Even though I knew that the young men who went past the hotel every day on horseback were the sons of the shady proprietor of a fancy goods shop whom my father would never have dreamed of knowing, the glamour of “seaside life” exalted them in my eyes to equestrian statues of demi-gods, and the best thing that I could hope for was that they would never allow their proud gaze to fall upon the wretched boy who was myself, who left the hotel dining-room only to sit upon the sands. I should have been glad to arouse some response even from the adventurer who had been king of a desert island in the South Seas, even from the young consumptive, of whom I liked to think that he concealed beneath his insolent exterior a shy and tender heart, which might perhaps have lavished on me, and on me alone, the treasures of its affection. Besides (contrary to what is usually said about travelling acquaintances) since being seen in certain company can invest us, in a watering-place to which we shall return another year, with a coefficient that has no equivalent in real social life, there is nothing that, far from keeping resolutely at a distance, we cultivate with such assiduity after our return to Paris as the friendships that we have formed by the sea. I was concerned about the impression I might make on all these temporary or local celebrities whom my tendency to put myself in the place of other people and to re-create their state of mind made me place not in their true rank, that which they would have occupied in Paris for instance and which would have been quite low, but in that which they must imagine to be theirs and which indeed was theirs at Balbec, where the want of a common denominator gave them a sort of relative superiority and unwonted interest. Alas, none of these people’s contempt was so painful to me as that of M. de Stermaria.
For I had noticed his daughter the moment she came into the room, her pretty face, her pallid, almost bluish complexion, the distinctiveness in the carriage of her tall figure, in her gait, which suggested to me, with reason, her heredity, her aristocratic upbringing, all the more vividly because I knew her name—like those expressive themes invented by musicians of genius which paint in splendid colours the glow of fire, the rush of water, the peace of fields and woods, to audiences who, having glanced through the programme in advance, have their imaginations trained in the right direction. “Pedigree,” by adding to Mlle de Stermaria’s charms the idea of their origin, made them more intelligible, more complete. It made them more desirable also, advertising their inaccessibility as a high price enhances the value of a thing that has already taken our fancy. And its stock of heredity gave to her complexion, in which so many selected juices had been blended, the savour of an exotic fruit or of a famous vintage.
Now, chance had suddenly put into our hands, my grandmother’s and mine, the means of acquiring instantaneous prestige in the eyes of all the other occupants of the hotel. For on that first afternoon, at the moment when the old lady came downstairs from her room, producing, thanks to the footman who preceded her and the maid who came running after her with a book and a rug that she had forgotten, a marked effect upon all who beheld her and arousing in each of them a curiosity from which it was evident that none was so little immune as M. de Stermaria, the manager leaned across to my grandmother and out of kindness (as one might point out the Shah or Queen Ranavalo to an obscure onlooker who could obviously have no sort of connexion with such mighty potentates, but might all the same be interested to know that he had been standing within a few feet of one) whispered in her ear, “The Marquise de Villeparisis!” while at the same moment the old lady, catching sight of my grandmother, could not repress a start of pleased surprise.
It may be imagined that the sudden appearance, in the guise of a little old woman, of the most powerful of fairies would not have given me more pleasure, destitute as I was of any means of access to Mlle de Stermaria, in a strange place where I knew no one: no one, that is to say, for any practical purpose. Aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know, even without looking for them in the works of the old masters, like Swann. Thus it happened that in the first few days of our visit to Balbec I had succeeded in encountering Legrandin, Swann’s hall porter, and Mme Swann herself, transformed respectively into a waiter, a foreign visitor whom I never saw again, and a bathing superintendent. And a sort of magnetisation attracts and retains so inseparably, one beside another, certain characteristics of physiognomy and mentality, that when Nature thus introduces a person into a new body she does not mutilate him unduly. Legrandin turned waiter kept intact his stature, the outline of his nose, part of his chin; Mme Swann, in the masculine gender and the calling of a bathing superintendent, had been accompanied not only by her familiar features but even by certain mannerisms of speech. Only she could be of little if any more use to me, standing upon the beach there in the red sash of her office, and hoisting at the first gust of wind the flag which forbade us to bathe (for these superintendents are prudent men, seldom knowing how to swim), than she would have been in that fresco of the Life of Moses in which Swann had long ago identified her in the person of Jethro’s daughter. Whereas this Mme de Villeparisis was her real self; she had not been the victim of a magic spell which had robbed her of her power, but was capable, on the contrary, of putting at the disposal of mine a spell which would multiply it a hundredfold, and thanks to which, as though I had been swept through the air on the wings of a fabulous bird, I was about to cross in a few moments the infinitely wide social gulf which separated me—at least at Balbec—from Mlle de Stermaria.
Unfortunately, if there was one person who, more than anyone else, lived shut up in a world of her own, it was my grandmother. She would not even have despised me, she would simply not have understood what I meant, if she had known that I attached importance to the opinions, that I felt an interest in the persons, of people the very existence of whom she never noticed and of whom, when the time came to leave Balbec, she would not remember the names. I dared not confess to her that if these same people had seen her talking to Mme de Villeparisis, I should have been immensely gratified, because I felt that the Marquise enjoyed some prestige in the hotel and that her friendship would have given us status in the eyes of Mlle de Stermaria. Not that my grandmother’s friend represented to me, in any sense of the word, a member of the aristocracy: I was too accustomed to her name, which had been familiar to my ears before my mind had begun to consider it, when as a child I had heard it uttered in conversation at home; while her title added to it only a touch of quaintness, as some uncommon Christian name would have done, or as in the names of streets, among which we can see nothing more noble in the Rue Lord Byron, in the plebeian and even squalid Rue Rochechouart, or in the Rue de Gramont than in the Rue Léonce-Reynaud or the Rue Hippolyte-Lebas. Mme de Villeparisis no more made me think of a person who belonged to a special social world than did her cousin MacMahon, whom I did not clearly distinguish from M. Carnot, likewise President of the Republic, or from Raspail, whose photograph Françoise had bought with that of Pius IX. It was one of my grandmother’s principles that, when away from home, one should cease to have any social intercourse, that one did not go to the seaside to meet people, having plenty of time for that sort of thing in Paris, that they would make one waste in polite exchanges, in pointless conversation, the precious time which ought all to be spent in the open air, beside the waves; and finding it convenient to assume that this view was shared by everyone else, and that it authorised, between old friends whom chance brought face to face in the same hotel, the fiction of a mutual incognito, on hearing her friend’s name from the manager she merely looked the other way and pretended not to see Mme de Villeparisis, who, realising that my grandmother did not want to be recognised, likewise gazed into space. She went past, and I was left in my isolation like a shipwrecked mariner who has seen a vessel apparently approaching, which has then vanished under the horizon.
She, too, had her meals in the dining-room, but at the other end of it. She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel or
who came there to call, not even M. de Cambremer; indeed, I noticed that he gave her no greeting one day when, with his wife, he had accepted an invitation to lunch with the president, who, intoxicated with the honour of having the nobleman at his table, avoided his habitual friends and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so as to draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly that his signal could not be interpreted as an invitation to join the party.
“Well, I hope you’ve done yourself proud, I hope you feel smart enough,” the judge’s wife said to him that evening.
“Smart? Why should I?” asked the president, concealing his rapture in an exaggerated astonishment. “Because of my guests, do you mean?” he went on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any longer. “But what is there smart about having a few friends to lunch? After all, they must feed somewhere!”
“Of course it’s smart! They were the de Cambremers, weren’t they? I recognised them at once. She’s a Marquise. And quite genuine, too. Not through the females.”
“Oh, she’s a very simple soul, she’s charming, no standoffishness about her. I thought you were coming to join us. I was making signals to you . . . I would have introduced you!” he asserted, tempering with a hint of irony the vast generosity of the offer, like Ahasuerus when he says to Esther: “Of all my Kingdom must I give you half?”
“No, no, no, no! We lie hidden, like the modest violet.”
“But you were quite wrong, I assure you,” replied the president emboldened now that the danger point was passed. “They weren’t going to eat you. I say, aren’t we going to have our little game of bezique?”
“Why, of course! We didn’t dare suggest it, now that you go about entertaining marquises.”
“Oh, get along with you; there’s nothing so very wonderful about them. Why, I’m dining there tomorrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I mean it. Honestly, I’d just as soon stay here.”
“No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a reactionary,” cried the senior judge, laughing till the tears came to his eyes at his own joke. “But you go to Féterne too, don’t you?” he went on, turning to the notary.
“Oh, I go there on Sundays—in one door and out the other. But they don’t come and have lunch with me as they do with the president.”
M. de Stermaria was not at Balbec that day, to the president’s great regret. But he managed to say a word in season to the head waiter:
“Aimé, you can tell M. de Stermaria that he’s not the only nobleman you’ve had in here. You saw the gentleman who was with me today at lunch? Eh? A small moustache, looked like a military man. Well, that was the Marquis de Cambremer!”
“Was it indeed? I’m not surprised to hear it.”
“That will show him that he’s not the only man who’s got a title. That’ll teach him! It’s not a bad thing to take ‘em down a peg or two, those noblemen. I say, Aimé, don’t say anything to him unless you want to. I mean to say, it’s no business of mine; besides, they know each other already.”
And next day M. de Stermaria, who remembered that the president had once represented one of his friends, came up and introduced himself.
“Our friends in common, the de Cambremers, were anxious that we should meet, the days didn’t fit—I don’t know quite what went wrong,” said the president who, like most liars, imagined that other people do not take the trouble to investigate an unimportant detail which, for all that, may be sufficient (if chance puts you in possession of the humble facts of the case, and they contradict it) to show the liar in his true colours and to inspire a lasting mistrust.
As usual, but more easily now that her father had left her to talk to the president I was gazing at Mlle de Stermaria. No less than the bold and always graceful distinctiveness of her attitudes, as when, leaning her elbows on the table, she raised her glass in both hands over her forearms, the dry flame of a glance at once extinguished, the ingrained, congenital hardness that one could sense, ill-concealed by her own personal inflexions, in the depths of her voice, and that had shocked my grandmother, a sort of atavistic ratchet to which she returned as soon as, in a glance or an intonation, she had finished expressing her own thoughts—all this brought the thoughts of the observer back to the long line of ancestors who had bequeathed to her that inadequacy of human sympathy, those gaps in her sensibility, a lack of fullness in the stuff of which she was made. But from a certain look which flooded for a moment the wells—instantly dry again—of her eyes, a look in which one sensed that almost humble docility which the predominance of a taste for sensual pleasures gives to the proudest of women, who will soon come to recognise but one form of personal magic, that which any man will enjoy in her eyes who can make her feel those pleasures, an actor or a mountebank for whom, perhaps, she will one day leave her husband, and from a certain pink tinge, warm and sensual, which flushed her pallid cheeks, like the colour that stained the hearts of the white water-lilies in the Vivonne, I thought I could discern that she might readily have consented to my coming to seek in her the savour of that life of poetry and romance which she led in Brittany, a life to which, whether from over-familiarity or from innate superiority, or from disgust at the penury or the avarice of her family, she seemed to attach no great value, but which, for all that, she held enclosed in her body. In the meagre stock of will-power that had been transmitted to her, and gave her expression a hint of weakness, she would not perhaps have found the strength to resist. And, crowned by a feather that was a trifle old-fashioned and pretentious, the grey felt hat which she invariably wore at meals made her all the more attractive to me, not because it was in harmony with her silver and rose complexion, but because, by making me suppose her to be poor, it brought her closer to me. Obliged by her father’s presence to adopt a conventional attitude, but already bringing to the perception and classification of the people who passed before her eyes other principles than his, perhaps she saw in me not my humble rank, but the right sex and age. If one day M. de Stermaria had gone out leaving her behind, if, above all, Mme de Villeparisis, by coming to sit at our table, had given her an opinion of me which might have emboldened me to approach her, perhaps then we might have contrived to exchange a few words, to arrange a meeting, to form a closer tie. And for a whole month during which she would be left alone without her parents in her romantic Breton castle, we should perhaps have been able to wander by ourselves at evening, she and I together in the twilight through which the pink flowers of the bell heather would glow more softly above the darkening water, beneath oak trees beaten and stunted by the pounding of the waves. Together we should have roamed that island impregnated with so intense a charm for me because it had enclosed the everyday life of Mlle de Stermaria and was reflected in the memory of her eyes. For it seemed to me that I should truly have possessed her only there, when I had traversed those regions which enveloped her in so many memories—a veil which my desire longed to tear aside, one of those veils which nature interposes between woman and her pursuers (with the same intention as when, for all of us, she places the act of reproduction between ourselves and our keenest pleasure, and for insects, places before the nectar the pollen which they must carry away with them) in order that, tricked by the illusion of possessing her thus more completely, they may be forced to occupy first the scenes among which she lives and which, of more service to their imagination than sensual pleasure can be, yet would not without that pleasure have sufficed to attract them.
But I was obliged to take my eyes from Mlle de Stermaria, for already, considering no doubt that making the acquaintance of an important person was an odd, brief act which was sufficient in itself and, to bring out all the interest that was latent in it, required only a handshake and a penetrating stare, without either immediate conversation or any subsequent relations, her father had taken leave of the president and returned to sit down facing her, rubbing his hands like a man who has just made a valuable acquisition. As for the president, once the first emotion of this interview
had subsided, he could be heard, as on other days, addressing the head waiter every other minute: “But I’m not a king, Aimé; go and attend to the king! I say, Chief, those little trout don’t look at all bad, do they? We must ask Aimé to let us have some. Aimé, that little fish you have over there looks to me highly commendable: will you bring us some, please, Aimé, and don’t be sparing with it.”
He repeated the name “Aimé” all the time, with the result that when he had anyone to dinner the guest would remark “I can see you’re quite at home in this place,” and would feel himself obliged to keep on saying “Aimé” also, from that tendency, combining elements of timidity, vulgarity and silliness, which many people have, to believe that it is smart and witty to imitate slavishly the people in whose company they happen to be. The president repeated the name incessantly, but with a smile, for he wanted to exhibit at one and the same time his good relations with the head waiter and his own superior station. And the head waiter, whenever he caught the sound of his own name, smiled too, as though touched and at the same time proud, showing that he was conscious of the honour and could appreciate the joke.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II Page 33
