The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (329 page)

“Françoise assured me that you were awake and that I wouldn’t be disturbing you,” said Albertine as she entered the room. And since, next to making me catch cold by opening the window at the wrong moment, what Albertine most dreaded was to come into my room when I was asleep: “I hope I haven’t done wrong,” she went on. “I was afraid you’d say to me:

And she laughed that laugh which I always found so disturbing.

I replied in the same jesting vein:

And, lest she should ever venture to infringe it, added: “Although I’d be furious if you did wake me.”

“I know, I know, don’t be frightened,” said Albertine.

To show that I was mollified, I added, still enacting the scene from
Esther
with her, while in the street below the cries continued, drowned by our conversation:

(and to myself I thought: “Yes, she does weary me very often”). And remembering what she had said to me the night before, as I thanked her extravagantly for having given up the Verdurins, so that another time she would obey me similarly with regard to something else, I said: “Albertine, you distrust me although I love you and you place your trust in people who don’t love you” (as though it were not natural to distrust the people who love you and who alone have an interest in lying to you in order to find out things, to thwart you), and added these lying words: “It’s funny, you don’t really believe that I love you. As a matter of fact, I don’t
adore
you.” She lied in her turn when she told me that she trusted nobody but myself and then became sincere when she assured me that she knew quite well that I loved her. But this affirmation
did not seem to imply that she did not believe me to be a liar who spied on her. And she seemed to forgive me as though she saw these defects as the agonising consequence of a great love or as though she herself did not feel entirely guiltless.

“I beg of you, my darling girl, no more of that trick riding you were practising the other day. Just think, Albertine, if you were to have an accident?”
^*

Of course I did not wish her any harm. But how delighted I should have been if, with her horses, she had taken it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and never come back to my house again! How it would have simplified everything, that she should go and live happily somewhere else, I did not even wish to know where!

“Oh! I know you wouldn’t survive me for forty-eight hours. You’d kill yourself.”
^*

Thus did we exchange lying speeches. But a truth more profound than that which we would utter were we sincere may sometimes be expressed and announced by another channel than that of sincerity.

“You don’t mind all that noise outside?” she asked me. “Personally I love it. But you’re such a light sleeper.”

I was on the contrary often an extremely heavy sleeper (as I have already said, but am compelled to repeat in view of what follows), especially when I only fell asleep in the morning. As this kind of sleep is—on an average—four times as refreshing, it seems to the awakened sleeper to have lasted four times as long, when it has really been four times as short. A splendid, sixteenfold error in multiplication which gives so much beauty to our awakening and gives life a veritable new dimension, like
those drastic changes of rhythm which, in music, mean that in an andante a quaver has the same duration as a minim in a prestissimo, and which are unknown in our waking state. There, life is almost always the same, whence the disappointments of travel. Yet it would seem that our dreams are sometimes made of the coarsest stuff of life, but that stuff is as it were treated, kneaded so thoroughly—with a protraction due to the fact that none of the temporal limitations of the waking state is there to prevent it from tapering off into unbelievable heights—that we fail to recognise it. On the mornings after this good fortune had befallen me, after the sponge of sleep had wiped from my brain the signs of everyday occupations that are traced upon it as on a blackboard, I was obliged to bring my memory back to life; by an exercise of will we can recapture what the amnesia of sleep or of a stroke has made us forget, what gradually returns to us as our eyes open or our paralysis disappears. I had lived through so many hours in a few minutes that, wishing to address Françoise, for whom I had rung, in words that corresponded to the facts of real life and were regulated by the clock, I was obliged to exert all my inner power of compression in order not to say: “Well, Françoise, here we are at five o’clock in the evening and I haven’t set eyes on you since yesterday afternoon.” And seeking to dispel my dreams, giving them the lie and lying to myself as well, I said brazenly, compelling myself with all my might to silence, the direct opposite: “Françoise, it must be at least ten o’clock!” I did not even say ten o’clock in the morning, but simply ten o’clock, so that this incredible hour might appear to be uttered in a more natural tone. And yet to say these words, instead of those that continued
to run in the mind of the half-awakened sleeper that I still was, demanded the same effort of equilibrium that a man requires when, jumping out of a moving train and running for some yards along the platform, he manages to avoid falling. He runs for a moment because the environment that he has just left was one animated by great velocity, and utterly unlike the inert soil to which his feet find it difficult to accustom themselves.

Because the dream world is not the waking world, it does not follow that the waking world is less real; far from it. In the world of sleep, our perceptions are so overloaded, each of them blanketed by a superimposed counterpart which doubles its bulk and blinds it to no purpose, that we are unable even to distinguish what is happening in the bewilderment of awakening: was it Françoise who had come to me, or I who, tired of calling her, went to her? Silence at that moment was the only way of revealing nothing, as when we are brought before a magistrate cognisant of all the charges against us when we ourselves have not been informed of them. Was it Françoise who had come, or was it I who had summoned her? Was it not, indeed, Françoise who had been asleep and I who had just awoken her? To go further still, was not Françoise contained within me, for the distinction between persons and their interaction barely exists in that murky obscurity in which reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine, and our all but non-existent perception may perhaps give us an idea of the perception of certain animals? Besides, in the state of limpid unreason that precedes these heavy slumbers, if fragments of wisdom float there luminously, if the names of Taine and George Eliot are not unknown, the waking state remains
none the less superior to the extent that it is possible to continue it every morning, but not to continue the dream life every night. But perhaps there are other worlds more real than the waking world. Even it we have seen transformed by each new revolution in the arts, and still more, at the same time, by the degree of proficiency or culture that distinguishes an artist from an ignorant fool.

And often an extra hour of sleep is an attack of paralysis after which we must recover the use of our limbs and learn to speak. Our will would not be adequate for this task. We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of the jellyfish follows, in which we could equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from gaol, were we but capable of thinking anything at all. But then from the highest heaven the goddess Mnemotechnia bends down and holds out to us in the formula “the habit of ringing for coffee” the hope of resurrection. Even then, the instantaneous gift of memory is not always so simple. Often we have at our disposal, in those first minutes in which we allow ourselves to glide into the waking state, a variety of different realities among which we imagine that we can choose as from a pack of cards. It is Friday morning and we have just returned from a walk, or else it is teatime by the sea. The idea of sleep and that we are lying in bed in our nightshirt is often the last thing that occurs to us. The resurrection is not effected at once; we think we have rung the bell, but we have not done so, and we utter senseless remarks. Movement alone restores thought, and when we have actually pressed the electric
button we are able to say slowly but distinctly: “It must be at least ten o’clock, Françoise. Bring me my coffee.”

Françoise,
mirabile dictu
, could have had no suspicion of the sea of unreality in which I was still wholly immersed and through which I had had the energy to make my strange question penetrate. Her answer would be: “It’s ten past ten,” which made me appear quite rational and enabled me not to betray the fantastic conversations by which I had been interminably lulled (on days when a mountain of non-existence had not crushed all life out of me). By force of will, I had reintegrated myself with reality. I was still enjoying the last shreds of sleep, that is to say of the only source of invention, the only novelty that exists in story-telling, since none of our narrations in the waking state, even when embellished with literary graces, admit those mysterious differences from which beauty derives. It is easy to speak of the beauty created by opium. But to a man who is accustomed to sleeping only with the aid of drugs, an unexpected hour of natural sleep will reveal the vast, matutinal expanse of a landscape as mysterious and more refreshing. By varying the hour and the place in which we go to sleep, by wooing sleep in an artificial manner, or on the contrary by returning for a day to natural sleep—the strangest kind of all to whomsoever is in the habit of putting himself to sleep with soporifics—we succeed in producing a thousand times as many varieties of sleep as a gardener could produce of carnations or roses. Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares. When I fell asleep in a certain way I used to wake up shivering, thinking that I had caught the measles, or, what was far more painful, that my grandmother (of whom I no longer
ever thought) was hurt because I had mocked her that day at Balbec when, in the belief that she was about to die, she had wished me to have a photograph of her. At once, although I was awake, I felt that I must go and explain to her that she had misunderstood me. But already my bodily warmth was returning. The diagnosis of measles was set aside, and my grandmother was so far away that she no longer made my heart ache.

Sometimes over these different kinds of sleep a sudden darkness fell. I was afraid to continue my walk along an entirely unlighted avenue, where I could hear prowling foot-steps. Suddenly an argument broke out between a policeman and one of those women whom one often saw driving hackney carriages, and mistook at a distance for young coachmen. Upon her box among the shadows I could not see her, but she was speaking, and in her voice I could read the perfections of her face and the youthfulness of her body. I strode towards her, in the darkness, to get into her carriage before she drove off. It was a long way. Fortunately, her argument with the policeman was prolonged. I overtook the carriage which was still stationary. This part of the avenue was lighted by street lamps. The driver became visible. It was indeed a woman, but large and old and corpulent, with white hair tumbling beneath her cap, and a strawberry mark on her face. I walked past her, thinking: “Is this what happens to the youth of women? If we have a sudden desire to see those we have met in the past, have they grown old? Is the young woman we desire like a character on the stage when, through the defection of the actress who created the part, the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star? But then it is no longer the same.”

Then I would be overcome with a feeling of sadness. We have thus in our sleep countless images of pity, like Renaissance Pietà’s, not, like them, wrought in marble, but on the contrary unsubstantial. They have their purpose, however, which is to remind us of a more compassionate, more humane view of things, which we are too apt to forget in the icy common sense, sometimes full of hostility, of the waking state. Thus I was reminded of the vow that I had made at Balbec that I would always treat Françoise with compassion. And for the whole of that morning at least I would manage to compel myself not to be irritated by Françoise’s quarrels with the butler, to be gentle with Françoise to whom everyone else showed so little kindness. For that morning only, and I would have to try to frame a code that was a little more permanent; for, just as nations are not governed for any length of time by a policy of pure sentiment, so men are not governed for long by the memory of their dreams. Already this dream was beginning to fade away. In attempting to recall it in order to portray it I made it fade all the faster. My eyelids were no longer so firmly sealed over my eyes. If I tried to reconstruct my dream, they would open completely. We must constantly choose between health and sanity on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been cowardly enough to choose the former. Moreover, the perilous power that I was renouncing was even more perilous than one might suppose. Those dreams, those images of pity, do not fly away alone. When we alter thus the conditions in which we go to sleep, it is not our dreams alone that fade, but, for days on end, sometimes for years, the faculty not merely of dreaming but of going to sleep. Sleep is divine but by no
means stable; the slightest shock makes it volatile. A friend to habit, it is kept night after night in its appointed place by habit, more steadfast than itself, protected from any possible disturbance; but if it is displaced, if it is no longer subjugated, it melts away like a vapour. It is like youth and love, never to be recaptured.

In these various forms of sleep, as likewise in music, it was the lengthening or shortening of the interval that created beauty. I enjoyed this beauty, but on the other hand I had missed in my sleep, however brief, a good number of the street cries which render perceptible to us the peripatetic life of the tradesmen, the victuallers of Paris. And so, habitually (without, alas, foreseeing the drama in which these late awakenings and the draconian, Medo-Persian laws of a Racinian Assuerus were presently to involve me) I made an effort to wake early so as to miss none of these cries. In addition to the pleasure of knowing how fond Albertine was of them and of being out of doors myself without leaving my bed, I heard in them as it were the symbol of the atmosphere of the world outside, of the dangerous stirring life through the midst of which I did not allow her to move save under my tutelage, in an external prolongation of her seclusion, and from which I withdrew her at the hour of my choosing to make her return home to my side.