The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (195 page)

There was a moment when her uraemic trouble affected my grandmother’s eyes. For some days she could not see at all. Her eyes were not at all like those of a blind person, but remained just the same as before. And I gathered that she could see nothing only from the strangeness of a certain smile of welcome which she assumed the moment one opened the door, until one had come up to her and taken her hand, a smile which began too soon and remained stereotyped on her lips, fixed, but always full-faced, and endeavouring to be visible from every quarter, because it could no longer rely on the eyes to regulate it, to indicate the right moment, the proper direction, to focus it, to make it vary according to the change of position or of facial expression of the person who had come in; because it was left isolated, without the accompanying smile in her eyes which would have diverted the attention of the visitor from it for a while, it assumed in its awkwardness an undue importance, giving an impression of exaggerated amiability. Then her sight was completely restored, and from her eyes the wandering affliction passed to her ears. For several days my grandmother was deaf. And as she was afraid of being taken by surprise by the sudden entry of someone whom she would not have heard come in, all day long (although she was lying with her face to the wall) she kept turning her head sharply towards the door. But the movement of her neck was awkward, for one cannot adapt oneself in a few days to this transposition of faculties, so as, if not actually to see sounds, at least to listen with one’s eyes. Finally her pain grew less, but the impediment in her speech increased. We were obliged to ask her to repeat almost everything that she said.

And now my grandmother, realising that we could no longer understand her, gave up altogether the attempt to speak and lay perfectly still. When she caught sight of me she gave a sort of convulsive start like a person who suddenly finds himself unable to breathe, but could make no intelligible sound. Then, overcome by her sheer powerlessness, she let her head fall back on the pillows, stretched herself out flat on her bed, her face grave and stony, her hands motionless on the sheet or occupied in some purely mechanical action such as that of wiping her fingers with her handkerchief. She made no effort to think. Then came a state of perpetual agitation. She was incessantly trying to get up. But we restrained her so far as we could from doing so, for fear of her discovering how paralysed she was. One day when she had been left alone for a moment I found her out of bed, standing in her nightdress trying to open the window.

At Balbec, once, when a widow who had flung herself into the sea had been rescued against her will, my grandmother had told me (moved perhaps by one of those pre-sentiments we discern at times in the mystery of our organic life which remains so obscure but in which nevertheless it seems that the future is foreshadowed) that she could think of nothing so cruel as to snatch a desperate woman away from the death that she had deliberately sought and restore her to her living martyrdom.

We were just in time to catch my grandmother; she put up an almost savage resistance to my mother, then, overpowered, seated forcibly in an armchair, she ceased to will, to regret, her face resumed its impassivity and she began laboriously to pick off the hairs that had been left on her nightdress by a fur coat which had been thrown over her shoulders.

The look in her eyes changed completely; often uneasy, plaintive, haggard, it was no longer the look we knew, it was the sullen expression of a senile old woman.

By dint of repeatedly asking her whether she would like her hair done, Françoise ended up by persuading herself that the request had come from my grandmother. She armed herself with brushes, combs, eau de Cologne, a wrapper. “It can’t hurt Madame Amédée,” she said, “if I just comb her hair; nobody’s ever too weak to be combed.” In other words, one is never too weak for another person to be able, for her own satisfaction, to comb one’s hair. But when I came into the room I saw between the cruel hands of Françoise, as blissfully happy as though she were in the act of restoring my grandmother to health, beneath aged straggling tresses which scarcely had the strength to withstand the contact of the comb, a head which, incapable of maintaining the position into which it had been forced, was rolling about in a ceaseless whirl in which sheer debility alternated with spasms of pain. I felt that the moment at which Françoise would have finished her task was approaching, and I dared not hasten it by suggesting to her: “That’s enough,” for fear of her disobeying me. But I did forcibly intervene when, in order that my grandmother might see whether her hair had been done to her liking, Françoise, with innocent brutality, brought her a mirror. I was glad for the moment that I had managed to snatch it from her in time, before my grandmother, whom we had carefully kept away from mirrors, caught even a stray glimpse of a face unlike anything she could have imagined. But alas, when, a moment later, I bent over her to kiss that beloved forehead which had been so harshly treated, she looked up at me with a puzzled, distrustful, shocked expression: she had not recognised me.

According to our doctor, this was a symptom that the congestion of her brain was increasing. It must be relieved in some way. Cottard was in two minds. Françoise hoped at first that they were going to apply “clarified cups.” She looked up the effects of this treatment in my dictionary, but could find no reference to it. Even if she had said “scarified” instead of “clarified” she still would not have found any reference to this adjective, since she did not look for it under “C” any more than under “S”—she did indeed say “clarified” but she wrote (and consequently assumed that the printed word was) “esclarified.” Cottard, to her disappointment, gave the preference, though without much hope, to leeches. When, a few hours later, I went into my grandmother’s room, fastened to her neck, her temples, her ears, the tiny black reptiles were writhing among her bloodstained locks, as on the head of Medusa. But in her pale and peaceful, entirely motionless face I saw her beautiful eyes, wide open, luminous and calm as of old (perhaps even more charged with the light of intelligence than they had been before her illness, since, as she could not speak and must not move, it was to her eyes alone that she entrusted her thought, that thought which can be reborn, as though by spontaneous generation, thanks to the withdrawal of a few drops of blood), her eyes, soft and liquid as oil, in which the rekindled fire that was now burning lit up for the sick woman the recaptured universe. Her calm was no longer the wisdom of despair but of hope. She realised that she was better, wanted to be careful and not to move, and made me the present only of a beautiful smile so that I should know that she was feeling better, as she gently pressed my hand.

I knew the disgust that my grandmother felt at the sight of certain animals, let alone at being touched by them. I knew that it was in consideration of a higher utility that she was enduring the leeches. And so it infuriated me to hear Françoise repeating to her with the little chuckle one gives to a baby one is trying to amuse: “Oh, look at the little beasties running all over Madame.” This was moreover to treat our patient with a lack of respect, as though she had lapsed into second childhood. But my grandmother, whose face had assumed the calm fortitude of a stoic, did not even seem to hear her.

Alas! no sooner had the leeches been removed than the congestion returned and grew steadily worse. I was surprised to find that at this stage, when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise was constantly disappearing. The fact was that she had ordered herself a mourning dress, and did not wish to keep the dressmaker waiting. In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of “trying-on.”

A few days later, while I was asleep in bed, my mother came to call me in the early hours of the morning. With that tender concern which in the gravest circumstances people who are overwhelmed by grief show for the comfort and convenience of others, “Forgive me for disturbing your sleep,” she said to me.

“I wasn’t asleep,” I answered as I awoke.

I said this in good faith. The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, on which we were still drifting a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them. And when that bright star shines which at the moment of waking lights up behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments that it was not a sleeping but a waking state; a shooting star indeed, which blots out with the fading of its light not only the illusory existence but every aspect of our dream, and merely enables him who has awoken to say to himself: “I was asleep.”

In a voice so gentle that it seemed to be afraid of hurting me, my mother asked whether it would tire me too much to get up, and, stroking my hands, went on:

“My poor child, you have only your Papa and Mamma to rely on now.”

We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semi-circle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes, lay panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions. The eyelids were closed, and it was because they did not shut properly rather than because they opened that they disclosed a chink of eyeball, blurred, rheumy, reflecting the dimness of an organic vision and of an inward pain. All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom she neither saw nor knew. But if it was only a beast that was stirring there, where was my grandmother? Yes, I could recognise the shape of her nose, which bore no relation now to the rest of her face, but to the corner of which a beauty spot still adhered, and the hand that kept thrusting the blankets aside with a gesture which formerly would have meant that those blankets were oppressing her, but now meant nothing.

Mamma asked me to go for a little vinegar and water with which to sponge my grandmother’s forehead. It was the only thing that refreshed her, thought Mamma, who saw that she was trying to push back her hair. But now one of the servants was signalling to me from the doorway. The news that my grandmother was
in extremis
had spread like wildfire through the house. One of those “extra helps” whom people engage at exceptional times to relieve the strain on their servants (a practice which gives deathbeds something of the air of social functions) had just opened the front door to the Duc de Guermantes, who was now waiting in the hall and had asked for me: I could not escape him.

“I have just, my dear sir, heard your macabre news. I should like, as a mark of sympathy, to shake your father by the hand.”

I pleaded the difficulty of disturbing him for the moment. M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to set out on a journey. But he was so intensely aware of the importance of the courtesy he was showing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing-room. As a rule, he made a point of carrying out to the last letter the formalities with which he had decided to honour anyone, and took little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin ready.

“Have you sent for Dieulafoy? No? That was a grave error. And if you had only asked me, I would have got him to come—he never refuses me anything, although he has refused the Duchesse de Chartres before now. You see, I set myself above a Princess of the Blood. However, in the presence of death we are all equal,” he added, not in order to assure me that my grandmother was becoming his equal, but perhaps because he felt that a prolonged discussion of his power over Dieulafoy and his pre-eminence over the Duchesse de Chartres would not be in very good taste.

His advice did not in the least surprise me. I knew that, in the Guermantes family, the name of Dieulafoy was regularly quoted (only with slightly more respect) among those of other tradesmen who were “quite the best” in their respective lines. And the old Duchesse de Mortemart,
née
Guermantes (I never could understand, by the way, why the moment one speaks of a Duchess, one almost invariably says: “The old Duchess of So-and-so,” or, alternatively, in a delicate Watteau tone, if she is still young, “The little Duchess of So-and-so”) would prescribe almost automatically, with a droop of the eyelid, in serious cases: “Dieulafoy, Dieulafoy!” as, if one wanted a place for ices, she would advise “Poiré Blanche,” or for cakes “Rebattet, Rebattet.” But I was not aware that my father had, as a matter of fact, just sent for Dieulafoy.

At this point my mother, who was waiting impatiently for some cylinders of oxygen which would help my grandmother to breathe more easily, came out herself to the hall where she little expected to find M. de Guermantes. I should have liked to conceal him, no matter where. But convinced in his own mind that nothing was more essential, could be more gratifying to her or more indispensable to the maintenance of his reputation as a perfect gentleman, he seized me violently by the arm and, although I defended myself as though against an assault with repeated protestations of “Sir, Sir, Sir,” dragged me across to Mamma, saying: “Will you do me the great honour of presenting me to your lady mother?”, going slightly off pitch on the word “mother.” And it was so plain to him that the honour was hers that he could not help smiling at her even while he was composing a grave face. I had no alternative but to effect the introduction, which triggered off a series of bowings and scrapings: he was about to begin the complete ritual of salutation, and even proposed to enter into conversation, but my mother, beside herself with grief, told me to come at once and did not reply to the speeches of M. de Guermantes who, expecting to be received as a visitor and finding himself instead left alone in the hall, would have been obliged to leave had he not at that moment caught sight of Saint-Loup who had arrived in Paris that morning and had come to us in haste to ask for news. “I say, this is a piece of luck!” cried the Duke joyfully, grabbing his nephew by a button which he nearly tore off, regardless of the presence of my mother who was again crossing the hall. Saint-Loup was not, I think, despite his genuine sympathy, altogether sorry to avoid seeing me, considering his attitude towards me. He left, dragged off by his uncle who, having had something very important to say to him and having very nearly gone down to Doncières on purpose to say it, was beside himself with joy at being able to save himself the trouble. “Upon my soul, if anybody had told me I had only to cross the courtyard to find you here, I should have thought they were pulling my leg. As your friend M. Bloch would say, it’s rather droll.” And as he disappeared down the stairs with his arm round Robert’s shoulder: “All the same,” he went on, “it’s quite clear I must have touched the hangman’s rope or something; I do have the devil’s own luck.” It was not that the Duc de Guermantes was bad-mannered; far from it. But he was one of those men who are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others, who resemble in that respect undertakers and the majority of doctors, and who, after having composed their faces and said “This is a very painful occasion,” having embraced you at a pinch and advised you to rest, cease to regard a deathbed or a funeral as anything but a social gathering of a more or less restricted kind at which, with a joviality that has been checked for a moment only, they scan the room in search of the person whom they can talk to about their own little affairs, or ask to introduce them to someone else, or offer a lift in their carriage when it is time to go home. The Duc de Guermantes, while congratulating himself on the “good wind” that had blown him into the arms of his nephew, was still so surprised at the reception—natural as it was—that he had had from my mother that he declared later on that she was as disagreeable as my father was civil, that she had “aberrations” during which she seemed literally not to hear a word you said to her, and that in his opinion she was out of sorts and perhaps even not quite “all there.” At the same time he was prepared (according to what I was told) to put it down partly at least to the “circumstances” and to aver that my mother had seemed to him greatly “affected” by the sad event. But his limbs were still twitching with all the residue of bows and heel-clickings and backings-out which he had been prevented from using up, and he had so little idea of the real nature of Mamma’s grief that he asked me, the day before the funeral, if I was doing anything to distract her.