In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV

by Marcel Proust

  “Can I have a nice kiss, Albertine?”

  “As many as you like,” she said to me in her good-natured way. I had never seen her looking so pretty.

  “Another one? You know it’s a great, great pleasure to me.”

  “And a thousand times greater to me,” she replied. “Oh, what a pretty book-cover you have there!”

  “Take it, I give it to you as a keepsake.”

  “You really are nice . . .”

  One would be cured for ever of romanticism if one could make up one’s mind, in thinking of the woman one loves, to try to be the man one will be when one no longer loves her. Gilberte’s book-cover and her agate marble must have derived their importance in the past from some purely inward state, since now they were to me a book-cover and a marble like any others.

  I asked Albertine if she would like something to drink. “I seem to see oranges over there and water,” she said. “That will be perfect.” I was thus able to taste, together with her kisses, that refreshing coolness which had seemed to me to be superior to them at the Princesse de Guermantes’s. And the orange squeezed into the water seemed to yield to me, as I drank, the secret life of its ripening growth, its beneficent action upon certain states of that human body which belongs to so different a kingdom, its powerlessness to make that body live but on the other hand the process of irrigation by which it was able to benefit it—countless mysteries unveiled by the fruit to my sensory perception, but not at all to my intelligence.

  When Albertine had gone, I remembered that I had promised Swann that I would write to Gilberte, and courtesy, I felt, demanded that I should do so at once. It was without emotion, and as though finishing off a boring school essay, that I traced upon the envelope the name Gilberte Swann with which at one time I used to cover my exercise-books to give myself the illusion that I was corresponding with her. For if, in the past, it had been I who wrote that name, now the task had been deputed by Habit to one of the many secretaries whom she employs. He could write down Gilberte’s name all the more calmly in that, placed with me only recently by Habit, having but recently entered my service, he had never known Gilberte, and knew only, without attaching any reality to the words, because he had heard me speak of her, that she was a girl with whom I had once been in love.

  I could not accuse her of coldness. The person I now was in relation to her was the clearest possible proof of what she herself had been: the book-cover, the agate marble had simply become for me in relation to Albertine what they had been for Gilberte, what they would have been to anybody who had not suffused them with the glow of an internal flame. But now there was in me a new turmoil which in its turn distorted the real force of things and words. And when Albertine said to me, in a further outburst of gratitude: “I do love turquoises!” I answered her: “Don’t let these die,” entrusting to them as to some precious jewel the future of our friendship, which in fact was no more capable of inspiring a sentiment in Albertine than it had been of preserving the sentiment that had once bound me to Gilberte.

  There occurred at about this time a phenomenon which deserves mention only because it recurs in every important period of history. At the very moment I was writing to Gilberte, M. de Guermantes, just home from his ball, still wearing his helmet, was thinking that next day he would be compelled to go into formal mourning, and decided to bring forward by a week the cure he was due to take at a spa. When he returned from it three weeks later (to anticipate for a moment, since I have only just finished my letter to Gilberte), those friends of his who had seen him, so indifferent at the start, turn into a fanatical anti-Dreyfusard, were left speechless with amazement when they heard him (as though the action of the cure had not been confined to his bladder) declare: “Oh, well, there’ll be a fresh trial and he’ll be acquitted. You can’t sentence a fellow without any evidence against him. Did you ever see anyone so gaga as Froberville? An officer leading the French people to the slaughter (meaning war)! Strange times we live in.” The fact was that, in the meantime, the Duke had met at the spa three charming ladies (an Italian princess and her two sisters-in-law). After hearing them make a few remarks about the books they were reading or a play that was being given at the Casino, the Duke had at once realised that he was dealing with women of superior intellect whom, as he expressed it, he “wasn’t up to.” He had been all the more delighted to be asked to play bridge by the princess. But, the moment he entered her sitting-room, as he began to say to her, in the fervour of his double-dyed anti-Dreyfusism: “Well, we don’t hear very much about the famous Dreyfus re-trial,” his stupefaction had been great when he heard the princess and her sisters-in-law say: “It’s becoming more certain every day. They can’t keep a man in prison who has done nothing.” “Eh? Eh?” the Duke had gasped at first, as at the discovery of a fantastic nickname employed in his household to turn to ridicule a person whom he had always regarded as intelligent. But, after a few days, just as, from cowardice and the spirit of imitation, we shout “Hallo, Jojotte” without knowing why at a great artist whom we hear so addressed by the rest of the household, the Duke, still greatly embarrassed by the novelty of this attitude, began nevertheless to say: “After all, if there’s no evidence against him.” The three charming ladies considered that he was not progressing rapidly enough and bullied him a bit: “But really, nobody with a grain of intelligence can ever have believed for a moment that there was anything.” Whenever any revelation came out that was “damning” to Dreyfus, and the Duke, supposing that now he was going to convert the three charming ladies, came to inform them of it, they burst out laughing and had no difficulty in proving to him, with great dialectic subtlety, that his argument was worthless and quite absurd. The Duke had returned to Paris a fanatical Dreyfusard. And of course we do not suggest that the three charming ladies were not, in this instance, messengers of truth. But it is to be observed that, every ten years or so, when we have left a man imbued with a genuine conviction, it so happens that an intelligent couple, or simply a charming lady, comes into his life and after a few months he is won over to the opposite camp. And in this respect there are many countries that behave like the sincere man, many countries which we have left full of hatred for another race and which, six months later, have changed their minds and reversed their alliances.

  I ceased for some time to see Albertine, but continued, failing Mme de Guermantes who no longer spoke to my imagination, to visit other fairies and their dwellings, as inseparable from themselves as is the pearly or enamelled valve or the crenellated turret of its shell from the mollusc that made it and shelters inside it. I should not have been able to classify these ladies, the problem being insignificant and impossible not only to resolve but to pose. Before coming to the lady, one had to approach the fairy mansion. Now as one of them was always at home after lunch in the summer months, before I reached her house I would be obliged to lower the hood of my cab, so scorching were the sun’s rays, the memory of which, without my realising it, was to enter into my general impression. I supposed that I was merely being driven to the Cours-la-Reine; in reality, before arriving at the gathering which a man of wider experience might well have derided, I would receive, as though on a journey through Italy, a delicious, dazzled sensation from which the house was never afterwards to be separated in my memory. What was more, in view of the heat of the season and the hour, the lady would have hermetically closed the shutters of the vast rectangular saloons on the ground floor in which she entertained. I would have difficulty at first in recognising my hostess and her guests, even the Duchesse de Guermantes, who in her husky voice bade me come and sit down next to her, in a Beauvais armchair illustrating the Rape of Europa. Then I would begin to make out on the walls the huge eighteenth-century tapestries representing vessels whose masts were hollyhocks in blossom, beneath which I sat as though in the palace not of the Seine but of Neptune, by the brink of the river Oceanus, where the Duchesse de Guermantes became a sort of goddess of the waters. I should never get to the end of it if I began
to describe all the different types of drawing-room. This example will suffice to show that I introduced into my social judgments poetical impressions which I never took into account when I came to add up the sum, so that, when I was calculating the merits of a drawing-room, my total was never correct.

  Certainly, these were by no means the only sources of error, but I have no time left, before my departure for Balbec (where to my sorrow I am going to make a second stay which will also be my last), to start upon a series of pictures of society which will find their place in due course. Here I need only say that to this first erroneous reason (my relatively frivolous existence which made people suppose that I was fond of society) for my letter to Gilberte, and for that reconciliation with the Swann family to which it seemed to point, Odette might very well, and with equal inaccuracy, have added a second. I have suggested hitherto the different aspects that the social world assumes in the eyes of a single person only by supposing that it does not change: if the selfsame woman who the other day knew nobody now goes everywhere, and another who occupied a commanding position is ostracised, one is inclined to see in these changes merely those purely personal ups and downs which from time to time bring about, in the same section of society, in consequence of speculations on the stock exchange, a resounding collapse or enrichment beyond the dreams of avarice. But there is more to it than that. To a certain extent social manifestations (vastly less important than artistic movements, political crises, the trend that leads public taste towards the theatre of ideas, then towards Impressionist painting, then towards music that is German and complicated, then music that is Russian and simple, or towards ideas of social service, ideas of justice, religious reaction, outbursts of patriotism) are nevertheless an echo of them, distant, disjointed, uncertain, changeable, blurred. So that even salons cannot be portrayed in a static immobility which has been conventionally employed up to this point for the study of characters, though these too must be carried along as it were in a quasi-historical momentum. The thirst for novelty that leads men of the fashionable world who are more or less sincere in their eagerness to keep abreast of intellectual developments to frequent the circles in which they can follow them makes them prefer as a rule some hostess as yet undiscovered, who represents still in their first freshness the hopes of a superior culture so faded and tarnished in the women who for long years have wielded the social sceptre and who, having no secrets from these men, no longer appeal to their imagination. And every period finds itself personified thus in new women, in a new group of women, who, closely identified with whatever may be the latest object of curiosity, seem, in their new attire, to be at that moment making their first appearance, like an unknown species born of the last deluge, irresistible beauties of each new Consulate, each new Directory. But very often the new hostesses are simply, like certain statesmen who may be in office for the first time but have for the last forty years been knocking at every door without seeing any open, women who were not known in society but who nevertheless had been entertaining for years past, for want of anyone better, a few “chosen friends.” To be sure, this is not always the case, and when, with the prodigious flowering of the Russian Ballet, revealing one after another Bakst, Nijinsky, Benois and the genius of Stravinsky, Princess Yourbeletieff, the youthful sponsor of all these new great men, appeared wearing on her head an immense, quivering aigrette that was new to the women of Paris and that they all sought to copy, it was widely supposed that this marvellous creature had been imported in their copious luggage, and as their most priceless treasure, by the Russian dancers; but when presently, by her side in her stage box at every performance of the “Russians,” seated like a true fairy godmother, unknown until that moment to the aristocracy, we see Mme Verdurin, we shall be able to tell the society people who may well suppose her to have recently entered the country with Diaghileff’s troupe, that this lady, too, had already existed in different periods and had passed through various avatars from which this one differed only in being the first to bring about at last, henceforth assured, and more and more swiftly on the march, the success so long awaited by the Mistress. In Mme Swann’s case, it is true, the novelty she represented had not the same collective character. Her salon had crystallised round one man, a dying man, who had progressed almost overnight, at the moment when his talent was exhausted, from obscurity to a blaze of glory. The craze for Bergotte’s works was unbounded. He spent the whole day, on show, at Mme Swann’s, who would whisper to some influential man: “I shall say a word to him: he’ll write an article for you.” He was, in fact, in a condition to do so, and even to write a little play for Mme Swann. A stage nearer to death, he was not quite so ill as at the time when he used to come and inquire after my grandmother. This was because intense physical pain had enforced a regime on him. Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

  It is true that the Verdurins and their little clan were at this time of far more lively interest than the faintly nationalist, more markedly literary, and pre-eminently Bergottesque salon of Mme Swann. The little clan was in fact the active centre of a long political crisis which had reached its maximum of intensity: Dreyfusism. But society people were for the most part so violently against reconsideration that a Dreyfusian salon seemed to them as inconceivable a phenomenon as, at an earlier period, a Communard salon. True, the Princesse de Caprarola, who had made Mme Verdurin’s acquaintance over a big exhibition which she had organised, had been to pay her a long visit in the hope of seducing a few interesting specimens of the little clan and incorporating them in her own salon, a visit in the course of which the Princess (playing a poor man’s Duchesse de Guermantes) had taken the opposing view to accepted opinion and declared that the people in her world were idiots, all of which Mme Verdurin had thought most courageous. But this courage did not subsequently take her to the point of daring, under the gimlet eyes of nationalist ladies, to bow to Mme Verdurin at the Balbec races. As for Mme Swann, on the other hand, the anti-Dreyfusards gave her credit for being “sound,” which, in a woman married to a Jew, was doubly meritorious. Nevertheless, people who had never been to her house imagined her as visited only by a few obscure Jews and disciples of Bergotte. In this way women far better qualified than Mme Swann are placed on the lowest rung of the social ladder, whether on account of their origins, or because they do not care about dinner-parties and receptions, at which they are never seen (an absence erroneously assumed to be due to their not having been invited), or because they never speak of their social connexions but only of literature and art, or because people conceal the fact that they go to their houses, or they, to avoid impoliteness to yet other people, conceal the fact that they entertain them—in short for countless reasons which, added together, make of this or that woman, in certain people’s eyes, the sort of woman whom one does not know. So it was with Odette. Mme d’Epinoy, when busy collecting some subscriptions for the “Patrie française,” having been obliged to go and see her, as she would have gone to her dressmaker, convinced moreover that she would find only a lot of faces that were not even despised but completely unknown, stood rooted to the ground when the door opened not upon the drawing-room she imagined but upon a magic hall in which, as in the transformation scene of a pantomime, she recognised in the dazzling chorus, reclining upon divans, seated in armchairs, addressing their hostess by her Christian name, the highnesses, the duchesses whom she, the Princesse d’Epinoy, had the greatest difficulty in enticing into her own drawing-room, and to whom at that moment, beneath the benevolent gaze of Odette, the Marquis du Lau, Comte Louis de Turenne, Prince Borghese, the Duc d’Estrées, carrying orangeade and petits fours, were acting as cupbearers and pantlers. The Princesse d’Epinoy, as she instinctively took people’s social status to be inherent in themselves, was obliged to disincarnate Mme Swann and reincarnate her in a fashionable woman. Ignorance of the real existence led by women who do not advertise it in the newspapers draws a veil of mystery over certain situations, ther
eby contributing to the diversification of salons. In Odette’s case, at the start, a few men of the highest society, anxious to meet Bergotte, had gone to dine in privacy at her house. She had had the tact, recently acquired, not to advertise their presence; they found when they went there—a memory perhaps of the little nucleus, whose traditions Odette had preserved in spite of the schism—a place laid for them at table, and so forth. Odette took them with Bergotte (whom these excursions, incidentally, finished off) to interesting first nights. They spoke of her to various women of their own world who were capable of taking an interest in such novelty. These women were convinced that Odette, an intimate friend of Bergotte, had more or less collaborated in his works, and believed her to be a thousand times more intelligent than the most outstanding women of the Faubourg, for the same reason that made them pin all their political faith to certain staunch Republicans such as M. Doumer and M. Deschanel, whereas they visualised France on the brink of ruin were her destinies entrusted to the monarchists who were in the habit of dining with them, men like Charette or Doudeauville. This change in Odette’s status had been achieved with a discretion on her part that made it more secure and more rapid but allowed no suspicion to filter through to the public, which is prone to refer to the social columns of the Gaulois for evidence as to the advance or decline of a salon, with the result that one day, at the dress rehearsal of a play by Bergotte given in one of the most fashionable theatres in aid of a charity, the really dramatic moment was when people saw coming in and sitting down beside Mme Swann in the centre box, which was that reserved for the author, Mme de Marsantes and the lady who, by the gradual self-effacement of the Duchesse de Guermantes (glutted with honours, and taking the easy way out), was on the way to becoming the lioness, the queen of the age: the Comtesse Molé. “We never even imagined that she had begun to climb,” people said of Odette as they saw the Comtesse Molé enter the box, “and look, she has reached the top of the ladder.”