The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (23 page)

I listened to M. Legrandin’s words which always seemed to me so pleasing; but I was preoccupied by the memory of a lady whom I had seen recently for the first time and thinking, now that I knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I summoned up all my courage and said to him: “Tell me, sir, do you by any chance know the lady … the ladies of Guermantes?”—glad, too, in pronouncing this name, to secure a sort of power over it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my day-dreams and giving it an objective existence in the world of spoken things.

But, at the sound of the name Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of our friend’s blue eyes a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow. His fringed eyelids darkened and drooped. His mouth, set in a bitter grimace, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes remained full of pain, like the eyes of a handsome martyr whose body bristles with arrows.

“No, I don’t know them,” he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it
with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly in order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself—in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family—might very well have been not forced upon, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.

“No,” he went on, explaining by his words the tone in which they were uttered, “no, I don’t know them, I’ve never wanted to; I’ve always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart, you know, I’m a bit of a Jacobin. People are always coming to me about it, telling me I’m mistaken in not going to Guermantes, that I make myself seem ill-bred, uncivilised, an old bear. But that’s not the sort of reputation that can frighten me; it’s too true! In my heart of hearts I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books and pictures, and the light of the moon when the fresh breeze of your youth wafts to my nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes can no longer distinguish.”

I did not understand very clearly why, in order to refrain from going to the houses of people whom one did not know, it should be necessary to cling to one’s independence,
or how this could give one the appearance of a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their displeasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come to light, that it should do so in his absence, a long way away, and “by default.” In a word, he was a snob. No doubt he would never have said any of this in the poetical language which my family and I so much enjoyed. And if I asked him, “Do you know the Guermantes family?” Legrandin the talker would reply, “No, I’ve never wished to know them.” But unfortunately the talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because this other could tell compromising stories about our own Legrandin and his snobbishness; and this other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that twisted smile, the undue gravity of the tone of his reply, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had instantaneously been stabbed and prostrated like a St Sebastian of snobbery: “Oh, how you hurt me! No, I don’t know the Guermantes family. Do not remind me of the great sorrow of my life.” And since this other, irrepressible, blackmailing Legrandin, if he lacked our Legrandin’s charming vocabulary, showed an infinitely greater promptness in expressing himself, by means of what are called “reflexes,” when Legrandin the
talker attempted to silence him, he had already spoken, and however much our friend deplored the bad impression which the revelations of his
alter ego
must have caused, he could do no more than endeavour to mitigate them.

This is not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he himself was one, since it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them. Upon ourselves they react only indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our primary motives other, auxiliary motives, less stark and therefore more seemly. Never had Legrandin’s snobbishness prompted him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would encourage his imagination to make that duchess appear, in his eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would gain acquaintance with the duchess, assuring himself that he was yielding to the attractions of mind and heart which the vile race of snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition the social activity of Legrandin and its primary cause.

At home, meanwhile, we no longer had any illusions about M. Legrandin, and our relations with him had become much more distant. Mamma was greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin which he never admitted to, which he continued to call the unpardonable sin, snobbery. As for my father, he found it
difficult to take Legrandin’s airs in so light-hearted and detached a spirit; and when there was talk, one year, of sending me to spend the summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother, he said: “I simply must tell Legrandin that you’re going to Balbec, to see whether he’ll offer to introduce you to his sister. He probably doesn’t remember telling us that she lived within a mile of the place.”

My grandmother, who held that when one went to the seaside one ought to be on the beach from morning to night sniffing the salt breezes, and that one should not know anyone there because visits and excursions are so much time filched from the sea air, begged him on no account to speak to Legrandin of our plans; for already, in her mind’s eye, she could see his sister, Mme de Cambremer, alighting from her carriage at the door of our hotel just as we were on the point of going out fishing, and obliging us to remain indoors to entertain her. But Mamma laughed at her fears, thinking to herself that the danger was not so threatening, and that Legrandin would show no undue anxiety to put us in touch with his sister. As it happened, there was no need for any of us to introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who, without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of visiting those parts, walked into the trap uninvited one evening when we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.

“There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?” he said to my father, “a blue, especially, more floral than aerial, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that little pink cloud there, has it not also the tint of some flower, a carnation or hydrangea?
Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the Channel, where Normandy merges into Brittany, have I observed such copious examples of that sort of vegetable kingdom of the atmosphere. Down there, in that unspoiled country near Balbec, there is a charmingly quiet little bay where the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which, by the by, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and insignificant; but in that moist and gentle atmosphere these celestial bouquets, pink and blue, will blossom all at once of an evening, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade. Others shed their flowers at once, and then it is lovelier still to see the sky strewn with their innumerable petals, sulphur or rose-pink. In that bay, which they call the Bay of Opal, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened, like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast, to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every winter many a brave vessel falls victim to the perils of the sea. Balbec! the most ancient bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil, the true Ar-mor, the sea, the land’s end, the accursed region which Anatole France—an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to read—has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the
Odyssey
. Balbec; yes, they are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and charming soil which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is to be able to make excursions into such primitive and beautiful regions only a step or two away!”

“Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?” inquired my father. “As it happens, this young man is
going to spend a couple of months there with his grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps.”

Legrandin, taken unawares by the question at a moment when he was looking directly at my father, was unable to avert his eyes, and so fastened them with steadily increasing intensity—smiling mournfully the while—upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness and frankness and of not being afraid to look him in the face, until he seemed to have penetrated my father’s skull as if it had become transparent, and to be seeing at that moment, far beyond and behind it, a brightly coloured cloud which provided him with a mental alibi and would enable him to establish that at the moment when he was asked whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking of something else and so had not heard the question. As a rule such tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, “Why, what are you thinking about?” But my father, inquisitive, irritated and cruel, repeated: “Have you friends, then, in the neighbourhood, since you know Balbec so well?”

In a final and desperate effort, Legrandin’s smiling gaze struggled to the extreme limits of tenderness, vagueness, candour and abstraction; but, feeling no doubt that there was nothing left for it now but to answer, he said to us: “I have friends wherever there are clusters of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together with touching perseverance to offer a common supplication to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them.”

“That is not quite what I meant,” interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as merciless as the sky. “I asked you, in case anything should happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that she was not all
alone there in an out-of-the-way place, whether you knew anyone in the neighbourhood.”

“There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one,” replied Legrandin, who did not give in so easily. “The places I know well, the people very slightly. But the places themselves seem like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality easily disillusioned by life. Perhaps it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff’s edge standing there by the path where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows beneath an evening sky, still roseate, in which the golden moon is climbing while the homeward-bound fishing-boats, cleaving the dappled waters, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours. Or perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, plain and shy-looking but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which knows not truth,” he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, “that land of pure fiction makes bad reading for any boy, and is certainly not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is already so much inclined to melancholy—for a heart already predisposed to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous secrets and futile regrets may suit a disillusioned old man like myself, but they must always prove fatal to a temperament that is still unformed. Believe me,” he went on with emphasis, “the waters of that bay—more Breton than Norman—may exert a sedative influence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no longer intact, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are contra-indicated … Good night to you,
neighbours,” he added, moving away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed; and then, turning towards us with a physicianly finger raised in warning, he resumed the consultation: “No Balbec before fifty!” he called out to us, “and even then it must depend on the state of the heart.”

My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but honourable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec, sooner than find himself obliged to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain—as from his knowledge of my grandmother’s character, he really ought to have been—that we would never have dreamed of making use of it.

We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie a visit before dinner. At the beginning of the season, when the days ended early, we would still be able to see, as we turned into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, a reflection of the setting sun in the windows of the house and a band of crimson beyond the timbers of the Calvary, which was mirrored further on in the pond; a fiery glow that, accompanied often by a sharp
tang in the air, would associate itself in my mind with the glow of the fire over which, at that very moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the poetic pleasure of the walk, with the sensual pleasures of good feeding, warmth and rest. But in summer, when we came back to the house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they lay along her window-sill, would be caught and held by the large inner curtains and the loops which tied them back to the wall, and then, split and ramified and filtered, encrusting with tiny flakes of gold the citron-wood of the chest of drawers, would illuminate the room with a delicate, slanting, woodland glow. But on some days, though very rarely, the chest of drawers would long since have shed its momentary incrustations, there would no longer, as we turned into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky lighting up the window-panes, and the pond beneath the Calvary would have lost its fiery glow, sometimes indeed had changed already to an opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, gradually broadening and splintered by every ripple upon the water’s surface, would stretch across it from end to end. Then, as we drew near the house, we would see a figure standing upon the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me: “Good heavens! There’s Françoise looking out for us; your aunt must be anxious; that means we’re late.”