In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV

by Marcel Proust

  At a signal from her daughter-in-law, the dowager Mme de Cambremer prepared to depart, and said to me: “Since you won’t come and stay at Féterne, won’t you at least come to luncheon, one day this week, tomorrow for instance?” And in her benevolence, to make the invitation irresistible, she added: “You will find the Comte de Crisenoy,” whom I had never lost, for the simple reason that I did not know him. She was beginning to dazzle me with yet further temptations, but stopped short; for the judge, who, on returning to the hotel, had been told that she was on the premises, had crept about searching for her everywhere, then waited his opportunity, and pretending to have caught sight of her by chance, came up now to pay her his respects. I gathered that Mme de Cambremer did not mean to extend to him the invitation to lunch that she had just addressed to me. And yet he had known her far longer than I, having for years past been one of the regular guests at the afternoon parties at Féterne whom I used so to envy during my former visit to Balbec. But old acquaintance is not the only thing that counts in society. And hostesses are more inclined to reserve their luncheons for new acquaintances who still whet their curiosity, especially when they arrive preceded by a warm and glowing recommendation from a Saint-Loup. The dowager Mme de Cambremer calculated that the judge could not have heard what she was saying to me, but, to salve her conscience, spoke to him in the most friendly terms. In the sunlight on the horizon that flooded the golden coastline of Rivebelle, invisible as a rule, we could just make out, barely distinguishable from the luminous azure, rising from the water, rose-pink, silvery, faint, the little bells that were sounding the Angelus round about Féterne. “That is rather Pelléas, too,” I suggested to Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin. “You know the scene I mean.” “Of course I do” was what she said; but “I haven’t the faintest idea” was the message proclaimed by her voice and features, which did not mould themselves to the shape of any recollection, and by her smile, which floated in the air, without support. The dowager could not get over her astonishment that the sound of bells should carry so far, and rose, reminded of the time: “But, as a rule,” I said, “we never see that part of the coast from Balbec, nor hear it either. The weather must have changed and enlarged the horizon in more ways than one. Unless the bells have come to look for you, since I see that they are making you leave; to you they are a dinner bell.” The judge, little interested in the bells, glanced furtively along the esplanade, on which he was sorry to see so few people that evening. “You are a true poet,” the dowager Mme de Cambremer said to me. “One feels you are so responsive, so artistic. Do come, I shall play you some Chopin,” she went on, raising her arms with an air of ecstasy and pronouncing the words in a raucous voice that seemed to be shifting pebbles. Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief. The judge unwittingly did me a great favour by offering the Marquise his arm to escort her to her carriage, a certain blend of vulgarity, boldness and love of ostentation prompting him to a mode of conduct which other people would hesitate to adopt but which is by no means unwelcome in society. He was in any case, and had been for years past, far more in the habit of such conduct than myself. While blessing him I did not venture to emulate him, and walked by the side of Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin who insisted upon seeing the book that I had in my hand. The name of Mme de Sévigné drew a grimace from her; and using a word which she had read in certain journals, but which, used in speech, given a feminine form and applied to a seventeenth-century writer, had an odd effect, she asked me: “Do you really think she’s ‘talentuous’?” The dowager gave her footman the address of a pastry-cook where she had to call before taking the road, which was pink in the evening haze, with the humped cliffs stretching away into the bluish distance. She asked her old coachman whether one of the horses which was apt to catch cold had been kept warm enough, and whether the other’s shoe were not hurting him. “I shall write to you and make a definite arrangement,” she murmured to me. “I heard you talking about literature to my daughter-in-law. She’s adorable,” she added, not that she really thought so, but she had acquired the habit—and kept it up out of the kindness of her heart—of saying so, in order that her son might not appear to have married for money. “Besides,” she added with a final enthusiastic mumble, “she’s so hartthhisttic!” With this she stepped into her carriage, nodding her head, holding the crook of her sunshade aloft, and set off through the streets of Balbec, overloaded with the ornaments of her ministry, like an old bishop on his confirmation rounds.

  “She has asked you to lunch,” the judge said to me sternly when the carriage had passed out of sight and I came indoors with the girls. “We’re not on the best of terms. She feels that I neglect her. Good heavens, I’m easy enough to get on with. If anybody needs me, I’m always there to say: Present! But they tried to get their hooks into me. And that,” he went on with a shrewd look, waving his finger like a man arguing some subtle distinction, “that is a thing I will not allow. It’s a threat to the liberty of my holidays. I was obliged to say: Stop there! You seem to be in her good books. When you reach my age you will see that society is a paltry thing, and you will be sorry you attached so much importance to these trifles. Well, I’m going to take a turn before dinner. Good-bye, children,” he shouted back at us, as though he were already fifty paces away.

  When I had said good-bye to Rosemonde and Gisèle, they saw with astonishment that Albertine was staying behind instead of accompanying them. “Why, Albertine, what are you doing, don’t you know what time it is?” “Go home,” she replied in a tone of authority. “I want to talk to him,” she added, pointing to me with a submissive air. Rosemonde and Gisèle stared at me, filled with a new and strange respect. I enjoyed the feeling that, for a moment at least, in the eyes even of Rosemonde and Gisèle, I was to Albertine something more important than the time to go home, or than her friends, and might indeed share solemn secrets with her into which it was impossible for them to be admitted. “Shan’t we see you again this evening?” “I don’t know, it will depend on this person. Anyhow, tomorrow.” “Let’s go up to my room,” I said to her when her friends had gone. We took the lift; she remained silent in the lift-boy’s presence. The habit of being obliged to resort to personal observation and deduction in order to find out the business of their masters, those strange beings who converse among themselves and do not speak to them, develops in “employees” (as the lift-boy styled servants) a greater power of divination than “employers” possess. Our organs become atrophied or grow stronger or more subtle according as our need of them increases or diminishes. Since railways came into existence, the necessity of not missing trains has taught us to take account of minutes, whereas among the ancient Romans, who not only had a more cursory acquaintance with astronomy but led less hurried lives, the notion not only of minutes but even of fixed hours barely existed. Hence the lift-boy had gathered, and meant to inform his “colleagues,” that Albertine and I were preoccupied. But he talked to us without ceasing because he had no tact. And yet I discerned upon his face, in place of the customary expression of friendliness and joy at taking me up in his lift, an air of extraordinary dejection and anxiety. Since I knew nothing of the cause of this, in an attempt to distract his thoughts—although I was more preoccupied with Albertine—I told him that the lady who had just left was called the Marquise de Cambremer and not de Camembert. On the floor which we were passing at that moment, I caught sight of a hideous chambermaid carrying a bolster, who greeted me with respect, hoping for a tip when I left. I should have liked to know if she was the one whom I had so ardently desired on the evening of my first arrival at Balbec, but I could never arrive at any certainty. The lift-boy swore to me with the sincerity of most false witnesses, but without shedding his woebegone expression, that it was indeed by the name of Camembert that the Marquise had told him to announce her. And as a matter of fact it was quite natural that he should have heard her say a name which he already knew. Besides, havi
ng only those very vague notions of nobility, and of the names with which titles are composed, which are shared by many people who are not lift-boys, the name Camembert had seemed to him all the more probable inasmuch as, that cheese being universally known, it was not in the least surprising that a marquisate should have been extracted from so glorious a renown, unless it were the marquisate that had bestowed its celebrity upon the cheese. Nevertheless, as he saw that I refused to admit that I might be mistaken, and as he knew that masters like to see their most futile whims obeyed and their most obvious lies accepted, he promised me like a good servant that in future he would say Cambremer. It is true that none of the shopkeepers in the town, none of the peasants in the district, where the name and persons of the Cambremers were perfectly familiar, could ever have made the lift-boy’s mistake. But the staff of the “Grand Hotel of Balbec” were none of them natives. They came direct, together with all the equipment and stock, from Biarritz, Nice and Monte-Carlo, one division having been transferred to Deauville, another to Dinard and the third reserved for Balbec.

  But the lift-boy’s anxious gloom continued to grow. For him thus to forget to show his devotion to me by the customary smiles, some misfortune must have befallen him. Perhaps he had been “‘missed.” I made up my mind in that case to try to secure his reinstatement, the manager having promised to ratify all my wishes with regard to his staff. “You can always do just what you like, I rectify everything in advance.” Suddenly, as I stepped out of the lift, I guessed the meaning of the lift-boy’s air of stricken misery. Because of Albertine’s presence I had not given him the five francs which I was in the habit of slipping into his hand when I went up. And the idiot, instead of realising that I did not wish to make a display of largesse in front of a third person, had begun to tremble, supposing that it was all finished once and for all, that I would never give him anything again. He imagined that I was “on the rocks” (as the Duc de Guermantes would have said), and the supposition inspired him with no pity for myself but with a terrible selfish disappointment. I told myself that I was less unreasonable than my mother thought when I had not dared, one day, not to give the extravagant but feverishly awaited sum that I had given the day before. But at the same time the meaning that I had until then, and without a shadow of doubt, ascribed to his habitual expression of joy, in which I had no hesitation in seeing a sign of devotion, seemed to me to have become less certain. Seeing him ready, in his despair, to fling himself down from the fifth floor of the hotel, I asked myself whether, if our respective social stations were to be altered, in consequence let us say of a revolution, instead of politely working his lift for me the lift-boy, having become a bourgeois, would not have flung me down the well, and whether there was not, in certain of the lower orders, more duplicity than in society, where, no doubt, people reserve their offensive remarks until we are out of earshot, but their attitude towards us would not be insulting if we were hard up.

  One cannot however say that the lift-boy was the most commercially minded person in the Balbec hotel. From this point of view the staff might be divided into two categories: on the one hand, those who drew distinctions between the guests, and were more grateful for the modest tip of an old nobleman (who, moreover, was in a position to relieve them from 28 days of military service by saying a word for them to General de Beautreillis) than for the thoughtless liberalities of a flashy vulgarian who by his very extravagance revealed a lack of breeding which only to his face did they call generosity; on the other hand, those to whom nobility, intellect, fame, position, manners were non-existent, concealed under a cash valuation. For these there was but a single hierarchy, that of the money one has, or rather the money one gives. Perhaps even Aimé himself, although pretending, in view of the great number of hotels in which he had served, to a great knowledge of the world, belonged to this latter category. At the most he would give a social turn, showing that he knew who was who, to this sort of appreciation, as when he said of the Princesse de Luxembourg: “There’s a pile of money among that lot?” (the question mark at the end being to ascertain the facts, or to check such information as he had already ascertained, before supplying a client with a “chef” for Paris, or promising him a table on the left, by the door, with a view of the sea, at Balbec). In spite of this, without being free from mercenary tendencies, he would not have displayed them with the fatuous despair of the lift-boy. And yet the latter’s artlessness helped perhaps to simplify things. It is a convenient feature of a big hotel, or of a house such as Rachel used at one time to frequent, that, without any intermediary, at the sight of a hundred-franc note, still more a thousand-franc one, even though it is being given on that particular occasion to someone else, the hitherto stony face of a servant or a woman will light up with smiles and offers of service. Whereas in politics, or in the relations between lover and mistress, there are too many things interposed between money and docility—so many things indeed that the very people upon whose faces money finally evokes a smile are often incapable of following the internal process that links them together, and believe themselves to be, indeed are, more refined. Besides, it rids polite conversation of such speeches as: “There’s only one thing left for me to do—you’ll find me tomorrow in the mortuary.” Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned.

  As soon as we were alone and had moved along the corridor, Albertine began: “What have you got against me?” Had my harsh treatment of her been more painful to myself? Hadn’t it been merely an unconscious ruse on my part, with the object of bringing her round to that attitude of fear and supplication which would enable me to interrogate her, and perhaps to find out which of the two hypotheses that I had long since formed about her was the correct one? However that may be, when I heard her question I suddenly felt the joy of one who attains to a long-desired goal. Before answering her, I escorted her to the door of my room. Opening it, I scattered the roseate light that was flooding the room and turning the white muslin of the curtains drawn for the night to golden damask. I went across to the window; the gulls had settled again upon the waves; but this time they were pink. I drew Albertine’s attention to them. “Don’t change the subject,” she said, “be frank with me.” I lied. I told her that she must first listen to a confession, that of a great passion I had had for Andrée for some time past, and I made her this confession with a simplicity and frankness worthy of the stage, but seldom expressed in real life except in declaring a love which one does not feel. Reverting to the fiction I had employed with Gilberte before my first visit to Balbec, but varying it, I went so far (in order to make her more ready to believe me when I told her now that I did not love her) as to let fall the admission that at one time I had been on the point of falling in love with her, but that too long an interval had elapsed, that she was no more to me now than a good friend, and that, even if I wished, it would no longer be possible for me to feel a more ardent sentiment for her. As it happened, in thus underlining to Albertine these protestations of coldness towards her, I was merely—because of a particular circumstance and with a particular object in view—making more perceptible, accentuating more markedly, that binary rhythm which love adopts in all those who have too little confidence in themselves to believe that a woman can ever fall in love with them, and also that they themselves can genuinely fall in love with her. They know themselves well enough to have observed that in the presence of the most divergent types of woman they felt the same hopes, the same agonies, invented the same romances, uttered the same words, and to have realised therefore that their feelings, their actions, bear no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her, like the incoming tide breaking against the rocks, and their sense of their own instability increases still further their misgivings that this woman, by whom they so long to be loved, does not love them. Why should chance have brought it about, when she is simply an accident placed in
the path of our surging desires, that we should ourselves be the object of the desires that she feels? And so, while feeling the need to pour out to her all those sentiments, so different from the merely human sentiments that our neighbour inspires in us, those highly specialised sentiments which are those of lovers, after having taken a step forward, in avowing to the one we love our passion for her, our hopes, we are overcome at once by the fear of offending her, and ashamed too that the language we have used to her was not fashioned expressly for her, that it has served us already, will serve us again for others, that if she does not love us she cannot understand us, and that we have spoken in that case with the lack of taste and discretion of a pedant who addresses an ignorant audience in subtle phrases which are not for them; and this fear and shame provoke the counter-rhythm, the reflux, the need, if only by first drawing back, hotly denying the affection previously confessed, to resume the offensive and regain respect and domination; the double rhythm is perceptible in the various periods of a single love affair, in all the corresponding periods of similar love affairs, in all those people whose self-analysis outweighs their self-esteem. If it was however somewhat more forcefully accentuated than usual in this speech which I was now making to Albertine, this was simply to allow me to pass more rapidly and more vigorously to the opposite rhythm which would be measured by my tenderness.