In Search of Lost Time, Volume II

by Marcel Proust

  All this I realised, and yet we talked so little! Whereas with Mme de Villeparisis or Saint-Loup I should have displayed by my words a great deal more pleasure than I should actually have felt, for I was worn out on leaving them, when, on the other hand, I was lying on the grass among these girls, the plenitude of what I felt infinitely outweighed the paucity, the infrequency of our speech, and brimmed over from my immobility and silence in waves of happiness that rippled up to die at the feet of these young roses.

  For a convalescent who rests all day long in a flower-garden or an orchard, a scent of flowers or fruit does not more completely pervade the thousand trifles that compose his idle hours than did for me that colour, that fragrance in search of which my eyes kept straying towards the girls, and the sweetness of which finally became incorporated in me. So it is that grapes sweeten in the sun. And by their slow continuity these simple little games had gradually wrought in me also, as in those who do nothing else all day but lie outstretched by the sea, breathing the salt air and sunning themselves, a relaxation, a blissful smile, a vague dazzlement that had spread from brain to eyes.

  Now and then a pretty attention from one or another of them would stir in me vibrations which dissipated for a time my desire for the rest. Thus one day Albertine suddenly asked: “Who has a pencil?” Andrée provided one, Rosemonde the paper. Albertine warned them: “Now, young ladies, I forbid you to look at what I write.” After carefully tracing each letter, supporting the paper on her knee, she passed it to me, saying: “Take care no one sees.” Whereupon I unfolded it and read her message, which was: “I like you.”

  “But we mustn’t sit here scribbling nonsense,” she cried, turning with an impulsive and serious air to André and Rosemonde, “I ought to show you the letter I got from Gisèle this morning. What an idiot I am; I’ve had it in my pocket all this time—and to think how useful it can be to us!”

  Gisèle had been moved to copy out for her friend, so that it might be passed on to the others, the essay which she had written in her examination. Albertine’s fears as to the difficulty of the subjects set had been more than justified by the two from which Gisèle had had to choose. The first was: “Sophocles, from the Shades, writes to Racine to console him for the failure of Athalie”; the other: “Suppose that, after the first performance of Esther, Mme de Sévigné is writing to Mme de La Fayette to tell her how much she regretted her absence.” Now Gisèle, in an excess of zeal which must have touched the examiners’ hearts, had chosen the first and more difficult of these two subjects, and had handled it with such remarkable skill that she had been given fourteen marks and had been congratulated by the board. She would have received a “distinction” if she had not “dried up” in the Spanish paper. The essay of which Gisèle had sent a copy to Albertine was immediately read aloud to us by the latter, who, having presently to take the same examination, was anxious to have Andrée’s opinion, since she was by far the cleverest of them all and might be able to give her some good tips.

  “She did have a bit of luck,” Albertine observed. “It’s the very subject her French mistress made her swot up while she was here.”

  The letter from Sophocles to Racine, as drafted by Gisèle, ran as follows:

  “My dear friend, you must pardon me the liberty of addressing you when I have not the honour of your personal acquaintance, but your latest tragedy, Athalie, shows, does it not, that you have made a thorough study of my own modest works. You have not only put poetry in the mouths of the protagonists, or principal persons of the drama, but you have written other, and, let me tell you without flattery, charming verses for the chorus, a feature which did not work too badly, from what one hears, in Greek tragedy, but is a veritable novelty in France. In addition, your talent, so fluent, so dainty, so seductive, so fine, so delicate, has here acquired an energy on which I congratulate you. Athalie, Joad—these are figures which your rival Corneille could have wrought no better. The characters are virile, the plot simple and strong. You have given us a tragedy in which love is not the keynote, and on this I must offer you my sincerest compliments. The most familiar precepts are not always the truest. I will give you an example:

  This passion treat, which makes the poet’s art

  Fly, as on wings, straight to the listener’s heart.

  You have shown us that the religious sentiment in which your chorus is steeped is no less capable of moving us. The general public may have been baffled, but true connoisseurs must give you your due. I have felt myself impelled to offer you all my congratulations, to which I would add, my dear brother poet, the expression of my very highest esteem.”

  Albertine’s eyes never ceased to sparkle while she was reading this to us. “Really, you’d think she must have cribbed it somewhere!” she exclaimed when she reached the end. “I’d never have believed Gisèle could cook up an essay like that! And the poetry she brings in! Where on earth can she have pinched that from?”

  Albertine’s admiration, with a change, it is true, of object, but with no loss—an increase, rather—of intensity, combined with the closest attention to what was being said, continued to make her eyes “start from her head” all the time that Andrée (consulted as being the biggest and cleverest) first of all spoke of Gisèle’s essay with a certain irony, then, with a levity of tone which failed to conceal her underlying seriousness, proceeded to reconstruct the letter in her own way.

  “It’s not bad,” she said to Albertine, “but if I were you and had the the same subject set me, which is quite likely, as they set it very often, I shouldn’t do it in that way. This is how I would tackle it. In the first place, if I had been Gisèle, I shouldn’t have got carried away and I’d have begun by making a rough sketch of what I was going to write on a separate piece of paper. First and foremost, the formulation of the question and the exposition of the subject; then the general ideas to be worked into the development; finally, appreciation, style, conclusion. In that way, with a summary to refer to, you know where you are. But at the very start, with the exposition of the subject, or, if you like, Titine, since it’s a letter, with the preamble, Gisèle has made a bloomer. Writing to a person of the seventeenth century, Sophocles ought never to have said ‘My dear friend.’ ”

  “Why, of course, she ought to have said ‘My dear Racine,’ ” came impetuously from Albertine. “That would have been much better.”

  “No,” replied Andrée, with a trace of mockery in her tone, “She ought to have put ‘Sir.’ In the same way, to end up, she ought to have thought of something like, ‘Allow me, Sir,’ (at the very most, ‘Dear Sir’) ‘to inform you of the high esteem with which I have the honour to be your servant.’ Then again, Gisèle says that the chorus in Athalie is a novelty. She is forgetting Esther, and two tragedies that are not much read now but happen to have been analysed this year by the teacher himself, so that you need only mention them, since they’re his hobby-horse, and you’re bound to pass. I mean Les Juives by Robert Garnier, and Montchrestien’s Aman.”

  Andrée quoted these titles without managing quite to conceal a secret sense of benevolent superiority, which found expression in a rather charming smile. Albertine could contain herself no longer.

  “Andrée, you really are staggering,” she cried. “You must write down those names for me. Just fancy, what luck it would be if I got on to that, even in the oral, I should quote them at once and make a colossal impression.”

  But in the days that followed, every time that Albertine asked Andrée to tell her again the names of those two plays so that she might write them down, her erudite friend seemed to have forgotten them, and never recalled them for her.

  “And another thing,” Andrée went on with the faintest note of scorn for companions more childish than herself, though relishing their admiration and attaching to the manner in which she herself would have composed the essay a greater importance than she wished to reveal, “Sophocles in the Shades must be well-informed about all that goes on. He must therefore know that it was not bef
ore the general public but before the Sun King and a few privileged courtiers that Athalie was first played. What Gisèle says in this connexion of the esteem of the connoisseurs is not at all bad, but she might have gone a little further. Sophocles, now that he is mortal, may quite well have the gift of prophecy and announce that, according to Voltaire, Athalie will be the supreme achievement not only of Racine but of the human mind.”

  Albertine was drinking in every word. Her eyes blazed. And it was with the utmost indignation that she rejected Rosemonde’s suggestion that they should have a game.

  “Finally,” Andrée concluded in the same detached, airy tone, a trifle mocking and at the same time fairly warmly convinced, “if Gisèle had first calmly noted down the general ideas that she was going to develop, it might perhaps have occurred to her to do what I myself should have done, point out what a difference there is between the religious inspiration of Racine’s choruses and those of Sophocles. I should have made Sophocles remark that if Racine’s choruses are impregnated with religious feeling like those of the Greek tragedians, the gods are not the same. The god of Joad has nothing in common with the god of Sophocles. And that brings us quite naturally, when we have finished developing the subject, to our conclusion: What does it matter if beliefs are different? Sophocles would hesitate to insist upon this point. He would be afraid of wounding Racine’s convictions, and so, slipping in a few appropriate words on his masters at Port-Royal, he prefers to congratulate his disciple on the loftiness of his poetic genius.”

  Admiration and attention had made Albertine so hot that she was sweating profusely. Andrée preserved the unruffled calm of a female dandy. “It would not be a bad thing, either, to quote some of the opinions of famous critics,” she added, before they began their game.

  “Yes,” put in Albertine, “so I’ve been told. The best ones to quote, on the whole, are Sainte-Beuve and Merlet, aren’t they?”

  “Well, you’re not absolutely wrong,” Andrée told her. “Merlet and Sainte-Beuve would do no harm. But above all you ought to mention Deltour and Gasq-Des-fossés.”

  Meanwhile I had been thinking of the little page torn from a scribbling block which Albertine had handed me. “I like you,” she had written. And an hour later, as I scrambled down the paths which led back, a little too vertically for my liking, to Balbec, I said to myself that it was with her that I would have my romance.

  The state of being characterised by the presence of all the signs by which we are accustomed to recognise that we are in love, such as the orders which I left in the hotel not to wake me whoever might ask to see me, unless it were one or other of the girls, the throbbing of my heart while I waited for them (whichever of them it might be that I was expecting), and, on those mornings, my fury if I had not succeeded in finding a barber to shave me, and would make an unsightly appearance before Albertine, Rosemonde or Andrée, no doubt this state, recurring for each of them in turn, was as different from what we call love as is from human life the life of the zoophytes, in which existence, individuality if we may so term it, is divided up among several organisms. But natural history teaches us that such an organisation of animal life is indeed to be observed, and that our own life, provided we have outgrown the first phase, is no less positive as to the reality of states hitherto unsuspected by us through which we have to pass, even though we abandon them later. Such was for me this state of love divided among several girls at once. Divided, or rather undivided, for more often than not what was so delicious to me, different from the rest of the world, what was beginning to become so precious to me that the hope of encountering it again the next day was the greatest joy of my life, was rather the whole of the group of girls, taken as they were all together on those afternoons on the cliffs, during those wind-swept hours, upon the strip of grass on which were laid those forms, so exciting to my imagination, of Albertine, of Rosemonde, of Andrée; and that without my being able to say which of them it was that made those scenes so precious to me, which of them I most wanted to love. At the start of a new love as at its ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but rather the desire to love from which it will presently arise (and, later on, the memory it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously through a zone of interchangeable charms—simply natural charms, it may be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one’s surroundings—which are harmonious enough for it not to feel at a loss in the presence of any one of them. Besides, as my perception of them was not yet dulled by familiarity, I still had the faculty of seeing them, that is to say of feeling a profound astonishment every time that I found myself in their presence.

  No doubt this astonishment is to some extent due to the fact that the other person on such occasions presents some new facet; but so great is the multiformity of each individual, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and body, so few of which leave any trace, once we are no longer in the presence of the other person, on the arbitrary simplicity of our recollection, since the memory has selected some distinctive feature that had struck us, has isolated it, exaggerated it, making of a woman who has appeared to us tall a sketch in which her figure is elongated out of all proportion, or of a woman who has seemed to be pink-checked and golden-haired a pure “Harmony in pink and gold,” that the moment this woman is once again standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which balance that one remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity, diminishing her height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we came exclusively to seek other features which we remember having noticed the first time and fail to understand why we so little expected to find them again. We remembered, we anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony. And this inevitable astonishment is not the only one; for side by side with it comes another, born of the difference, not now between the stylisations of memory and the reality, but between the person whom we saw last time and the one who appears to us today from another angle and shows us a new aspect. The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.

  But to a great extent our astonishment springs from the fact that the person presents to us also a face that is the same as before. It would require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been imparted to us by things other than ourselves—were it only the taste of a fruit—that no sooner is the impression received than we begin imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without realising it, in a very short time we have come a long way from what we actually felt. So that every fresh glimpse is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we in fact saw. Already we no longer had any recollection of it, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him. But as long as we can still see, as soon as the forgotten feature appears we recognise it, we are obliged to correct the straying line, and thus the perpetual and fruitful surprise which made so salutary and invigorating for me these daily outings with the charming damsels of the sea shore consisted fully as much in recollection as in discovery. When there is added to this the agitation aroused by what these girls were to me, which was never quite what I had supposed, and meant that my expectancy of our next meeting resembled not so much my expectancy the time before as the still vibrant memory of our last encounter, it will be realised that each of our excursions brought about a violent change in the course of my thoughts and not at all in the direction which, in the solitude of my own room, I had traced for them at my leisure. That plotted course was forgotten, had ceased to exist, when I returned home buzzing like a bee-hive with remarks which had disturbed me and were still echoing in my brain. Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all. For the minimum variation that is to be found in these creations is twofold. Remembering a strong and searching glance, a bold manner, it is inevitably, next time, by an almost languid prof
ile, a sort of dreamy gentleness, overlooked by us in our previous impression, that at the next encounter we shall be astonished, that is to say almost uniquely struck. In confronting our memory with the new reality it is this that will mark the extent of our disappointment or surprise, will appear to us like a revised version of the reality by notifying us that we had not remembered correctly. In its turn, the facial aspect neglected the time before, and for that very reason the most striking this time, the most real, the most corrective, will become a matter for day-dreams and memories. It is a languorous and rounded profile, a gentle, dreamy expression which we shall now desire to see again. And then once more, next time, such resolution, such strength of character as there may be in the piercing eyes, the pointed nose, the tight lips, will come to correct the discrepancy between our desire and the object to which it has supposed itself to correspond. Of course, this fidelity to the first and purely physical impressions experienced anew at each encounter with my young friends did not only concern their facial appearance, since the reader has seen that I was sensitive also to their voices, more disturbing still, perhaps (for not only does a voice offer the same strange and sensuous surfaces as a face, it issues from that unknown, inaccessible region the mere thought of which sets the mind swimming with unattainable kisses), those voices, like the unique sound of a little instrument into which each of them put all of herself and which belonged to her alone. Traced by a casual inflexion, a sudden deep chord in one of these voices would surprise me when I recognised it after having forgotten it. So much so that the corrections which after every fresh meeting I was obliged to make so as to ensure absolute accuracy were as much those of a tuner or singing-master as of a draughtsman.