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

by Marcel Proust

  What a deceptive sense sight is! A human body, even a beloved one, as Albertine’s was, seems to us, from a few yards, from a few inches away, remote from us. And similarly with the soul that inhabits it. But if something brings about a violent change in the position of that soul in relation to us, shows us that it is in love with others and not with us, then by the beating of our shattered heart we feel that it is not a few feet away from us but within us that the beloved creature was. Within us, in regions more or less superficial. But the words: “That friend is Mlle Vinteuil” had been the Open sesame, which I should have been incapable of discovering by myself, that had made Albertine penetrate to the depths of my lacerated heart. And I might search for a hundred years without discovering how to open the door that had closed behind her.

  I had ceased for a moment to hear these words ringing in my ears while Albertine had been with me just now. While kissing her, as I used to kiss my mother at Combray, to calm my anguish, I believed almost in Albertine’s innocence, or at least did not think continuously of the discovery that I had made of her vice. But now that I was alone the words rang out afresh like those noises inside the ear which one hears as soon as someone stops talking to one. Her vice now seemed to me to be beyond any doubt. The light of approaching sunrise, by modifying the appearance of the things around me, made me once again, as if for a moment I were shifting my position in relation to it, even more bitterly aware of my suffering. I had never seen the dawn of so beautiful or so sorrowful a morning. And thinking of all the indifferent landscapes which were about to be lit up and which, only yesterday, would have filled me simply with the desire to visit them, I could not repress a sob when, with a gesture of oblation mechanically performed and symbolising, in my eyes, the bloody sacrifice which I was about to have to make of all joy, every morning, until the end of my life, a solemn renewal, celebrated as each day dawned, of my daily grief and of the blood from my wound, the golden egg of the sun, as though propelled by the rupture of equilibrium brought about at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with tongues of flame as in a painting, burst through the curtain behind which one had sensed it quivering for a moment, ready to appear on the scene and to spring forward, and whose mysterious congealed purple it annihilated in a flood of light. I heard myself weeping. But at that moment, to my astonishment, the door opened and, with a throbbing heart, I seemed to see my grandmother standing before me, as in one of those apparitions that had already visited me, but only in my sleep. Was it all only a dream, then? Alas, I was wide awake. “You see a likeness to your poor grandmother,” said Mamma, for it was she, speaking gently as though to calm my fear, acknowledging however the resemblance, with a beautiful smile of modest pride which had always been innocent of coquetry. Her dishevelled hair, whose grey tresses were not hidden and strayed about her troubled eyes, her ageing cheeks, my grandmother’s own dressing-gown which she was wearing, all these had for a moment prevented me from recognising her and had made me uncertain whether I was still asleep or my grandmother had come back to life. For a long time past my mother had resembled my grandmother far more than the young and smiling Mamma of my childhood. But I had ceased to think of this resemblance. So it is, when one has been sitting reading for a long time, one’s mind absorbed, not noticing how the time was passing, that suddenly one sees round about one the sun that shone yesterday at the same hour call up the same harmonies, the same effects of colour that precede a sunset. It was with a smile that my mother drew my attention to my error, for it was pleasing to her that she should bear so strong a resemblance to her mother.

  “I came,” she said, “because while I was asleep I thought I heard someone crying. It wakened me. But how is it that you aren’t in bed? And your eyes are filled with tears. What’s the matter?”

  I took her head in my arms: “Mamma, listen, I’m afraid you’ll think me very changeable. But first of all, yesterday I spoke to you not at all nicely about Albertine; what I said was unfair.”

  “But what difference can that make?” said my mother, and, catching sight of the rising sun, she smiled sadly as she thought of her own mother, and, so that I might not lose the benefit of a spectacle which my grandmother used to regret that I never watched, she pointed to the window. But beyond the beach of Balbec, the sea, the sunrise, which Mamma was pointing out to me, I saw, with a gesture of despair which did not escape her notice, the room at Montjouvain where Albertine, curled up like a great cat, with her mischievous pink nose, had taken the place of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend and was saying amid peals of her voluptuous laughter: “Well, all the better if they do see us! What, I wouldn’t dare to spit on that old monkey?” It was this scene that I saw, beyond the scene which was framed in the open window and which was no more than a dim veil drawn over the other, superimposed upon it like a reflexion. It seemed, indeed, itself almost unreal, like a painted view. Facing us, where the cliff of Parville jutted out, the little wood in which we had played “ferret” dipped the picture of its foliage down into the sea, beneath the still-golden varnish of the water, as at the hour when often, at the close of day, after I had gone there to rest in the shade with Albertine, we had risen as we saw the sun sink in the sky. In the confusion of the night mists which still hung in pink and blue tatters over the water littered with the pearly debris of the dawn, boats sailed by, smiling at the slanting light which gilded their sails and the points of their bowsprits as when they are homeward bound at evening: an imaginary scene, shivering and deserted, a pure evocation of the sunset which did not rest, as at evening, upon the sequence of the hours of the day which I was accustomed to see precede it, detached, interpolated, more insubstantial even than the horrible image of Montjouvain which it did not succeed in cancelling, covering, concealing—a poetical, vain image of memory and dreams.

  “But come,” my mother was saying, “you said nothing unpleasant about her, you told me that she bored you a little, that you were glad you had given up the idea of marrying her. That’s no reason for you to cry like that. Remember that your Mamma is going away today and couldn’t bear to leave her big pet in such a state. Especially, my poor child, as I haven’t time to comfort you. Even if my things are packed, one never has any time on the morning of a journey.”

  “It’s not that.”

  And then, calculating the future, weighing up my desires, realising that such an affection on Albertine’s part for Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, and one of such long standing, could not have been innocent, that Albertine had been initiated, and, as every one of her instinctive actions made plain to me, had moreover been born with a predisposition towards that vice which my anxiety had all too often sensed in her, in which she must never have ceased to indulge (in which she was indulging perhaps at that moment, taking advantage of an instant in which I was not present), I said to my mother, knowing the pain that I was causing her, which she did not reveal and which betrayed itself only by that air of serious preoccupation which she wore when she was comparing the gravity of making me unhappy or making me ill, that air which she had worn at Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night in my room, that air which at this moment was extraordinarily like my grandmother’s when she had allowed me to drink brandy, I said to my mother: “I know how unhappy I’m going to make you. First of all, instead of remaining here as you wished, I want to leave at the same time as you. But that too is nothing. I don’t feel well here, I’d rather go home. But listen to me, don’t be too distressed. This is it. I was deceiving myself, I deceived you in good faith yesterday, I’ve been thinking it over all night. I absolutely must—and let’s settle the matter at once, because I’m quite clear about it now, because I won’t change my mind again, because I couldn’t live without it—I absolutely must marry Albertine.”

  Notes

  1 Altesse, like majesté, being feminine, takes the feminine pronoun.

  2 Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté: from Alfred de Vigny’s La Colère de Samson.

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p; 3 The reference is to Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador in St Petersburg during the Great War.

  4 Emile Loubet, President of the Republic from 1899 to 1906.

  5 Vert = spicy, risqué.

  6 Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denis: a distinguished French sinologist.

  7 Of the two French versions of the Arabian Nights, Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-17) is elegant, scholarly but heavily bowdlerised, and Mardrus’s Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit (1899-1904) coarser and unexpurgated.

  8 A popular tune from Offenbach’s Les Brigands. A courrier de cabinet is the equivalent of a King’s or Queen’s Messenger.

  9 Better known under his pen-name Saint-John Perse.

  10 Mme Récamier’s property on the outskirts of Paris, where she held her salon.

  11 Jachères = fallow land; gâtines = sterile marshland.

  12 Francisque Sarcey: middlebrow drama critic noted for his avuncular style.

  13 The French has le cheveu instead of the normal les cheveux.

  14 Untranslatable pun. The French of course is Watteau à vapeur, echoing bateau à vapeur = steamer.

  15 Monseigneur is the formula for addressing royalty.

  16 Philipp, Prince Eulenburg, a close friend and adviser of William II, was involved in a homosexual scandal in 1906.

  17 The French say une veine de cocu for “the luck of the devil.”

  18 Tapette can mean both “chatterbox” and “nancy boy.”

  19 Idiomatic expression meaning “the moment of reckoning.”

  Addenda

  The manuscript has a longer version of M. de Charlus’s reply:

  “Good heavens, what a fate for that unfortunate canvas to be a prisoner in the house of such a person! To go there once by chance is in itself an error of taste; but to spend one’s life there, especially if one is a thing of beauty, is so painful as to be quite unpardonable. There are certain forms of disgrace which it’s a crime to resign oneself to … [As a good Catholic, I honour St Euverte: crossed out] and I can remember very well from the Lives of the Saints what this confessor’s qualifications for canonisation were; and indeed, if you like, as a no less good pagan, I respect Diana and admire her crescent, especially when it is placed in your hair by Elstir. But as for the contradictory monster, or even the monster pure and simple, whom you call Diane de Saint-Euverte, I confess I do not take the desire for a union of the churches as far as that. The name recalls the time when altars used to be raised to St Apollo. It is a very distant time—a time from which the person you speak of must incidentally date, judging by her face, which has strangely survived exhumation. And yet, in spite of everything, she is a person with whom one has certain things in common; she has always manifested a singular love of beauty.” This observation would have appeared incomprehensible to the Marquise if for some minutes past, having ceased to understand, she had not given up listening. The love of beauty which caused M. de Charlus to cherish, together with a great deal of social contempt, a more deep-rooted respect for Mme de Saint-Euverte, was deduced from the fact that she always had as footmen a numerous and carefully selected pack of irreproachably vigorous young men. “Yes, what a destiny for a beautiful work of art which was spoiled from the start by living face to face with you! There is something tragic about the fate of these captive paintings. Just think, if ever you pay a brief visit to that lady from the Golden Legend, with what despair the poor portrait, imprisoned in its blue and rose-pink tones, must be saying to you:

  How different are our fates! I must remain

  But you are free to go …

  And yet both of you are flowers. Flowers, themselves too in bondage, have contrived in their captivity sublime stratagems for passing on their messages. I confess that I should not be surprised if, with similar intelligence, some day when the windows of the Burgundian saint’s wife were left open, your portrait unfolded its canvas wings and flew off, thus solving the problem of aerial navigation before mankind, and making Elstir, in a second and more unexpected form, the successor of Leonardo da Vinci.”

  In place of this sentence the manuscript has a long passage which was not included in the original edition and which Proust here declares his explicit intention to return to later in the novel, though he did not have time to do so:

  People in society noticed the Princess’s febrility, and her fear, though she was still very far from ageing, lest the state of nervous agitation in which she now lived might prevent her from keeping her young appearance. Indeed one evening, at a dinner party to which M. de Charlus was also invited and at which, for that reason, she arrived looking radiant but somehow strange, I realised that this strangeness arose from the fact that, thinking to improve her complexion and to look younger—and probably for the first time in her life—she was heavily made up. She exaggerated even further the eccentricity of dress which had always been a slight weakness of hers. She had only to hear M. de Charlus speak of a portrait to have its sitter’s elaborate finery copied and to wear it herself. One day when, thus bedecked with an immense hat copied from a Gainsborough portrait (it would be better to think of a painter whose hats were really extraordinary), she was harping on the theme, which had now become a familiar one with her, of how sad it must be to grow old, and quoted in this connexion Mme Récamier’s remark to the effect that she would know she was no longer beautiful when the little chimney-sweeps no longer turned to look at her in the street. “Don’t worry, my dear little Marie,” replied the Duchesse de Guermantes in a caressing voice, so that the affectionate gentleness of her tone should prevent her cousin from taking offence at the irony of the words, “you’ve only to go on wearing hats like the one you have on and you can be sure that they’ll always turn round.”

  This love of hers for M. de Charlus which was beginning to be bruited abroad, combined with what was gradually becoming known about the latter’s way of life, was almost as much of a help to the anti-Dreyfusards as the Princess’s Germanic origin. When some wavering spirit pointed out in favour of Dreyfus’s innocence the fact that a nationalist and anti-semitic Christian like the Prince de Guermantes had been converted to a belief in it, people would reply: “But didn’t he marry a German?” “Yes, but …” “And isn’t that German woman rather highly strung? Isn’t she infatuated with a man who has bizarre tastes?” And in spite of the fact that the Prince’s Dreyfusism had not been prompted by his wife and had no connexion with the Baron’s sexual proclivities, the philosophical anti-Dreyfusard would conclude: “There, you see! The Prince de Guermantes may be Dreyfusist in the best of good faith; but foreign influence may have been brought to bear on him by occult means. That’s the most dangerous way. But let me give you a piece of advice. Whenever you come across a Dreyfusard, just scratch a bit. Not far underneath you’ll find the ghetto, foreign blood, inversion or Wagneromania.” And cravenly the subject would be dropped, for it had to be admitted that the Princess was a passionate Wagnerian.

  Whenever the Princess was expecting a visit from me, since she knew that I often saw M. de Charlus, she would evidently prepare in advance a certain number of questions which she then put to me adroitly enough for me not to detect what lay behind them and which must have been aimed at verifying whether such and such an assertion, such and such an excuse by M. de Charlus in connexion with a certain address or a certain evening, were true or not. Sometimes, throughout my entire visit, she would not ask me a single question, however insignificant it might have appeared, and would try to draw my attention to this. Then, having said good-bye to me, she would suddenly, on the doorstep, ask me five or six as though without premeditation. So it went on, until one evening she sent for me. I found her in a state of extraordinary agitation, scarcely able to hold back her tears. She asked if she could entrust me with a letter for M. de Charlus and begged me to deliver it to him at all costs. I hurried round to his house, where I found him in front of the mirror wiping a few specks of powder from his face. He perused the letter—the most desperate appeal, I later learned—and as
ked me to reply that it was physically impossible that evening, that he was ill. While he was talking to me, he plucked from a vase one after another a number of roses each of a different hue, tried them in his buttonhole, and looked in the mirror to see how they matched his complexion, without being able to decide on any of them. His valet came in to announce that the barber had arrived, and the Baron held out his hand to say good-bye to me. “But he’s forgotten his curling tongs,” said the valet. The Baron flew into a terrible rage; only the unsightly flush which threatened to ruin his complexion persuaded him to calm down a little, though he remained plunged in an even more bitter despair than before because not only would his hair be less wavy than it might have been but his face would be redder and his nose shiny with sweat. “He can go and get them,” suggested the valet. “But I haven’t the time,” wailed the Baron in an ululation calculated to produce as terrifying an effect as the most violent rage while generating less heat in him who emitted it. “I haven’t the time,” he moaned. “I must leave in half an hour or I shall miss everything.” “Would Monsieur le Baron like him to come in, then?” “I don’t know, I can’t do without a touch of the curling tongs. Tell him he’s a brute, a scoundrel. Tell him …”