The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (290 page)

Aimé had not even read this letter to the end, being able to make nothing of it and suspecting a hoax. When I had explained to him who the Baron was, he appeared to be lost in thought and to be feeling the regret that M. de Charlus had anticipated. I would not be prepared to swear that he might not at that moment have written a letter of apology to a man who gave carriages to his friends. But in the interval M. de Charlus had made Morel’s acquaintance. At most, his relations with Morel being possibly platonic, M. de Charlus occasionally sought to spend an evening in company such as that in which I had just met him in the hall. But he was no longer able to divert from Morel the violent feelings which, unfettered a few years earlier, had been only too ready to fasten themselves upon Aimé and had dictated the letter which had embarrassed me for its writer’s sake when the head waiter showed me it. It was, because of the anti-social nature of M. de Charlus’s love, a more striking example of the insensible, sweeping force of those currents of passion by which the lover, like a swimmer, is very soon carried out of sight of land. No doubt the love of a normal man may also, when the lover through the successive fabrications of his desires, regrets, disappointments, plans, constructs a whole novel about a woman whom he does not know, cause the two legs of the compass to gape at a fairly considerable angle. All the same, such an angle was singularly widened by the character of a passion which is not generally shared and by the difference in social position between M. de Charlus and Aimé.

Every day I went out with Albertine. She had decided to take up painting again and had chosen as the subject of her first attempts the church of Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise which nobody ever visited and very few had even heard of, which was difficult to get directions to, impossible to find without being guided, and laborious to reach in its isolation, more than half an hour from Epreville station, after one had long left behind one the last houses of the village of Quetteholme. As to the name Epreville, I found that the curé’s book and Brichot’s information were at variance. According to one, Epreville was the ancient Sprevilla; the other derived the name from Aprivilla. On our first visit we took a little train in the opposite direction from Féterne, that is to say towards Grattevast. But we were in the dog days and it had been a terrible strain to leave immediately after lunch. I should have preferred not to set out so early; the luminous and burning air provoked thoughts of indolence and cool retreats. It filled my mother’s room and mine, according to their exposure, at varying temperatures, like rooms in a Turkish bath. Mamma’s bathroom, festooned by the sun with a dazzling, Moorish whiteness, appeared to be sunk at the bottom of a well, because of the four plastered walls on which it looked out, while far above, in the square gap, the sky, whose fleecy white waves could be seen gliding past, one above the other, seemed (because of the longing that one felt) like a tank filled with blue water and reserved for ablutions, either built on a terrace or seen upside down in a mirror fixed to the window. Notwithstanding this scorching temperature, we had taken the one o’clock train. But Albertine had been very hot in the carriage, hotter still in the long walk across country, and I was afraid of her catching cold when afterwards she had to sit still in that damp hollow where the sun’s rays did not penetrate. However, having realised as long ago as our first visits to Elstir that she would appreciate not merely luxury but even a certain degree of comfort of which her want of money deprived her, I had made arrangements with a Balbec livery stable for a carriage to be sent to fetch us every day. To escape from the heat we took the road through the forest of Chantepie. The invisibility of the innumerable birds, some of them sea-birds, that conversed with one another from the trees on either side of us, gave the same impression of repose as one has when one shuts one’s eyes. By Albertine’s side, clasped in her arms in the depths of the carriage, I listened to these Oceanides. And when by chance I caught sight of one of these musicians as he flitted from one leaf to the shelter of another, there was so little apparent connexion between him and his songs that I could not believe that I was seeing their cause in that tiny body, fluttering, humble, startled and unseeing. The carriage could not take us all the way to the church. I stopped it when we had passed through Quetteholme and bade Albertine good-bye. For she had alarmed me by saying to me of this church as of other monuments and of certain pictures: “What a pleasure it would be to see it with you!” This pleasure was one that I did not feel myself capable of giving her. I felt it myself in front of beautiful things only if I was alone or pretended to be alone and did not speak. But since she had hoped to be able, thanks to me, to experience artistic sensations that cannot be communicated thus, I thought it more prudent to say that I must leave her, that I would come back to fetch her at the end of the day, but that in the meantime I must go back with the carriage to pay a call on Mme Verdurin or on the Cambremers, or even spend an hour with Mamma at Balbec, but never further afield. To begin with, that is to say. For, Albertine having once said to me petulantly: “It’s a bore that nature has arranged things so badly and put Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise in one direction, La Raspelière in another, so that you’re imprisoned for the whole day in the spot you’ve chosen,” as soon as the toque and veil had come I ordered, to my eventual undoing, a motor-car from Saint-Fargeau (
Sanctus Ferreolus
, according to the curé’s book). Albertine, whom I had kept in ignorance and who had come to call for me, was surprised when she heard in front of the hotel the purr of the engine, delighted when she learned that this motor was for ourselves. I took her upstairs to my room for a moment. She jumped for joy. “Are we going to pay a call on the Verdurins?” “Yes, but you’d better not go dressed like that since you’ll have your motor-car. Here, you’ll look better in these.” And I brought out the toque and veil which I had hidden. “They’re for me? Oh! you are an angel,” she cried, throwing her arms round my neck. Aimé, who met us on the stairs, proud of Albertine’s smart attire and of our means of transport, for these vehicles were still comparatively rare at Balbec, could not resist the pleasure of coming downstairs behind us. Albertine, anxious to display herself in her new garments, asked me to have the hood raised; we could lower it later on when we wished to be more private. “Now then,” said Aimé to the driver, with whom he was not acquainted and who had not stirred, “don’t you (
tu
) hear, you’re to raise the hood?” For Aimé, sophisticated as a result of hotel life, in which moreover he had won his way to exalted rank, was not as shy as the cab driver to whom Françoise was a “lady”; despite the absence of any formal introduction, plebeians whom he had never seen before he addressed as
tu
, though it was hard to say whether this was aristocratic disdain on his part or democratic fraternity. “I’m engaged,” replied the chauffeur, who did not know me by sight. “I’m ordered for Mlle Simonet. I can’t take this gentleman.” Aimé burst out laughing: “Why, you great bumpkin,” he said to the driver, whom he at once convinced, “this is Mlle Simonet, and Monsieur, who wants you to open the roof of your car, is the person who has engaged you.” And since, although personally he had no great liking for Albertine, Aimé was for my sake proud of her get-up, he whispered to the chauffeur: “Don’t get the chance of driving a princess like that every day, do you?” On this first occasion I was unable to go to La Raspelière alone as I did on other days, while Albertine painted; she wanted to come there with me. Although she realised that it would be possible to stop here and there on our way, she could not believe that we could start by going to Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise, that is to say in another direction, and then make an excursion which seemed to be reserved for a different day. She learned on the contrary from the driver that nothing could be easier than to go to Saint-Jean, which he could do in twenty minutes, and that we might stay there if we chose for hours, or go on much further, for from Quetteholme to La Raspelière would not take more than thirty-five minutes. We realised this as soon as the vehicle, starting off, covered in one bound twenty paces of an excellent horse. Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with it. We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometres which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases. Art is modified by it also, since a village which seemed to be in a different world from some other village becomes its neighbour in a landscape whose dimensions are altered. In any case, to learn that there may perhaps exist a universe in which two and two make five and a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points would have astonished Albertine far less than to hear the driver say that it was easy to go in a single afternoon to Saint-Jean and La Raspelière. Douville and Quetteholme, Saint-Mars-le-Vieux and Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, Gourville and Balbec-le-Vieux, Tourville and Féterne, prisoners hitherto as hermetically confined in the cells of distinct days as long ago were Méséglise and Guermantes, upon which the same eyes could not gaze in the course of a single afternoon, delivered now by the giant with the seven-league boots, clustered around our tea-time with their towers and steeples and their old gardens which the neighbouring wood sprang back to reveal.

Coming to the foot of the cliff road, the car climbed effortlessly, with a continuous sound like that of a knife being ground, while the sea, falling away, widened beneath us. The old rustic houses of Montsurvent came rushing towards us, clasping to their bosoms vine or rose-bush; the firs of La Raspelière, more agitated than when the evening breeze was rising, ran in every direction to escape from us, and a new servant whom I had never seen before came to open the door for us on the terrace while the gardener’s son, betraying a precocious bent, gazed intently at the engine. As it was not a Monday we did not know whether we should find Mme Verdurin, for except on that day, when she had guests, it was unsafe to call upon her without warning. No doubt she was “in principle” at home, but this expression, which Mme Swann employed at the time when she too was seeking to form her little clan and attract customers without herself moving (even though she often did not get her money’s worth) and which she mistranslated into “on principle,” meant no more than “as a general rule,” that is to say with frequent exceptions. For not only did Mme Verdurin like going out, but she carried her duties as a hostess to extreme lengths, and when she had had people to lunch, immediately after the coffee, liqueurs and cigarettes (notwithstanding the first somnolent effects of heat and digestion in which they would have preferred to watch through the leafy boughs of the terrace the Jersey packet sailing across the enamelled sea), the programme included a series of excursions in the course of which her guests, forced into carriages, were conveyed willy-nilly to look at one or other of the beauty spots that abound in the neighbourhood of Douville. This second part of the entertainment was, as it happened (once the effort to get up and climb into a carriage had been made), no less satisfying than the other to the guests, already conditioned by the succulent dishes, the vintage wines or sparkling cider to be easily intoxicated by the purity of the breeze and the magnificence of the sights. Mme Verdurin used to show these to visitors rather as though they were annexes (more or less detached) of her property, which you could not help going to see if you came to lunch with her and which conversely you would never have known had you not been entertained by the Mistress. This claim to arrogate to herself the exclusive right over the local sights, as over Morel’s and formerly Dechambre’s playing, and to compel the landscapes to form part of the little clan, was not in fact as absurd as it appears at first sight. Mme Verdurin deplored not only the lack of taste which in her opinion the Cambremers showed in the furnishing of La Raspelière and the arrangement of the garden, but also the excursions they made, with or without their guests, in the surrounding countryside. Just as, according to her, La Raspelière was only beginning to become what it should always have been now that it was the asylum of the little clan, so she insisted that the Cambremers, perpetually exploring in their barouche, along the railway line, by the shore, the one ugly road in the district, had been living in the place all their lives but did not know it. There was a grain of truth in this assertion. From force of habit, lack of imagination, want of interest in a country which seemed hackneyed because it was so near, the Cambremers when they left their home went always to the same places and by the same roads. To be sure, they laughed heartily at the Verdurins’ pretensions to teach them about their own countryside. But if they were driven into a corner they and even their coachman would have been incapable of taking us to the splendid, more or less secret places to which M. Verdurin brought us, now breaking through the fence of a private but deserted property into which other people would not have thought it possible to venture, now leaving the carriage to follow a path which was not wide enough for wheeled traffic, but in either case with the certain recompense of a marvellous view. It must also be said that the garden at La Raspelière was in a sense a compendium of all the excursions to be made in a radius of many miles—in the first place because of its commanding position, overlooking on one side the valley, on the other the sea, and also because, on one and the same side, the seaward side for instance, clearings had been made through the trees in such a way that from one point you embraced one horizon, from another a different one. There was at each of these vantage points a bench; you went and sat down in turn upon the bench from which there was the view of Balbec, or Parville, or Douville. Even to command a single direction, one bench would have been placed more or less on the edge of the cliff, another set back. From the latter you had a foreground of verdure and a horizon which seemed already the vastest imaginable, but which became infinitely larger if, continuing along a little path, you went to the next bench from which you embraced the whole amphitheatre of the sea. There you could catch distinctly the sound of the waves, which did not penetrate to the more secluded parts of the garden, where the sea was still visible but no longer audible. These resting-places were known by the occupants of La Raspelière by the name of “views.” And indeed they assembled round the château the finest views of the neighbouring villages, beaches or forests, seen greatly diminished by distance, as Hadrian collected in his villa reduced models of the most famous monuments of different regions. The name that followed the word “view” was not necessarily that of a place on the coast, but often that of the opposite shore of the bay which you could make out, standing out in a certain relief notwithstanding the extent of the panorama. Just as you took a book from M. Verdurin’s library to go and read for an hour at the “view of Balbec,” so if the sky was clear the liqueurs would be served at the “view of Rivebelle,” on condition however that the wind was not too strong, for, in spite of the trees planted on either side, the air up there was keen.