The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (30 page)

And then it happened that, along the Guermantes way, I sometimes passed beside well-watered little enclosures, over whose hedges rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop, hoping to gain some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my eyes a fragment of that fluvial country which I had longed so much to see and know since coming upon a description of it by one of my favourite authors. And it was with that storybook land, with its imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that Guermantes, changing its aspect in my mind, became identified, after I heard Dr Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and fountains that were to be seen there in the ducal park. I used to dream that Mme de Guermantes, taking a sudden capricious fancy to me, invited me there, that all day long she stood fishing for trout by my side. And when evening came, holding my hand in hers, as we passed by the little gardens of her vassals she would point out to me the flowers that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls, and would teach me all their names. She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps some malady of the brain was
hindering its development. Sometimes I would rely on my father to settle it all for me. He was so powerful, in such high favour with people in office, that he made it possible for us to transgress laws which Françoise had taught me to regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we were allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repointing of the walls of our house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris, or when he obtained permission from the Minister for Mme Sazerat’s son, who had been ordered to some watering-place, to take his baccalaureate two months in advance, among the candidates whose surnames began with “A,” instead of having to wait his turn as an “S.” If I had fallen seriously ill, if I had been captured by brigands, convinced that my father’s understanding with the supreme powers was too complete, that his letters of introduction to the Almighty were too irresistible for my illness or captivity to turn out to be anything but vain illusions, in which no danger actually threatened me, I should have awaited with perfect composure the inevitable hour of my return to comfortable realities, of my deliverance from bondage or restoration to health; and perhaps this lack of genius, this black cavity which gaped in my mind when I ransacked it for the theme of my future writings, was itself no more than an insubstantial illusion, and would vanish with the intervention of my father, who must have agreed with the Government and with Providence that I should be the foremost writer of the day. But at other times, while my parents were growing impatient at seeing me loiter behind instead of following them, my present life, instead of seeming an artificial creation of my father’s which he could modify as he chose, appeared, on the contrary, to
be comprised in a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit, from whose judgments there was no appeal, within which I had no friend or ally, and beyond which no further possibilities lay concealed. It seemed to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever, despite the encouragement Bloch had given me. This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering words that might be lavished upon me, as a wicked man whose good deeds are praised by all is gnawed by secret remorse.

One day my mother said to me: “You’re always talking about Mme de Guermantes. Well, Dr Percepied took great care of her when she was ill four years ago, and so she’s coming to Combray for his daughter’s wedding. You’ll be able to see her in church.” It was from Dr Percepied, as it happened, that I had heard most about Mme de Guermantes, and he had even shown us the number of an illustrated paper in which she was depicted in the costume she had worn at a fancy dress ball given by the Princesse de Léon.

Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the verger, by moving to one side, enabled me to see in one of the chapels a fair-haired lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy and new and bright, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose. And because on the surface of her face, which was red, as though she had been very hot, I could discern, diluted and barely perceptible, fragments of resemblance with the
portrait that had been shown to me; because, more especially, the particular features which I remarked in this lady, if I attempted to catalogue them, formulated themselves in precisely the same terms—
a large nose, blue eyes
—as Dr Percepied had used when describing in my presence the Duchesse de Guermantes, I said to myself: “This lady is like the Duchesse de Guermantes.” Now the chapel from which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad, beneath the flat tombstones of which, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb, rested the bones of the old Counts of Brabant; and I remembered having heard it said that this chapel was reserved for the Guermantes family, whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; hence there was only one woman resembling the portrait of Mme de Guermantes who on that day, the very day on which she was expected to come there, could conceivably be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment was immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of Mme de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a stained-glass window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had it occurred to me that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Mme Sazerat; and the oval curve of her cheeks reminded me so strongly of people whom I had seen at home that the suspicion crossed my mind (though it was immediately banished) that in her causal principle, in the molecules of her physical composition, this lady was perhaps not substantially the Duchesse de Guermantes, but that her body, in ignorance of the name that people had given it, belonged to a certain female type
which included also the wives of doctors and tradesmen. “So that’s Mme de Guermantes—that’s all she is!” were the words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with which I gazed upon this image which, naturally enough, bore no resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of “Mme de Guermantes,” appeared in my dreams, since it had not, like the others, been formed arbitrarily by myself but had leapt to my eyes for the first time only a moment ago, here in church; an image which was not of the same nature, was not colourable at will like those others that allowed themselves to be impregnated with the amber hue of a sonorous syllable, but was so real that everything, down to the fiery little spot at the corner of her nose, attested to her subjection to the laws of life, as, in a transformation scene on the stage, a crease in the fairy’s dress, a quivering of her tiny finger, betray the physical presence of a living actress, whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely at a projection from a lantern.

But at the same time, I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision (perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Mme de Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image, the idea: “It’s Mme de Guermantes”; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes with a space between. But this Mme de Guermantes of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent
of myself, acquired an even greater power over my imagination, which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from what it had expected, began to react and to say to me: “Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes had the right of life and death over their vassals; the Duchesse de Guermantes descends from Geneviève de Brabant. She does not know, nor would she consent to know, any of the people who are here today.”

And then—oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray alone as far as it may choose—while Mme de Guermantes sat in the chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze wandered here and there, rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested momentarily upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but a ray of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared conscious of where it fell. As for Mme de Guermantes herself, since she remained motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to notice the mischievous impudence and the indiscreet advances of her children when, in the course of their play, they accost people whom she does not know, it was impossible for me to determine whether, in the careless detachment of her soul, she approved or condemned the vagrancy of her eyes.

I felt it to be important that she should not leave the church before I had been able to look at her for long enough, reminding myself that for years past I had regarded the sight of her as a thing eminently to be desired, and I kept my eyes fixed on her, as though by gazing at her I should be able to carry away and store up inside
myself the memory of that prominent nose, those red cheeks, of all those details which struck me as so many precious, authentic and singular items of information with regard to her face. And now that all the thoughts I brought to bear upon it (especially, perhaps—a form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves—the familiar desire not to have been disappointed) made me think it beautiful, and I set her once again (since they were one and the same person, this lady who sat before me and that Duchesse de Guermantes whom I had hitherto conjured up in my imagination) apart from that common run of humanity with which the actual sight of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound her, I grew indignant when I heard people saying in the congregation round me: “She’s better looking than Mme Sazerat” or “than Mlle Vinteuil,” as though she was in any way comparable with them. And my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of the faces of other women, I cried out within myself as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: “How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant, that I have before me!” And the attention which I focused on her face succeeded in isolating it so completely that today, when I call that marriage ceremony to mind, I find it impossible to visualise any single person who was present except her, and the verger who answered me in the affirmative when I inquired whether the lady was indeed Mme de Guermantes. But I can see her still quite clearly, especially at the moment when the procession filed into the sacristy,
which was lit up by the intermittent warm sunshine of a windy and rainy day and in which Mme de Guermantes found herself in the midst of all those Combray people whose names she did not even know, but whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy too loudly for her not to feel sincerely benevolent towards them, and whom she might count on impressing even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and graciousness. And so, since she could not bring into play the deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs towards people one knows, but must allow her absent-minded thoughts to flow continuously from her eyes in a stream of blue light which she was powerless to contain, she was anxious not to embarrass or to appear to be disdainful of those humbler mortals whom it encountered on its way, on whom it was constantly falling. I can still see, above her mauve scarf, puffed and silky, the gentle astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to address it to anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his share of it, a rather shy smile as of a sovereign lady who seems to be making an apology for her presence among the vassals whom she loves. This smile fell upon me, who had never taken my eyes off her. And remembering the glance which she had let fall upon me during mass, blue as a ray of sunlight that had penetrated the window of Gilbert the Bad, I said to myself: “She must have taken notice of me.” I fancied that I had found favour in her eyes, that she would continue to think of me after she had left the church, and would perhaps feel sad that evening, at Guermantes, because of me. And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she should look on
us with contempt, as I supposed Mlle Swann to have done, and that we should think that she can never be ours, sometimes, too, it is enough that she should look on us kindly, as Mme de Guermantes was doing, and that we should think of her as almost ours already. Her eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, impossible to pluck, yet dedicated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from behind a threatening cloud and darting the full force of its rays on to the Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the red carpet laid down for the wedding, across which Mme de Guermantes was smilingly advancing, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a bloom of luminosity, that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterise certain pages of
Lohengrin
, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and make us understand how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet “delicious.”