The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  On our way home from mass we would often meet M. Legrandin, who, detained in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer, could only (except in the regular holiday seasons) visit his house at Combray between Saturday evenings and Monday mornings. He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits. More lettered than many men of letters (we were not aware at this period that M. Legrandin had a distinct reputation as a writer, and were greatly astonished to find that a well-known composer had set some verses of his to music), endowed with greater “facility” than many painters, they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either an indifference tinged with fantasy, or a sustained and haughty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious. Tall and handsome of bearing, with a fine, thoughtful face, drooping fair moustaches, blue eyes, an air of disenchantment, an almost exaggerated refinement of courtesy, a talker such as we had never heard, he was in the sight of my family, who never ceased to quote him as an example, the very pattern of a gentleman, who took life in the noblest and most delicate manner. My grandmother alone found fault with him for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not using a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted bow-ties, his short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was astonished, too, at the furious tirades which he was always launching at the aristocracy, at fashionable life, at snobbishness—“undoubtedly,” he would say, “the sin of which St Paul is thinking when he speaks of the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost.”

  Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to apply so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she did not think it in very good taste for M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country gentleman of Lower Normandy, near Balbec, to deliver himself of such violent attacks upon the nobility, going so far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined them all.

  “Well met, my friends!” he would say as he came towards us. “You are lucky to spend so much time here; tomorrow I have to go back to Paris, to squeeze back into my niche. Oh, I admit,” he went on, with the gentle, ironical, disillusioned, rather absent-minded smile that was peculiar to him, “I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,” he added, turning to me. “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

  When, on our return home, my aunt would send to ask us whether Mme Goupil had indeed arrived late for mass, not one of us could inform her. Instead, we increased her anxiety by telling her that there was a painter at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert the Bad. Françoise was at once dispatched to the grocer’s, but returned empty-handed owing to the absence of Théodore, whose dual profession of cantor, with a share in the upkeep of the church, and of grocer’s assistant gave him not only relations with all sections of society, but an encyclopaedic knowledge of their affairs.

  “Ah!” my aunt would sigh, “I wish it were time for Eulalie to come. She is really the only person who will be able to tell me.”

  Eulalie was a limping, energetic, deaf spinster who had “retired” after the death of Mme de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in service since her childhood, and had then taken a room beside the church from which she would incessantly emerge either to attend some service or, when there was no service, to say a prayer by herself or to give Théodore a hand; the rest of her time she spent in visiting sick persons like my aunt Léonie, to whom she would relate everything that had occurred at mass or vespers. She was not above adding occasional pocket-money to the small annuity paid to her by the family of her former employers by going from time to time to look after the Curé’s linen, or that of some other person of note in the clerical world of Combray. Above a mantle of black cloth she wore a little white coif that seemed almost to attach her to some Order, and an infirmity of the skin had stained part of her cheeks and her crooked nose the bright red colour of balsam. Her visits were the one great distraction in the life of my aunt Léonie, who now saw hardly anyone else, except the Curé. My aunt had by degrees dropped every other visitor’s name from her list, because they were all guilty of the fatal error, in her eyes, of falling into one or other of the two categories of people she most detested. One group, the worse of the two, and the one of which she rid herself first, consisted of those who advised her not to “coddle” herself, and preached (even if only negatively and with no outward signs beyond an occasional disapproving silence or doubting smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good red beefsteak would do her more good (when she had had only two wretched mouthfuls of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours!) than her bed and her medicines. The other category was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as seriously ill as she said. And so, of those whom she had allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation and only at Françoise’s urgent request, and who in the course of their visit had shown how unworthy they were of the honour which had been done them by venturing a timid: “Don’t you think that if you were just to stir out a little on really fine days …?” or who, on the other hand, when she said to them: “I’m very low, very low; nearing the end, I’m afraid” had replied: “Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may last a while yet,” all alike might be certain that her doors would never be opened to them again. And if Françoise was amused by the look of consternation on my aunt’s face whenever she saw from her bed any of these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit looking as if they were coming to see her, or whenever she heard her door-bell ring, she would laugh far more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt’s devices (which never failed) for having them sent away, and at their look of discomfiture when they had to turn back without having seen her, and would be filled with secret admiration for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior to all these people since she did not wish to receive them. In short, my aunt demanded that whoever came to see her must at one and the same time approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of ultimate recovery.

  In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in a minute: “The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!,” twenty times Eulalie would retort: “Knowing your illness as you do, Mme Octave, you will live to be a hundred, as Mme Sazerin said to me only yesterday.” For one of Eulalie’s most rooted beliefs, and one that the formidable number of rebuttals which experience had brought her was powerless to eradicate, was that Mme Sazerat’s name was really Mme Sazerin.

  “I do not ask to live to a hundred,” my aunt would say, for she preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.

  And since besides this Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place regularly every Sunday, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent them, were for my aunt a pleasure the prospect of which kept her on those days in a state of expectation, agreeable enough to begin with, but swiftly changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if Eulalie happened to be a little late. For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never stop looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of her symptoms in turn. Eulalie’s ring, if it sounded from the front door at the very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would almost make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she thought of nothing else but this visit, and the moment our lunch was ended Françoise would be impatient for us to
leave the dining-room so that she might go upstairs to “occupy” my aunt. But—especially after the fine weather had definitely set in at Combray—the proud hour of noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its sonorous crown, would long have echoed about our table, beside the blessed bread which too had come in, after church, in its familiar way, and we would still be seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates, weighed down by the heat of the day, and even more by our heavy meal. For upon the permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves, and biscuits, which she no longer even bothered to announce, Françoise would add—as the labour of fields and orchards, the harvest of the tides, the luck of the markets, the kindness of neighbours, and her own genius might provide, so that our bill of fare, like the quatrefoils that were carved on the porches of cathedrals in the thirteenth century, reflected to some extent the rhythm of the seasons and the incidents of daily life—a brill because the fish-woman had guaranteed its freshness, a turkey because she had seen a beauty in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin, cardoons with marrow because she had never done them for us in that way before, a roast leg of mutton because the fresh air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time for it to “settle down” in the seven hours before dinner, spinach by way of a change, apricots because they were still hard to get, gooseberries because in another fortnight there would be none left, raspberries which M. Swann had brought specially, cherries, the first to come from the cherry-tree which had yielded none for the last two years, a cream cheese, of which in those days I was extremely fond, an almond cake because she had ordered one the evening before, a brioche because it was our turn to make them for the church. And when all this was finished, a work composed expressly for ourselves, but dedicated more particularly to my father who had a fondness for such things, a chocolate cream, Françoise’s personal inspiration and speciality would be laid before us, light and fleeting as an “occasional” piece of music into which she had poured the whole of her talent. Anyone who refused to partake of it, saying: “No, thank you, I’ve finished; I’m not hungry any more,” would at once have been relegated to the level of those Philistines who, even when an artist makes them a present of one of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas what is of value is the creator’s intention and his signature. To have left even the tiniest morsel in the dish would have shown as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert hall before the end of a piece under the composer’s very eyes.

  At length my mother would say to me: “Now, don’t stay here all day; you can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little fresh air first; don’t start reading immediately after your food.” And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, ornamented here and there, like a Gothic font, with a salamander, which impressed on the rough stone the mobile relief of its tapering allegorical body, on the bench without a back, in the shade of a lilac-tree, in that little corner of the garden which opened, through a service door, on to the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected soil there rose, in two stages, jutting out from the house itself, and as it were a separate building, my aunt’s back-kitchen. One could see its red-tiled floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the cave of Françoise as a little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing with the offerings of the dairyman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come sometimes from distant villages to dedicate to the goddess the first-fruits of their fields. And its roof was always crowned with a cooing dove.

  In earlier days I did not linger in the sacred grove which surrounded this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I used to steal into the little sitting-room that my uncle Adolphe, a brother of my grandfather and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a major, occupied on the ground floor, a room which, even when its opened windows let in the heat, if not actually the rays of the sun which seldom penetrated so far, would never fail to emit that oddly cool odour, suggestive at once of woodlands and the ancient régime, which sets the nostrils quivering when one goes into an abandoned shooting-lodge. But for some years now I had not gone into my uncle Adolphe’s sanctum, for he no longer came to Combray on account of a quarrel which had arisen between him and my family, through my fault, in the following circumstances:

  Once or twice a month, in Paris, I used to be sent to pay him a visit, as he was finishing his luncheon, wearing a simple jacket and waited upon by his manservant in a tunic of striped drill, purple and white. He would complain that I had not been to see him for a long time, that he was being neglected; he would offer me a biscuit or a tangerine, and we would go through a drawing-room in which no one ever sat, whose fire was never lighted, whose walls were decorated with gilded mouldings, its ceiling painted blue in imitation of the sky, and its furniture upholstered in satin, as at my grandparents’, only yellow; then we would enter what he called his “study,” a room whose walls were hung with prints which showed, against a dark background, a pink and fleshy goddess driving a chariot, or standing upon a globe, or wearing a star on her brow—pictures which were popular under the Second Empire because there was thought to be something about them that suggested Pompeii, which were then generally despised, and which are now becoming fashionable again for one single and consistent reason (notwithstanding all the others that are advanced), namely, that they suggest the Second Empire. And there I would stay with my uncle until his man came with a message from the coachman, asking him at what time he would like the carriage. My uncle would then become lost in meditation, while his servant stood there agape, not daring to disturb him by the least movement, curiously awaiting his answer, which never varied. For in the end, after a supreme crisis of hesitation, my uncle would utter, infallibly, the words: “A quarter past two,” which the servant would echo with amazement, but without disputing them: “A quarter past two! Very good, sir … I’ll go and tell him …”

  At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so inaccurate was the picture I had formed in my mind’s eye of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked, as through a stereoscope, at a scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other scenes presented to the rest of the audience individually.

  Every morning I would hasten to the Morris column to see what new plays it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the day-dreams with which these announcements filled my imagination, day-dreams which were conditioned by the associations of the words forming the titles of the plays, and also by the colour of the bills, still damp and wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out. Nothing, unless it were such strange titles as the Testament de César Girodot or Oedipus Rex, inscribed not on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique but on the wine-coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of the Diamants de la Couronne than the sleek, mysterious satin of the Domino Noir; and since my parents had told me that, for my first visit to the theatre, I should have to choose between these two pieces, I would study exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title of the other (for these were all that I knew of either), attempting to snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure it promised, and to compare this with the pleasure latent in the other, until in the end I succeeded in conjuring up such vivid and compelling pictures of, on the one hand, a play of dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle, velvety play, that I was as little capable of deciding which of them I should prefer to see as if, at the dinner-table, I had been obliged to choose between rice à l’Impératrice and the famous chocolate cream.

  All my conversations with my friends bore upon actors, whose art, although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment. Between one actor’s tricks of intonation and inflection and another’s, the most trifling differences would strik
e me as being of an incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would arrange them in order of talent in lists which I used to recite to myself all day and which ended up by hardening in my brain and hampering it by their immovability.