrew inside him, and a zone of accessibility appeared in his eyes. The two of us left the theatre and began to walk. I had stopped for a moment at a corner of the Avenue Gabriel from which I had often in the past seen Gilberte appear. I tried for a few seconds to recall those distant impressions, and was hurrying almost at the double to overtake Saint-Loup when I saw that a somewhat shabbily attired gentleman appeared to be talking to him confidentially. I concluded that this was a personal friend of Robert; meanwhile they seemed to be drawing even closer to one another; suddenly, as an astral phenomenon flashes through the sky, I saw a number of ovoid bodies assume with a dizzy swiftness all the positions necessary for them to compose a flickering constellation in front of Saint-Loup. Flung out like stones from a catapult, they seemed to me to be at the very least seven in number. They were merely, however, Saint-Loup’s two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing place in this—to all appearance ideal and decorative—arrangement. But this elaborate display was nothing more than a pummelling which Saint-Loup was administering, the aggressive rather than aesthetic character of which was first revealed to me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed gentleman who appeared to be losing at once his self-possession, his lower jaw and a quantity of blood. He gave mendacious explanations to the people who came up to question him, turned his head and, seeing that Saint-Loup had made off and was hastening to rejoin me, stood gazing after him with an offended, crushed, but by no means furious expression on his face. Saint-Loup, on the other hand, was furious, although he himself had received no blow, and his eyes were still blazing with anger when he reached me. The incident was in no way connected (as I had supposed) with the assault in the theatre. It was an impassioned loiterer who, seeing the handsome young soldier that Saint-Loup was, had made a proposition to him. My friend could not get over the audacity of this “clique” who no longer even waited for the shades of night to venture forth, and spoke of the proposition that had been made to him with the same indignation as the newspapers use in reporting an armed assault and robbery in broad daylight in the centre of Paris. And yet the recipient of his blows was excusable in one respect, for the trend of the downward slope brings desire so rapidly to the point of enjoyment that beauty in itself appears to imply consent. And that Saint-Loup was beautiful was beyond dispute. Castigation such as he had just administered has this value, for men of the type that had accosted him, that it makes them think seriously of their conduct, though never for long enough to enable them to mend their ways and thus escape correction at the hands of the law. And so, although Saint-Loup had administered the thrashing without much preliminary thought, all such punishments, even when they reinforce the law, are powerless to bring uniformity to morals.

These incidents, particularly the one that was weighing most on his mind, seemed to have prompted in Robert a desire to be left alone for a while. For after a time he asked me to leave him, and go by myself to call on Mme de Villeparisis. He would join me there, but preferred that we should not go in together, so that he might appear to have only just arrived in Paris instead of having spent half the day already with me.

As I had supposed before making the acquaintance of Mme de Villeparisis at Balbec, there was a vast difference between the world in which she lived and that of Mme de Guermantes. Mme de Villeparisis was one of those women who, born of an illustrious house, entering by marriage into another no less illustrious, do not for all that enjoy any great position in the social world, and, apart from a few duchesses who are their nieces or sisters-in-law, perhaps even a crowned head or two, old family connexions, have their drawing-rooms patronised only by third-rate people, drawn from the middle classes or from a nobility either provincial or tainted in some way, whose presence there has long since driven away all such smart and snobbish folk as are not obliged to come to the house by ties of blood or the claims of a friendship too old to be ignored. Certainly I had no difficulty after the first few minutes in understanding how Mme de Villeparisis, at Balbec, had come to be so well informed, better than ourselves even, as to the smallest details of the tour through Spain which my father was then making with M. de Norpois. It was impossible, for all that, to entertain the theory that the intimacy—of more than twenty years’ standing—between Mme de Villeparisis and the Ambassador could have been responsible for the lady’s loss of caste in a world where the smartest women boasted lovers far less respectable than him, quite apart from the fact that it was probably years since he had been anything more to the Marquise than an old friend. Had Mme de Villeparisis then had other adventures in the past? Being then of a more passionate temperament than now, in a calm and pious old age which nevertheless owed some of its mellow colouring to those ardent, vanished years, had she somehow failed, in the country neighbourhood where she had lived for so long, to avoid certain scandals unknown to a younger generation which merely noted their effect in the mixed and defective composition of a visiting list bound otherwise to have been among those least tarnished by any base alloy? Had that “sharp tongue” which her nephew ascribed to her made her enemies in those far-off days? Had it driven her into taking advantage of certain successes with men to avenge herself upon women? All this was possible; nor could the exquisitely sensitive way in which—modulating so delicately her choice of words as well as her tone of voice—Mme de Villeparisis spoke of modesty or kindness be held to invalidate this supposition; for the people who not only speak with approval of certain virtues but actually feel their charm and understand them admirably (who will be capable of painting a worthy picture of them in their memoirs) are often sprung from, but do not themselves belong to, the inarticulate, rough-hewn, artless generation which practised them. That generation is reflected but not continued in them. Instead of the character which it possessed, one finds a sensibility, an intelligence which are not conducive to action. And whether or not there had been in the life of Mme de Villeparisis any of those scandals which the lustre of her name had expunged, it was this intelligence, resembling rather that of a writer of the second rank than that of a woman of position, that was undoubtedly the cause of her social decline.

It is true that the qualities, such as level-headedness and moderation, which Mme de Villeparisis chiefly extolled were not especially exalting; but in order to describe moderation in an entirely convincing way, moderation will not suffice, and some of the qualities of authorship which presuppose a quite immoderate exaltation are required. I had remarked at Balbec that the genius of certain great artists was completely unintelligible to Mme de Villeparisis, and that all she could do was to make delicate fun of them and to express her incomprehension in a graceful and witty form. But this wit and grace, in the degree to which they were developed in her, became themselves—on another plane, and even though they were employed to belittle the noblest masterpieces—true artistic qualities. Now the effect of such qualities on any social position is a morbid activity of the kind which doctors call elective, and so disintegrating that the most firmly established can hardly resist it for any length of time. What artists call intelligence seems pure presumption to the fashionable world which, incapable of adopting the angle of vision from which they, the artists, judge things, incapable of understanding the particular attraction to which they yield when they choose an expression or draw a parallel, feel in their company an exhaustion, an irritation, from which antipathy rapidly springs. And yet in her conversation, and the same may be said of the
Memoirs
which she afterwards published, Mme de Villeparisis showed nothing but a sort of graciousness that was eminently social. Having passed by great works without considering them deeply, sometimes without even noticing them, she had retained from the period in which she had lived, and which indeed she described with great aptness and charm, little but the most trivial things it had had to offer. But a piece of writing, even if it treats exclusively of subjects that are not intellectual, is still a work of the intelligence, and to give a consummate impression of frivolity in a book, or in a talk which is not dissimilar, requires a touch of seriousness which a purely frivolous person would be incapable of. In a certain book of memoirs written by a woman and regarded as a masterpiece, such and such a sentence that people quote as a model of airy grace has always made me suspect that, in order to arrive at such a degree of lightness, the author must once have been imbued with a rather weighty learning, a forbidding culture, and that as a girl she probably appeared to her friends an insufferable bluestocking. And between certain literary qualities and lack of social success the connexion is so inevitable that when we open Mme de Villeparisis’s
Memoirs
today, on any page an apt epithet, a sequence of metaphors will suffice to enable the reader to reconstruct the deep but icy bow which must have been bestowed on the old Marquise on the staircase of an embassy by a snob such as Mme Leroi, who may perhaps have left a card on her when she went to call on the Guermantes, but never set foot in her house for fear of losing caste among all the doctors’ or solicitors’ wives whom she would find there. A bluestocking Mme de Villeparisis had perhaps been in her earliest youth, and, intoxicated with her learning, had perhaps been unable to resist applying to people in society, less intelligent and less educated than herself, those cutting taunts which the injured party never forgets.