In Search of Lost Time, Volume II

by Marcel Proust

  As he spoke, Swann realised that I might be applying this maxim to himself and Odette, and as, even among superior people, at the moment when they seem to be soaring with you above the plane of life, their personal pride is still basely human, he was overcome with profound irritation towards me. But it manifested itself only in the uneasiness of his glance. He said nothing to me at the time. Not that this need surprise us. When Racine (according to a story that is in fact apocryphal though its substance may be found recurring every day in Parisian life) made an allusion to Scarron in front of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said nothing to the poet that evening. It was on the following day that he fell from grace.

  But since a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, completed his thought in these words, words which were to assume later on in my memory the importance of a prophetic warning which I had not had the sense to heed: “The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a while he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells are kept lighted day and night to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.”

  I reverted to M. de Norpois. “You must never trust him; he has the most wicked tongue,” said Mme Swann in a tone which seemed to me to indicate that M. de Norpois had spoken ill of her, especially as Swann looked across at his wife with an air of rebuke, as though to stop her before she went too far.

  Meanwhile Gilberte, who had twice been told to go and get ready to go out, remained listening to our conversation, sitting between her mother and her father, her head resting affectionately against the latter’s shoulder. Nothing, at first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme Swann, who was dark, than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But after a while one saw in Gilberte many of the features—for instance, the nose cut short with a sharp, unerring decision by the invisible sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive generations—the expression, the movements of her mother; to take an illustration from another art, she recalled a portrait that was as yet a poor likeness of Mme Swann, whom the painter, from some colourist’s whim, had posed in a partial disguise, dressed to go out to a party in Venetian “character.” And since not only was she wearing a fair wig, but every atom of darkness had been evicted from her flesh which, stripped of its brown veils, seemed more naked, covered simply in rays shed by an internal sun, this “make-up” was not just superficial but incarnate: Gilberte had the air of embodying some fabulous animal or of having assumed a mythological fancy dress. This reddish skin was so exactly that of her father that nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was being created, to solve the problem of how to reconstruct Mme Swann piecemeal, without any material at its disposal save the skin of M. Swann. And nature had utilised this to perfection, like a master carver who makes a point of leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in evidence. On Gilberte’s face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette’s nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact M. Swann’s two moles. It was a new variety of Mme Swann that was thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree beside a purple. At the same time it would be wrong to imagine the line of demarcation between these two likenesses as absolutely clear-cut. Now and then, when Gilberte smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father’s cheek upon her mother’s face, as though they had been put together to see what would result from the blend; this oval took shape as an embryo forms; it lengthened obliquely, swelled, and a moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte’s eyes there was the frank and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when she gave me the agate marble and said “Keep it as a souvenir of our friendship.” But were one to question Gilberte about what she had been doing, then one saw in those same eyes the embarrassment, the uncertainty, the prevarication, the misery that Odette used in the old days to betray, when Swann asked her where she had been and she gave him one of those lying answers which in those days drove the lover to despair and now made him abruptly change the conversation as an incurious and prudent husband. Often, in the Champs-Elysées, I was disturbed to see this look in Gilberte’s eyes. But as a rule my fears were unfounded. For in her, a purely physical survival of her mother, this look (if no other) had ceased to have any meaning. It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go home for some lesson, that Gilberte’s pupils executed that movement which, in the past, in Odette’s eyes, had been caused by the fear of disclosing that she had opened the door that day to one of her lovers, or was at that moment in a hurry to get to some assignation. Thus did one see the two natures of M. and Mme Swann ripple and flow and overlap one upon the other in the body of this Mélusine.

  It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the qualities and defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents, only one will be found in the child, and allied to the very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it. Indeed, the embodiment of a good moral quality in an incompatible physical blemish is often one of the laws of filial resemblance. Of two sisters, one will combine with the proud bearing of her father the mean little soul of her mother; the other, abundantly endowed with the paternal intelligence, will present it to the world in the aspect which her mother has made familiar; her mother’s shapeless nose and puckered belly and even her voice have become the bodily vestment of gifts which one had learned to recognise beneath a superb presence. With the result that of each of the sisters one can say with equal justification that it is she who takes more after one or other of her parents. It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father’s and her mother’s, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her—and even that would be not entirely accurate since it would give the impression that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering from being the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one and then the other, and at any given moment only one of the two, that is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering accordingly, the better Gilberte being unable at the time, on account of her momentary absence, to detect the other’s lapse from virtue. And so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of an ignoble kind. When the other spoke to you with her father’s heart she held broad and generous views, and you would have liked to engage with her upon a fine and beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as your arrangements were being completed, her mother’s heart would already have claimed its turn, and hers was the voice that answered; and you would be disappointed and vexed—almost baffled, as though by the substitution of one person for another—by a mean remark, a sly snigger, in which Gilberte would take delight, since they sprang from what she herself at that moment was. Indeed, the disparity was at times so great between the two Gilbertes that you asked yourself, though without finding an answer, what on earth you could have said or done to her to find her now so different. When she herself had suggested meeting you somewhere, not only would she fail to appear and would offer no excuse afterwards, but, whatever the influence might have been that had made her change her mind, she would appear so different that you might well have supposed that, taken in by a resemblance such as forms the plot of the Menaechmi, you were now talking to a different person from the one who had so sweetly expressed a desire to see you, had she not shown signs of an ill-humour which revealed that she felt herself to be in the wrong and wished to avoid entering into explanations.

  “Now then, run along and get ready; you’re keeping us waiting,” her mother reminded her.

  “I’m so happy here with my little Papa; I want to stay just for a minute,” replied Gilberte, burying her head beneath the arm of her father, who passed his fingers lovingly through her fair hair.


  Swann was one of those men who, having lived for a long time amid the illusions of love, have seen the blessings they have brought to a number of women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to survive after their death. When there should no longer be any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle Swann, or a Mme X, née Swann, who would continue to love the vanished father. Indeed, to love him too well perhaps, Swann may have been thinking, for he acknowledged Gilberte’s caress with a “You’re a good girl,” in the tone softened by uneasiness to which, when we think of the future, we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a person who is destined to survive us. To conceal his emotion, he joined in our talk about Berma. He pointed out to me, but in a detached, bored tone, as though he wished to remain somehow detached from what he was saying, with what intelligence, with what an astonishing fitness the actress said to Oenone, “You knew it!” He was right. That intonation at least had a validity that was really intelligible, and might thereby have satisfied my desire to find incontestable reasons for admiring Berma. But it was because of its very clarity that it did not in the least satisfy me. Her intonation was so ingenious, so definite in intention and meaning, that it seemed to exist by itself, so that any intelligent actress might have acquired it. It was a fine idea; but whoever else might express it as fully must possess it equally. It remained to Berma’s credit that she had discovered it, but can one use the word “discover” when the object in question is something that would not be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one’s own nature since someone else may afterwards reproduce it?

  “Upon my soul, your presence among us does raise the tone of the conversation!” Swann observed to me, as though to excuse himself to Bergotte; for he had formed the habit, in the Guermantes set, of entertaining great artists as if they were just ordinary friends whom one seeks only to provide with the opportunity to eat the dishes or play the games they like, or, in the country, indulge in whatever form of sport they please. “It seems to me that we’re talking a great deal about art,” he went on. “But it’s so nice, I do love it!” said Mme Swann, throwing me a look of gratitude, from good nature as well as because she had not abandoned her old aspirations towards intellectual conversation. After this it was to others of the party, and principally to Gilberte, that Bergotte addressed himself. I had told him everything that I felt with a freedom which had astonished me and which was due to the fact that, having acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those hours of solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better part of myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence, I found him less intimidating than a person with whom I was talking for the first time. And yet, for the same reason, I was very uneasy about the impression that I must have been making on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for my ideas dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant time in which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray. I ought perhaps to have reminded myself nevertheless that since it was in all sincerity, abandoning myself to the train of my thoughts, that I had felt on the one hand so intensely in sympathy with the work of Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theatre, a disappointment the reasons for which I did not know, those two instinctive impulses could not be so very different from one another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of Bergotte’s which I had loved in his books could not be entirely alien and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to express it. For my intelligence must be one—perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage. Doubtless the ideas which I was tempted to seek to disentangle were not those which Bergotte usually explored in his books. But if it was one and the same intelligence which we had, he and I, at our disposal, he must, when he heard me express those ideas, be reminded of them, cherish them, smile upon them, keeping probably, in spite of what I supposed, before his mind’s eye, quite a different part of his intelligence than that of which an excerpt had passed into his books, an excerpt upon which I had based my notion of his whole mental universe. Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works. I ought to have told myself all this (though in fact it is none too consoling a thought, for the benevolent condescension of great minds has as a corollary the incomprehension and hostility of small; and one derives far less happiness from the amiability of a great writer, which one can find after all in his books, than suffering from the hostility of a woman whom one did not choose for her intelligence but cannot help loving). I ought to have told myself all this, but I did not; I was convinced that I had appeared a fool to Bergotte, when Gilberte whispered in my ear:

  “You can’t think how overjoyed I am, because you’ve made a conquest of my great friend Bergotte. He’s been telling Mamma that he found you extremely intelligent.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked her.

  “Oh, wherever you like. You know it’s all the same to me.”

  But since the incident that had occurred on the anniversary of her grandfather’s death I had begun to wonder whether Gilberte’s character was not other than I had supposed, whether that indifference to what was to be done, that docility, that calm, that gentle and constant submissiveness did not indeed conceal passionate longings which her pride would not allow her to reveal and which she disclosed only by her sudden resistance whenever by any chance they were thwarted.

  As Bergotte lived in the same neighbourhood as my parents, we left the house together. In the carriage he spoke to me of my health: “Our friends were telling me that you had been ill. I’m very sorry. And yet, after all, I’m not too sorry, because I can see quite well that you are able to enjoy the pleasures of the mind, and they are probably what means most to you, as to everyone who has known them.”

  Alas, how little I felt that what he was saying applied to me, whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and well. I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect. As I made no distinction among my pleasures between those that came to me from different sources, of varying depth and permanence, I thought, when the moment came to answer him, that I should have liked an existence in which I was on intimate terms with the Duchesse de Guermantes and often came across, as in the old toll-house in the Champs-Elysées, a fusty coolness that would remind me of Combray. And in this ideal existence which I dared not confide to him, the pleasures of the mind found no place.

  “No, Monsieur, the pleasures of the mind count for very little with me; it is not them that I seek after; indeed I don’t even know that I have ever tasted them.”

  “You really think not?” he replied. “Well, you know, after all, that must be what you like best—at least that’s my guess, that’s what I think.”

  He did not convince me, of course, and yet I already felt happier, less constricted. After what M. de Norpois had said to me, I had regarded my moments of day-dreaming, of enthusiasm, of self-confidence as purely subjective and false. But according to Bergotte, who appeared to understand my case, it seemed that it was quite the contrary, that the symptom I ought to disregard was, in fact, my doubts, my disgust with myself. Moreover, what he had said about M. de Norpois took most of the sting out of a sentence from which I had supposed that no appeal was possible.

  “Are you
being properly looked after?” Bergotte asked me. “Who is treating you?” I told him that I had seen, and should probably go on seeing, Cottard. “But that’s not at all the sort of man you want!” he told me. “I know nothing about him as a doctor. But I’ve met him at Mme Swann’s. The man’s an imbecile. Even supposing that that doesn’t prevent his being a good doctor, which I hesitate to believe, it does prevent his being a good doctor for artists, for intelligent people. People like you must have suitable doctors, I would almost go so far as to say treatment and medicines specially adapted to themselves. Cottard will bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from having any effect. Besides, the proper course of treatment cannot possibly be the same for you as for any Tom, Dick or Harry. Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands that disease. How do you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare. So that his calculations are inaccurate in your case, the balance is upset; you see, always the little bottle-imp bobbing up again. He will find that you have a distended stomach; he has no need to examine you for it, since he has it already in his eye. You can see it there, reflected in his glasses.”

  This manner of speaking tired me greatly. I said to myself with the stupidity of common sense: “There’s no more a distended stomach reflected in Professor Cottard’s glasses than there are inanities stored behind M. de Norpois’s white waistcoat.”