The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (56 page)

“Ah! Princess, it’s easy to see you’re not a Guermantes for nothing. You have your share of it, all right, the wit of the Guermantes!”

“But people always talk about the wit of
the
Guermantes in the plural. I never could make out why. Do you really know any
others
who have it?” she rallied him, with a rippling flow of laughter, her features concentrated, yoked to the service of her animation, her eyes sparkling, blazing with a radiant sunshine of gaiety which could be kindled only by such observations—even if the Princess had to make them herself—as were in praise of her wit or of her beauty. “Look, there’s Swann talking to your Cambremer; over there, beside old mother Saint-Euverte, don’t you see him? Ask him to introduce you. But hurry up, he seems to be just going!”

“Did you notice how dreadfully ill he’s looking?” asked the General.

“My precious Charles? Ah, he’s coming at last. I was beginning to think he didn’t want to see me!”

Swann was extremely fond of the Princesse des Laumes, and the sight of her reminded him of Guermantes, the estate next to Combray, and all that country which he so dearly loved and had ceased to visit in order not to be separated from Odette. Slipping into the manner, half-artistic, half-amorous, with which he could always manage to amuse the Princess—a manner which came to him quite naturally whenever he dipped for a moment into the old social atmosphere—and wishing also to express in words, for his own satisfaction, the longing that he felt for the country:

“Ah!” he began in a declamatory tone, so as to be audible at once to Mme de Saint-Euverte, to whom he was
speaking, and to Mme des Laumes, for whom he was speaking, “Behold our charming Princess! Look, she has come up on purpose from Guermantes to hear Saint Francis preach to the birds, and has only just had time, like a dear little titmouse, to go and pick a few little hips and haws and put them in her hair; there are even some drops of dew upon them still, a little of the hoar-frost which must be making the Duchess shiver. It’s very pretty indeed, my dear Princess.”

“What! The Princess came up on purpose from Guermantes? But that’s too wonderful! I never knew; I’m quite overcome,” Mme de Saint-Euverte protested with quaint simplicity, being but little accustomed to Swann’s form of wit. And then, examining the Princess’s headdress, “Why, you’re quite right; it is copied from … what shall I say, not chestnuts, no—oh, it’s a delightful idea, but how can the Princess have known what was going to be on my programme? The musicians didn’t tell me, even.”

Swann, who was accustomed, when he was with a woman whom he had kept up the habit of addressing in terms of gallantry, to pay her delicate compliments which most society people were incapable of understanding, did not condescend to explain to Mme de Saint-Euverte that he had been speaking metaphorically. As for the Princess, she was in fits of laughter, both because Swann’s wit was highly appreciated by her set, and because she could never hear a compliment addressed to herself without finding it exquisitely subtle and irresistibly amusing.

“Well, I’m delighted, Charles, if my little hips and haws meet with your approval. But tell me, why did you
pay your respects to that Cambremer person, are you also her neighbour in the country?”

Mme de Saint-Euverte, seeing that the Princess seemed quite happy talking to Swann, had drifted away.

“But you are yourself, Princess!”

“I! Why, they must have ‘countries’ everywhere, those people! Don’t I wish I had!”

“No, not the Cambremers; her own people. She was a Legrandin, and used to come to Combray. I don’t know whether you’re aware that you are Comtesse de Combray, and that the Chapter owes you a due.”

“I don’t know what the Chapter owes me, but I do know that I’m touched for a hundred francs every year by the Curé, which is a due that I could do very well without. But surely these Cambremers have rather a startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!” she said with a laugh.
¹⁴

“It begins no better.” Swann took the point.

“Yes; that double abbreviation!”

“Someone very angry and very proper who didn’t dare to finish the first word.”

“But since he couldn’t stop himself beginning the second, he’d have done better to finish the first and be done with it. I must say our jokes are in really charming taste, my dear Charles … but how tiresome it is that I never see you now,” she went on in a winning tone, “I do so love talking to you. Just imagine, I couldn’t even have made that idiot Froberville see that there was anything funny about the name Cambremer. Do you agree that life is a dreadful business. It’s only when I see you that I stop feeling bored.”

Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had a similar way of looking at the little things of life, the effect—if not the cause—of which was a close analogy between their modes of expression and even of pronunciation. This similarity was not immediately striking because no two things could have been more unlike than their voices. But if one took the trouble to imagine Swann’s utterances divested of the sonority that enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one realised that they were the same phrases, the same inflexions, that they had the style of the Guermantes set. On important matters, Swann and the Princess had not an idea in common. But since Swann had become so melancholy, and was always in that tremulous condition which precedes the onset of tears, he felt the same need to speak about his grief as a murderer to speak about his crime. And when he heard the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, it gave him a feeling of solace as if she had spoken to him of Odette.

“Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear friend. What is so nice about you is that you’re not cheerful. We might spend an evening together.”

“By all means. Why not come down to Guermantes? My mother-in-law would be wild with joy. It’s supposed to be very ugly down there, but I must say I find the neighbourhood not at all unattractive; I have a horror of ‘picturesque spots’.”

“Yes, I know, it’s delightful!” replied Swann. “It’s almost too beautiful, too alive for me just at present; it’s a country to be happy in. It’s perhaps because I’ve lived there, but things there speak to me so. As soon as a
breath of wind gets up, and the cornfields begin to stir, I feel that someone is going to appear suddenly, that I’m going to hear some news; and those little houses by the water’s edge … I should be quite wretched!”

“Oh! my dear Charles, look out, there’s that appalling Rampillon woman; she’s seen me; please hide me. Remind me what it was that happened to her; I get so confused; she’s just married off her daughter, or her lover, I don’t know which; perhaps the two of them … to each other! Oh, no, I remember now, she’s been dropped by her prince … Pretend to be talking to me, so that the poor old Berenice shan’t come and invite me to dinner. Anyhow, I’m going. Listen, my dearest Charles, now that I’ve seen you for once, won’t you let me carry you off and take you to the Princesse de Parme’s? She’d be so pleased to see you, and Basin too, for that matter—he’s meeting me there. If one didn’t get news of you, sometimes, from Mémé … Imagine, I never see you at all now!”

Swann declined. Having told M. de Charlus that on leaving Mme de Saint-Euverte’s he would go straight home, he did not care to run the risk, by going on now to the Princesse de Parme’s, of missing a message which he had all the time been hoping to see brought in to him by one of the footmen during the party, and which he might perhaps find with his own porter when he got home.

“Poor Swann,” said Mme des Laumes that night to her husband, “he’s as charming as ever, but he does look so dreadfully unhappy. You’ll see for yourself, as he has promised to dine with us one of these days. I do feel it’s absurd that a man of his intelligence should let himself suffer for a woman of that sort, and one who isn’t even
interesting, for they tell me she’s an absolute idiot!” she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

Swann wanted to go home, but just as he was making his escape, General de Froberville caught him and asked for an introduction to Mme de Cambremer, and he was obliged to go back into the room with him to look for her.

“I say, Swann, I’d rather be married to that little woman than slaughtered by savages, what do you say?”

The words “slaughtered by savages” pierced Swann’s aching heart; and at once he felt the need to continue the conversation. “Ah!” he began, “some fine lives have been lost in that way … There was, you remember, that navigator whose remains Dumont d’Urville brought back, La Pérouse …” (and he was at once happy again, as though he had named Odette). “He was a fine character, and interests me very much, does La Pérouse,” he added with a melancholy air.

“Oh, yes, of course, La Pérouse,” said the General. “It’s quite a well-known name. There’s a street called that.”

“Do you know anyone in the Rue La Pérouse?” asked Swann excitedly.

“Only Mme de Chanlivault, the sister of that good fellow Chaussepierre. She gave a most amusing theatre-party the other evening. That’ll be a really elegant salon one of these days, you’ll see!”

“Oh, so she lives in the Rue La Pérouse. It’s attractive, a delightful street, so gloomy.”

“Not at all. You can’t have been in it for a long time; it isn’t gloomy now; they’re beginning to build all round there.”

When Swann did finally introduce M. de Froberville to the young Mme de Cambremer, since it was the first time she had heard the General’s name she offered him the smile of joy and surprise with which she would have greeted him if no one had ever uttered any other; for, not knowing any of the friends of her new family, whenever someone was presented to her she assumed that he must be one of them, and thinking that she was showing evidence of tact by appearing to have heard such a lot about him since her marriage, she would hold out her hand with a hesitant air that was meant as a proof at once of the inculcated reserve which she had to overcome and of the spontaneous friendliness which successfully overcame it. And so her parents-in-law, whom she still regarded as the most eminent people in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more so because they preferred to appear, in marrying their son to her, to have yielded to the attraction rather of her natural charm than of her considerable fortune.

“It’s easy to see that you’re a musician heart and soul, Madame,” said the General, alluding to the incident of the candle.

Meanwhile the concert had begun again, and Swann saw that he could not now go before the end of the new number. He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities struck him all the more painfully since, being ignorant of his
love and incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish nonsense or deplore it as an act of folly, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered above all, to the point where even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry out, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.

But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition was so agonisingly painful that his hand clutched at his heart. The violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it rested as though awaiting something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to last out until its arrival, to welcome it before itself expiring, to keep the way open for a moment longer, with all its remaining strength, so that the stranger might pass, as one holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening and to say to himself: “It’s the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata—I mustn’t listen!”, all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his
ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.

In place of the abstract expressions “the time when I was happy,” “the time when I was loved,” which he had often used before then without suffering too much since his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips—the address “Maison Dorée” embossed on the note-paper on which he had read “My hand trembles so as I write to you”—the contraction of her eyebrows when she said pleadingly: “You won’t leave it too long before getting in touch with me?”; he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he used to have singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little seamstress; could feel the showers which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all the network of mental habits, of seasonal impressions, of sensory reactions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes in which his body found itself inextricably caught. At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleasures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also; yet how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in comparison with the fearsome terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around her, the immense
anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and night what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, always and everywhere! Alas, he recalled the accents in which she had exclaimed: “But I can see you at any time; I’m always free!”—she who was never free now; he remembered the interest, the curiosity she had shown in his life, her passionate desire that he should do her the favour—which it was he who had dreaded at that time as a possibly tedious waste of his time and disturbance of his arrangements—of granting her access to his study; how she had been obliged to beg him to let her take him to the Verdurins’; and, when he allowed her to come to him once a month, how she had had to repeat to him time and again, before he let himself be swayed, what a joy it would be to see each other daily, a custom for which she longed when to him it seemed only a tiresome distraction, which she had then grown tired of and finally broken while for him it had become so irresistible and painful a need. Little had he suspected how truly he spoke, when at their third meeting, as she repeated: “But why don’t you let me come to you oftener?” he had told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that it was for fear of forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still happened at times that she wrote to him from a restaurant or hotel, on paper which bore a printed address, but printed in letters of fire that seared his heart. “It’s written from the Hôtel Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone there for? With whom? What happened there?” He remembered the gas-jets being extinguished along the Boulevard des Italiens when he had met her against all expectations among the errant shades on that night which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which
indeed—a night from a period when he had not even to ask himself whether he would be annoying her by looking for her and finding her, so certain was he that she knew no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take her home—belonged to a mysterious world to which one never may return again once its doors are closed. And Swann could distinguish, standing motionless before that scene of remembered happiness, a wretched figure who filled him with such pity, because he did not at first recognise who it was, that he had to lower his eyes lest anyone should observe that they were filled with tears. It was himself.