In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV

by Marcel Proust

  A few days later I was able to look with pleasure at the photograph that Saint-Loup had taken of her; it did not revive the memory of what Françoise had told me, because that memory had never left me and I was growing used to it. But by contrast with what I imagined to have been her grave and pain-racked state that day, the photograph, still profiting by the ruses which my grandmother had adopted, which succeeded in taking me in even after they had been disclosed to me, showed her looking so elegant, so carefree, beneath the hat which partly hid her face, that I saw her as less unhappy and in better health than I had supposed. And yet, her cheeks having without her knowing it an expression of their own, leaden, haggard, like the expression of an animal that senses it has been chosen and marked down, my grandmother had an air of being under sentence of death, an air involuntarily sombre, unconsciously tragic, which escaped me but prevented Mamma from ever looking at that photograph, that photograph which seemed to her a photograph not so much of her mother as of her mother’s disease, of an insult inflicted by that disease on my grandmother’s brutally buffeted face.

  Then one day I decided to send word to Albertine that I would see her presently. This was because, on a morning of intense and premature heat, the myriad cries of children at play, of bathers disporting themselves, of newsvendors, had traced for me in lines of fire, in wheeling, interlacing flashes, the scorching beach which the little waves came up one by one to sprinkle with their coolness; then the symphony concert had begun, mingled with the lapping of the surf, through which the violins hummed like a swarm of bees that had strayed out over the sea. At once I had longed to hear Albertine’s laughter and to see her friends again, those girls silhouetted against the waves who had remained in my memory the inseparable charm, the characteristic flora of Balbec; and I had decided to send a line via Françoise to Albertine, making an appointment for the following week, while the sea, gently rising, with the unfurling of each wave completely buried in layers of crystal the melody whose phrases appeared to be separated from one another like those angel lutanists which on the roof of an Italian cathedral rise between the pinnacles of blue porphyry and foaming jasper. But on the day on which Albertine came, the weather had turned dull and cold again, and moreover I had no opportunity of hearing her laugh; she was in a very bad mood. “Balbec is deadly dull this year,” she said to me. “I don’t mean to stay any longer than I can help. You know I’ve been here since Easter, that’s more than a month. There’s not a soul here. You can imagine what fun it is.” Notwithstanding the recent rain and a sky that changed every moment, after escorting Albertine as far as Epreville, for she was, to borrow her expression, “shuttling” between that little watering-place, where Mme Bontemps had her villa, and Incarville, where she had been taken “en pension” by Rosemonde’s family, I went off by myself in the direction of the high road that Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage used to take when we went for drives with my grandmother; pools of water, which the sun, now bright again, had not yet dried, made a regular quagmire of the ground, and I thought of my grandmother who could never walk a yard without covering herself in mud. But on reaching the road I found a dazzling spectacle. Where I had seen with my grandmother in the month of August only the green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight; the distant horizon of the sea gave the trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze at the sky through the flowers, which made its serene blue appear almost violent, they seemed to draw apart to reveal the immensity of their paradise. Beneath that azure a faint but cold breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling. Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring.

  Chapter Two

  In my fear lest the pleasure I found in this solitary excursion might weaken my memory of my grandmother, I sought to revive it by thinking of some great sorrow that she had experienced; in response to my appeal, that sorrow tried to reconstruct itself in my heart, threw up vast pillars there; but my heart was doubtless too small for it, I had not the strength to bear so great a pain, my attention was distracted at the moment when it was approaching completion, and its arches collapsed before they had joined, as the waves crumble before reaching their pinnacle.

  And yet, if only from my dreams when I was asleep, I might have learned that my grief for my grandmother’s death was diminishing, for she appeared in them less crushed by the idea that I had formed of her non-existence. I saw her an invalid still, but on the road to recovery; I found her in better health. And if she made any allusion to what she had suffered, I stopped her mouth with my kisses and assured her that she was now permanently cured. I should have liked to call the sceptics to witness that death is indeed a malady from which one recovers. Only, I no longer found in my grandmother the rich spontaneity of old. Her words were no more than a feeble, docile response, almost a mere echo of mine; she was now no more than the reflexion of my own thoughts.

  Although I was still incapable of feeling a renewal of physical desire, Albertine was beginning nevertheless to inspire in me a desire for happiness. Certain dreams of shared affection, always hovering within us, readily combine, by a sort of affinity, with the memory (provided that this has already become slightly vague) of a woman with whom we have taken our pleasure. This sentiment recalled to me aspects of Albertine’s face more gentle, less gay, quite different from those that would have been evoked by physical desire; and as it was also less pressing than that desire, I would gladly have postponed its realisation until the following winter, without seeking to see Albertine again at Balbec before her departure. But, even in the midst of a grief that is still acute, physical desire will revive. From my bed, where I was made to spend hours every day resting, I longed for Albertine to come and resume our former amusements. Do we not see, in the very room in which they have lost a child, its parents soon come together again to give the little angel a baby brother? I tried to distract my mind from this desire by going to the window to look at that day’s sea. As in the former year, the seas, from one day to another, were rarely the same. Nor indeed did they at all resemble those of that first year, whether because it was now spring with its storms, or because, even if I had come down at the same time of year as before, the different, more changeable weather might have discouraged from visiting this coast certain indolent, vaporous, fragile seas which on blazing summer days I had seen slumbering upon the beach, their bluish breasts faintly stirring with a soft palpitation or above all because my eyes, taught by Elstir to retain precisely those elements that once I had deliberately rejected, would now gaze for hours at what in the former year they had been incapable of seeing. The contrast that used then to strike me so forcibly, between the country drives that I took with Mme de Villeparisis and the fluid, inaccessible, mythological proximity of the eternal Ocean, no longer existed for me. And there were days now when, on the contrary, the sea itself seemed almost rural. On the days, few and far between, of really fine weather, the heat had traced upon the waters, as though across fields, a dusty white track at the end of which the pointed mast of a fishing-boat stood up like a village steeple. A tug, of which only the funnel was visible, smoked in the distance like a factory set apart, while alone against the horizon
a convex patch of white, sketched there doubtless by a sail but seemingly solid and as it were calcareous, was reminiscent of the sunlit corner of some isolated building, a hospital or a school. And the clouds and the wind, on the days when these were added to the sun, completed, if not the error of judgment, at any rate the illusion of the first glance, the suggestion that it aroused in the imagination. For the alternation of sharply defined patches of colour like those produced in the country by the proximity of different crops, the rough, yellow, almost muddy irregularities of the marine surface, the banks, the slopes that hid from sight a vessel upon which a crew of nimble sailors seemed to be harvesting, all this on stormy days made the sea a thing as varied, as solid, as undulating, as populous, as civilised as the earth with its carriage roads over which I used to travel and was soon to be travelling again. And once, unable any longer to hold out against my desire, instead of going back to bed I put on my clothes and set off for Incarville to find Albertine. I would ask her to come with me to Douville, where I would pay calls on Mme de Cambremer at Féterne and on Mme Verdurin at La Raspelière. Albertine would wait for me meanwhile upon the beach and we would return together after dark. I went to take the train on the little local railway, of which I had picked up from Albertine and her friends all the nicknames current in the district, where it was known as the Twister because of its numberless windings, the Crawler because the train never seemed to move, the Transatlantic because of a horrible siren which it sounded to clear people off the line, the Decauville and the Funi, albeit there was nothing funicular about it but because it climbed the cliff, and, though not strictly speaking a Decauville, had a 60 centimetre gauge, the B.A.G. because it ran between Balbec and Grattevast via Angerville, the Tram and the T.S.N. because it was a branch of the Tramways of Southern Normandy. I took my seat in a compartment in which I was alone; it was a day of glorious sunshine, and stiflingly hot; I drew down the blue blind which shut off all but a single ray of sunlight. But immediately I saw my grandmother, as she had appeared sitting in the train on our departure from Paris for Balbec, when, in her distress at seeing me drink beer, she had preferred not to look, to shut her eyes and pretend to be asleep. I, who in my childhood had been unable to endure her anguish when my grandfather took a drop of brandy, had not only inflicted upon her the anguish of seeing me accept, at the invitation of another, a drink which she regarded as harmful to me, but had forced her to leave me free to swill it down to my heart’s content; worse still, by my bursts of anger, my fits of breathlessness, I had forced her to help, to advise me to do so, with a supreme resignation of which I saw now in my memory the mute, despairing image, her eyes closed to shut out the sight. So vivid a memory had, like the stroke of a magic wand, restored the mood that I had been gradually outgrowing for some time past; what could I have done with Albertine when my lips were wholly possessed by the desperate longing to kiss a dead woman? What could I have said to the Cambremers and the Verdurins when my heart was beating so violently because the pain that my grandmother had suffered was being constantly renewed in it? I could not remain in the compartment. As soon as the train stopped at Maineville-la-Teinturière, abandoning all my plans, I alighted. Maineville had of late acquired considerable importance and a reputation all its own, because a director of various casinos, a purveyor of pleasure, had set up just outside it, with a luxurious display of bad taste that could vie with that of any grand hotel, an establishment to which we shall return anon and which was, to put it bluntly, the first brothel for smart people that it had occurred to anyone to build upon the coast of France. It was the only one. True, every port has its own, but intended for sailors only, and for lovers of the picturesque who are amused to see, next door to the age-old parish church, the hardly less ancient, venerable and moss-grown bawd standing in front of her ill-famed door waiting for the return of the fishing fleet.

  Hurrying past the glittering house of “pleasure,” insolently erected there despite the protests which the heads of families had addressed in vain to the mayor, I reached the cliff and followed its winding paths in the direction of Balbec. I heard, without responding to it, the appeal of the hawthorns. Less opulent neighbours of the blossoming apple-trees, they found them rather heavy, without denying the fresh complexion of the rosy-petalled daughters of those wealthy brewers of cider. They knew that, though less well endowed, they were more sought after, and were more than attractive enough simply in their crumpled whiteness.*

  On my return, the hotel porter handed me a blackbordered letter in which the Marquis and the Marquise de Gonneville, the Vicomte and the Vicomtesse d’Amfreville, the Comte and the Comtesse de Berneville, the Marquis and the Marquise de Graincourt, the Comte d’Amenoncourt, the Comtesse de Maineville, the Comte and the Comtesse de Franquetot, the Comtesse de Chaverny née d’Aigleville, begged to announce, and from which I understood at length why it had been sent to me when I caught sight of the names of the Marquise de Cambremer née du Mesnil La Guichard, the Marquis and the Marquise de Cambremer, and saw that the deceased, a cousin of the Cambremers, was named Eléonore-Euphrasie-Humbertine de Cambremer, Comtesse de Criquetot. In the whole expanse of this provincial family, the enumeration of which filled several closely printed lines, not a single commoner, and on the other hand not a single known title, but the entire muster-roll of the nobles of the region who made their names—those of all the interesting places in the neighbourhood—ring out with their joyous endings in ville, in court, or sometimes on a duller note (in tot). Garbed in the roof-tiles of their castle or in the roughcast of their parish church, their nodding heads barely reaching above the vault of the nave or hall, and then only to cap themselves with the Norman lantern or the timbers of the pepperpot turret, they gave the impression of having sounded the rallying call to all the charming villages straggling or scattered over a radius of fifty leagues, and to have paraded them in massed formation, without a single absentee or a single intruder, on the compact, rectangular chess-board of the aristocratic letter edged with black.

  My mother had gone upstairs to her room, meditating this sentence from Mme de Sévigné: “I see none of the people who seek to distract me; in veiled words they seek to prevent me from thinking of you, and that offends me”—because the judge had told her that she ought to find some distraction. To me he whispered: “That’s the Princesse de Parme!” My fears were dispelled when I saw that the woman whom the judge pointed out to me bore not the slightest resemblance to Her Royal Highness. But as she had engaged a room in which to spend the night after paying a visit to Mme de Luxembourg, the report of her coming had the effect upon many people of making them take each newcomer for the Princesse de Parme—and upon me of making me go and shut myself up in my attic.

  I had no wish to remain there by myself. It was barely four o’clock. I asked Françoise to go and find Albertine, so that she might spend the evening with me.

  It would be untrue, I think, to say that there were already symptoms of that painful and perpetual mistrust which Albertine was to inspire in me, not to mention the special character, emphatically Gomorrhan, which that mistrust was to assume. Certainly, even that afternoon—but not for the first time—I waited a little anxiously. Françoise, once she had started, stayed away so long that I began to despair. I had not lighted the lamp. The daylight had almost gone. The flag over the Casino flapped in the wind. And, feebler still in the silence of the beach over which the tide was rising, and like a voice expressing and intensifying the jarring emptiness of this restless, unnatural hour, a little barrel-organ that had stopped outside the hotel was playing Viennese waltzes. At length Françoise arrived, but unaccompanied. “I’ve been as quick as I could but she wouldn’t come because she didn’t think she was looking smart enough. If she was five minutes painting herself and powdering herself, she was a good hour by the clock. It’ll be a regular scentshop in here. She’s coming, she stayed behind to tidy herself at the mirror. I thought I should find her here.” There was still a long time to wait before Albertine ap
peared. But the gaiety and the charm that she showed on this occasion dispelled my gloom. She informed me (contrary to what she had said the other day) that she would be staying for the whole season and asked me whether we could not arrange, as in the former year, to meet daily. I told her that at the moment I was too sad and that I would rather send for her from time to time at the last moment, as I did in Paris. “If ever you’re feeling gloomy or if you’re in the mood, don’t hesitate,” she told me, “just send for me and I shall come at once, and if you’re not afraid of its creating a scandal in the hotel, I shall stay as long as you like.” Françoise, in bringing her to me, had assumed the joyous air she wore whenever she had gone to some trouble on my behalf and had succeeded in giving me pleasure. But her joy had nothing to do with Albertine herself, and the very next day she was to greet me with these penetrating words: “Monsieur ought not to see that young lady. I know quite well the sort she is, she’ll make you unhappy.” As I escorted Albertine to the door I saw in the lighted dining-room the Princesse de Parme. I merely gave her a glance, taking care not to be seen. But I must confess that I found a certain grandeur in the royal politeness which had made me smile at the Guermantes’s. It is a fundamental rule that sovereign princes are at home wherever they are, and this rule is conventionally expressed in obsolete and useless customs such as that which requires the host to carry his hat in his hand in his own house to show that he is not in his own home but in the Prince’s. Now the Princesse de Parme may not have formulated this idea to herself, but she was so imbued with it that all her actions, spontaneously invented to suit the circumstances, expressed it. When she rose from table she handed a lavish tip to Aimé, as though he had been there solely for her and she were rewarding, before leaving a country house, a butler who had been detailed to wait upon her. Nor did she stop at the tip, but with a gracious smile bestowed on him a few friendly, flattering words, with a store of which her mother had provided her. She all but told him that, just as the hotel was perfectly managed, so Normandy was a garden of roses and that she preferred France to any other country in the world. Another coin slipped from the Princess’s fingers for the wine waiter whom she had sent for and to whom she insisted on expressing her satisfaction like a general after an inspection. The lift-boy had come up at that moment with a message for her; he too received a word, a smile and a tip, all this interspersed with simple, encouraging remarks intended to prove to them that she was only one of themselves. As Aimé, the wine waiter, the lift-boy and the rest felt that it would be impolite not to grin from ear to ear at a person who smiled at them, she was presently surrounded by a cluster of servants with whom she chatted benevolently; such ways being unfamiliar in smart hotels, the people who passed by, not knowing who she was, thought they were seeing a regular visitor to Balbec who because of her mean extraction or for professional reasons (she was perhaps the wife of an agent for champagne) was less different from the domestics than the really smart visitors. As for me, I thought of the palace at Parma, of the advice, partly religious, partly political, given to this Princess, who behaved towards the lower orders as though she had been obliged to conciliate them in order to reign over them one day; or indeed, as though she were already reigning.