The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (331 page)

The charming apostolic motorist smiled a subtle smile, his hand resting upon the consecration-cross of his wheel.
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Then he answered me in the following words which (banishing all the anxiety from my heart and filling it instead with joy) made me want to fling my arms round his neck.

“Never fear,” he said to me. “Nothing can happen to her, for when my wheel isn’t guiding her, my eye follows her everywhere. At Versailles, I went quietly along and visited the town with her, as you might say. From the Reservoirs she went to the Château, from the Château to the two Trianons, with me following her all the time without appearing to see her, and the amazing thing is that she never saw me. Oh, even if she had it wouldn’t have been such a calamity. It was only natural, since I had the whole day before me with nothing to do, that I should visit the Château too. All the more so because Mademoiselle certainly can’t have failed to notice that I’ve read a bit myself and take an interest in all those old curiosities.” (This was true; indeed I should have been surprised if I had learned that he was a friend of Morel’s, so far did he surpass the violinist in taste and sensitivity.) “Anyhow, she didn’t see me.”

“She must have met some of her friends, of course, for she has several at Versailles.”

“No, she was alone all the time.”

“Then people must have stared at her, such a dazzling young lady all by herself.”

“Why, of course they stared at her, but she knew practically nothing about it; she went round all the time with her eyes glued to her guide-book, or gazing up at the pictures.”

The chauffeur’s story seemed to me all the more accurate in that it was indeed a postcard representing the Chateau, and another representing the two Trianons, that Albertine had sent me on the day of her visit. The care with which the obliging chauffeur had followed every step of her itinerary touched me deeply. How could I have supposed that this rectification—in the form of a generous amplification—of the account he had given two days earlier was due to the fact that in those two days Albertine, alarmed that the chauffeur should have spoken to me, had submitted and made her peace with him? This suspicion never even occurred to me. What is certain is that this version of the chauffeur’s story, by ridding me of any fear that Albertine might have deceived me, quite naturally cooled my ardour towards my mistress and made me take less interest in the day that she had spent at Versailles. I think, however, that the chauffeur’s explanations, which, by absolving Albertine, made her seem even more boring to me than before, would not perhaps have been sufficient to calm me so quickly. Two little pimples which she had on her forehead for a few days were perhaps even more effective in modifying the feelings of my heart. Finally, these feelings were diverted further
still from her (so far that I was conscious of her existence only when I set eyes on her) by the strange confidence volunteered me by Gilberte’s maid, whom I met by chance. I learned that, when I used to go to see Gilberte every day, she was in love with a young man of whom she saw a great deal more than of myself. I had had a momentary inkling of this at the time, and indeed I had questioned this very maid. But, as she knew that I was in love with Gilberte, she had denied the story, had sworn that Mlle Swann had never set eyes on the young man. Now, however, knowing that my love had long since died, that for years past I had left all her letters unanswered—and also perhaps because she was no longer in Gilberte’s service—of her own accord she gave me a full account of the amorous episode of which I had known nothing. This seemed to her quite natural. I assumed, remembering the oaths she had sworn at the time, that she had not been aware of what was going on. Not at all; it was she herself who used to go, on the orders of Mme Swann, to inform the young man whenever the one I loved was alone. The one I loved then … But I asked myself whether my love of those days was as dead as I thought, for this story pained me. Since I do not believe that jealousy can revive a dead love, I supposed that my painful impression was due, in part at least, to the injury to my self-esteem, for a number of people whom I did not like and who at that time and even a little later—their attitude has since altered—affected a contemptuous attitude towards me, knew perfectly well, while I was in love with Gilberte, that I was being duped. And this made me wonder retrospectively whether in my love for Gilberte there had not been an element of self-love, since it so pained
me now to discover that all the hours of tenderness which had made me so happy were recognised, by people I did not like, as downright deception on Gilberte’s part at my expense. In any case, love or self-love, Gilberte was almost dead in me, but not entirely, and the result of this chagrin was to prevent me from worrying unduly about Albertine, who occupied so small a place in my heart. Nevertheless, to return to her (after so long a digression) and to her expedition to Versailles, the postcards of Versailles (is it possible, then, to have one’s heart thus obliquely assailed by two simultaneous and interwoven jealousies, each inspired by a different person?) gave me a slightly disagreeable impression whenever my eye fell upon them as I tidied my papers. And I thought that if the chauffeur had not been such a worthy fellow, the accordance of his second narrative with Albertine’s cards would not have amounted to much, for what are the first things that people send you from Versailles but the Chateau and the Trianons, unless the cards have been chosen by some sophisticated person who adores a certain statue, or by some idiot who selects as a “view” of Versailles the horse tramway station or the goods depot.

But perhaps I am wrong in saying an idiot, such postcards not having always been bought by a person of that sort at random, for their interest as coming from Versailles. For two whole years men of intelligence, artists, used to find Siena, Venice, Granada a “bore,” and would say of the humblest omnibus, of every railway carriage: “There you have true beauty.” Then this fancy passed like the rest. Indeed, I am not sure that people did not revert to the “sacrilege of destroying the noble relics of the
past.” At any rate, a first-class railway carriage ceased to be regarded as
a priori
more beautiful than St Mark’s in Venice. People continued to say: “Here you have real life, the return to the past is artificial,” but without drawing any definite conclusion. At all events, while retaining full confidence in the chauffeur, to ensure that Albertine would be unable to desert him without his daring to stop her for fear of being taken for a spy, I no longer allowed her to go out after this without the reinforcement of Andrée, whereas for a time I had found the chauffeur sufficient. I had even allowed her then (a thing I would never dare do now) to stay away for three whole days by herself with the chauffeur and to go almost as far as Balbec, such a craving did she have for travelling at high speed in an open car. Three days during which my mind had been quite at rest, although the rain of postcards that she had showered upon me did not reach me, owing to the appalling state of the Breton postal system (good in summer, but disorganised, no doubt, in winter), until a week after the return of Albertine and the chauffeur, so hale and hearty that on the very morning of their return they resumed their daily outings as though nothing had happened. I was delighted that Albertine should be going this afternoon to the Trocadéro, to this “special” matinee, but above all reassured by the fact that she would have a companion there in the shape of Andrée.

Dismissing these reflexions, now that Albertine had gone out, I went and stood for a moment at the window. There was at first a silence, amid which the whistle of the tripe vendor and the hooting of the trams reverberated through the air in different octaves, like a blind piano-tuner. Then gradually the interwoven motifs became distinct,
and others were combined with them. There was also a new whistle, the call of a vendor the nature of whose wares I never discovered, a whistle that exactly resembled the whistle of the trams, and since it was not carried out of earshot by its own velocity, it gave the impression of a single tram-car, not endowed with motion, or broken down, immobilised, screeching at brief intervals like a dying animal.

And I felt that, should I ever have to leave this aristocratic quarter—unless it were to move to one that was entirely plebeian—the streets and boulevards of central Paris (where the greengrocery, fishmongering and other trades, established in big stores, rendered superfluous the cries of the street hawkers, who in any case would have been unable to make themselves heard) would seem to me very dreary, quite uninhabitable, stripped, drained of all these litanies of the small trades and itinerant victuals, deprived of the orchestra that came every morning to charm me. On the pavement a woman with no pretence to fashion (or else obedient to an ugly fashion) came past, too brightly dressed in a sack overcoat of goatskin; but no, it was not a woman, it was a chauffeur who, enveloped in his goatskin, was proceeding on foot to his garage. Winged messengers of variegated hue, escaped from the big hotels, were speeding towards the stations bent over their handlebars, to meet the arrivals by the morning trains. The whirring of a violin was due at one time to the passing of a car, at another to my not having put enough water in my electric hot-water bottle. In the middle of the symphony an old-fashioned tune rang out; replacing the sweet-seller, who generally accompanied her song with a rattle, the toy-seller, to whose kazoo was attached a jumping-jack
which he sent bobbing in all directions, paraded other puppets for sale, and, indifferent to the ritual declamation of Gregory the Great, the reformed declamation of Palestrina or the lyrical declamation of the moderns, warbled at the top of his voice, a belated adherent of pure melody:

Making no attempt to compete with this lively aria, little Italians in berets offered their statuettes for sale in silence. Soon, however, a young fifer compelled the toy merchant to move on and to chant more inaudibly, though in brisk time: “Come along all you mammies and dads!” Was this young fifer one of the dragoons whom I used to hear in the mornings at Donciéres? No, for what followed was: “Here comes the china restorer. I repair glass, marble, crystal, bone, ivory and antiques. Here comes the restorer.” In a butcher’s shop, between an aureole of sunshine on the left and a whole ox suspended from a hook on the right, a young assistant, very tall and slender, with fair hair and a long neck emerging from a sky-blue collar, was displaying a lightning speed and a religious conscientiousness in putting on one side the most exquisite fillets of beef, on the other the coarsest parts of the rump, and placing them on glittering scales surmounted by a cross from which there dangled a set of beautiful chains, and—although he did nothing afterwards
but arrange in the window a display of kidneys, steaks and ribs—was really far more reminiscent of a handsome angel who, on the Day of Judgment, will organise for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the wicked and the weighing of souls. And once again the thin, shrill music of the fife rose into the air, herald no longer of the destruction that Françoise used to dread whenever a regiment of cavalry filed past, but of “repairs” promised by an “antiquary,” simpleton or rogue, who, in either case highly eclectic and very far from specialising, applied his art to the most diverse materials. The little bakers’ girls hastened to stuff into their baskets the long loaves ordered for some luncheon party, while the dairymaids deftly attached the milk-churns to their yokes. Could it, I wondered, be altogether warranted, the nostalgic view I had of these young creatures? Would it not have been different if I had been able to detain for a few moments at close quarters one of those whom from the height of my window I saw only inside their shops or in motion? To estimate the loss that I suffered by my seclusion, that is to say the riches that the day had to offer me, I should have had to intercept in the long unwinding of the animated frieze some damsel carrying her laundry or her milk, transfer her for a moment, like the silhouette of a mobile piece of stage decor between its supports, into the frame of my door, and keep her there before my eyes for long enough to elicit some information about her which would enable me to find her again some day, like the identification discs which ornithologists or ichthyologists attach before setting them free to the legs or bellies of the birds or fishes whose migrations they are anxious to trace.

And so I told Françoise that I wanted some shopping done, and asked her to send up to me, should any of them call, one or other of the girls who were constantly coming to the house with laundry or bread or jugs of milk, and whom she herself used often to send on errands. In doing so I was like Elstir, who, obliged to remain closeted in his studio, on certain days in spring when the knowledge that the woods were full of violets gave him a hunger to see some, used to send his concierge out to buy him a bunch; and then it was not the table upon which he had posed the little floral model, but the whole carpet of undergrowth where in other years he had seen, in their thousands, the serpentine stems bowed beneath the weight of their tiny blue heads, that Elstir would fancy that he had before his eyes, like an imaginary zone defined in his studio by the limpid odour of the evocative flower.

Of a laundry girl, on a Sunday, there was not the slightest prospect. As for the baker’s girl, as ill luck would have it she had rung the bell when Françoise was not about, had left her loaves in their basket on the landing, and had made off. The greengrocer’s girl would not call until much later. Once, I had gone to order a cheese at the dairy, and among the various young female employees had noticed a startling towhead, tall in stature though little more than a child, who seemed to be day-dreaming, amid the other errand-girls, in a distinctly haughty attitude. I had seen her from a distance only, and for so brief an instant that I could not have described her appearance, except to say that she must have grown too fast and that her head supported a mane that gave the impression far less of capillary characteristics than of a sculptor’s stylised
rendering of the separate meanderings of parallel snow-tracks on a mountainside. This was all that I had been able to make out, apart from a sharply defined nose (a rare thing in a child) in a thin face, which recalled the beaks of baby vultures. It was not only the clustering of her comrades round her that prevented me from seeing her distinctly, but also my uncertainty whether the sentiments which I might, at first sight and subsequently, inspire in her would be those of shy pride, or of irony, or of a scorn which she would express later on to her friends. These alternative suppositions which I had formed about her in a flash had thickened the blurred atmosphere around her in which she was veiled like a goddess in a cloud shaken by thunder. For moral uncertainty is a greater obstacle to an exact visual perception than any defect of vision would be. In this too skinny young person, who also struck one’s attention too forcibly, the excess of what another person would perhaps have called her charms was precisely what was calculated to repel me, but had nevertheless had the effect of preventing me from even noticing, let alone remembering, anything about the other dairymaids, whom the aquiline nose of this one and her uninviting look, pensive, private, seeming to be passing judgment, had totally eclipsed, as a white streak of lightning plunges the surrounding countryside into darkness. And thus, of my call to order a cheese at the dairy, I had remembered (if one can say “remember” in speaking of someone so carelessly observed that one adapts to the nullity of the face ten different noses in succession), I had remembered only the girl I had found unpleasing. This can be enough to set a love affair in motion. And yet I might have forgotten the startling towhead and might
never have wished to see her again, had not Françoise told me that, though still quite a nipper, she had all her wits about her and would shortly be leaving her employer, since she had been going too fast and owed money in the neighbourhood. It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure may be a beginning of beauty.