It cost me a great effort not to ply her with questions, but, mastering myself so as to appear not to be attaching any importance to all this, I returned to Thomas Hardy. “Do you remember the stonemasons in Jude the Obscure, and in The Well-Beloved the blocks of stone which the father hews out of the island coming in boats to be piled up in the son’s work-shop where they are turned into statues; and in A Pair of Blue Eyes the parallelism of the tombs, and also the parallel line of the boat and the nearby railway coaches containing the lovers and the dead woman; and the parallel between The Well-Beloved, where the man loves three women, and A Pair of Blue Eyes, where the woman loves three men, and in short all those novels which can be superimposed on one another like the houses piled up vertically on the rocky soil of the island. I can’t sum up the greatest writers like this in a few moments, but you’ll see in Stendhal a certain sense of altitude symbolising the life of the spirit: the lofty place in which Julien Sorel is imprisoned, the tower at the top of which Fabrice is incarcerated, the belfry in which the Abbé Blanès pores over his astrology and from which Fabrice has such a magnificent bird’s-eye view. You told me you had seen some of Vermeer’s pictures: you must have realised that they’re fragments of an identical world, that it’s always, however great the genius with which they have been re-created, the same table, the same carpet, the same woman, the same novel and unique beauty, an enigma at that period in which nothing resembles or explains it, if one doesn’t try to relate it all through subject matter but to isolate the distinctive impression produced by the colour. Well, this novel beauty remains identical in all Dostoievsky’s works. Isn’t the Dostoievsky woman (as distinctive as a Rembrandt woman) with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature was only play-acting, into terrible insolence (although at heart it seems that she is more good than bad), isn’t she always the same, whether it’s Nastasia Philipovna writing love letters to Aglaya and telling her that she hates her, or in a visit that’s absolutely identical with this—as also the one where Nastasia Philipovna insults Gania’s family—Grushenka, as charming in Katerina Ivanovna’s house as the latter had supposed her to be terrible, then suddenly revealing her malevolence by insulting Katerina Ivanovna (although Grushenka is good at heart)? Grushenka, Nastasia—figures as original, as mysterious, not merely as Carpaccio’s courtesans but as Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. Mind you, he certainly didn’t only know how to depict that striking dual face, with its sudden explosions of furious pride, which makes the woman seem other than she is (‘You are not like that,’ says Myshkin to Nastasia during the visit to Gania’s family, and Alyosha might have said the same to Grushenka during the visit to Katerina Ivanovna). But on the other hand when he wants ‘ideas for paintings’ they’re always stupid and would at best result in the pictures where Munkacsy wanted to see a condemned man represented at the moment when … etc., or the Virgin Mary at the moment when … etc. But to return to the new kind of beauty that Dostoievsky brought to the world, just as, in Vermeer, there’s the creation of a certain soul, of a certain colour of fabrics and places, so in Dostoievsky there’s the creation not only of people but of their homes, and the house of the Murder in Crime and Punishment, with its janitor, isn’t it as marvellous as the masterpiece of the house of Murder in The Idiot, that sombre house of Rogozhin’s, so long, and so high, and so vast, in which he kills Nastasia Philipovna. That new and terrible beauty of a house, that new and two-sided beauty of a woman’s face, that is the unique thing that Dostoievsky has given to the world, and the comparisons that literary critics may make, between him and Gogol, or between him and Paul de Kock, are of no interest, being external to this secret beauty. Besides, if I’ve said to you that from one novel to another it’s the same scene, it’s in the compass of a single novel that the same scenes, the same characters reappear if the novel is at all long. I could illustrate this to you easily in War and Peace, and a certain scene in a carriage …”
“I didn’t want to interrupt you, but now that I see that you’re leaving Dostoievsky, I’m afraid I might forget. My sweet, what was it you meant the other day when you said: ‘It’s like the Dostoievsky side of Mme de Sévigné.’ I must confess that I didn’t understand. It seems to me so different.”
“Come, little girl, let me give you a kiss to thank you for remembering so well what I say. You shall go back to the pianola afterwards. And I must admit that what I said was rather stupid. But I said it for two reasons. The first is a special reason. What I meant was that Mme de Sévigné, like Elstir, like Dostoievsky, instead of presenting things in their logical sequence, that is to say beginning with the cause, shows us first of all the effect, the illusion that strikes us. That is how Dostoievsky presents his characters. Their actions seem to us as deceptive as those effects in Elstir’s pictures where the sea appears to be in the sky. We’re quite surprised to find later on that some sly-looking individual is really the best of men, or vice versa.”
“Yes, but give me an example in Mme de Sévigné.”
“I admit,” I answered her with a laugh, “that it’s very far-fetched, but still I could find examples. For instance …,”23
“But did he ever murder anyone, Dostoievsky? The novels of his that I know might all be called The Story of a Crime. It’s an obsession with him, it isn’t natural that he should always be talking about it.”
“I don’t think so, dear Albertine. I know little about his life. It’s certain that, like everyone else, he was acquainted with sin, in one form or another, and probably in a form which the laws condemn. In that sense he must have been a bit criminal, like his heroes—who in any case are not entirely criminal, who are found guilty with extenuating circumstances. And perhaps it wasn’t necessary for him to be criminal himself. I’m not a novelist; it’s possible that creative writers are tempted by certain forms of life of which they have no personal experience. If I come with you to Versailles as we arranged, I shall show you the portrait of an ultra-respectable man, the best of husbands, Choderlos de Laclos, who wrote the most appallingly perverse book, and just opposite it the portrait of Mme de Genlis who wrote moral tales and, not content with betraying the Duchesse d’Orléans, tortured her by turning her children against her. I admit all the same that in Dostoievsky this preoccupation with murder is something extraordinary which makes him very alien to me. I’m amazed enough when I hear Baudelaire say:
If not yet poison, arson, rape, and stabbing …
It is because our soul, alas! lacks daring.
But I can at least assume that Baudelaire is not sincere. Whereas Dostoievsky … All that sort of thing seems to me as remote from myself as possible, unless there are parts of myself of which I know nothing, for we realise our own nature only in the course of time. In Dostoievsky I find the deepest wells of insight but only into certain isolated regions of the human soul. But he is a great creator. For one thing, the world which he describes does really appear to have been created by him. All those buffoons who keep on reappearing, like Lebedev, Karamazov, Ivolgin, Segrev, that incredible procession, are human types even more fantastic than those that people Rembrandt’s Night Watch. And yet perhaps they’re fantastic only in the same way, by the effect of lighting and costume, and are quite normal really. In any case the whole thing is full of profound and unique truths, which belong only to Dostoievsky. They almost suggest, those buffoons, some trade or calling that no longer exists, like certain characters in the old drama, and yet how they reveal true aspects of the human soul! What I find so tedious is the solemn manner in which people talk and write about Dostoievsky. Have you ever noticed the part that self-esteem and pride play in his characters? It’s as though, for him, love and the most passionate hatred, goodness and treachery, timidity and insolence, are merely two aspects of a single nature, their self-esteem, their pride preventing Aglaya, Nastasia, the Captain whose beard Mitya pulls, Krassotkin, Alyosha’s enemy-friend, from showing themselves in their true colours. But there are many other great qual
ities as well. I know very few of his books. But what a simple, sculptural notion it is, worthy of the most classical art, a frieze interrupted and resumed in which the theme of vengeance and expiation is unfolded in the crime of old Karamazov getting the poor simpleton with child, the mysterious, animal, unexplained impulse whereby the mother, herself unconsciously the instrument of an avenging destiny, obeying also obscurely her maternal instinct, feeling perhaps a combination of resentment and physical gratitude towards her violator, comes to give birth to her child in old Karamazov’s garden. This is the first episode, mysterious, grandiose, august, like the Creation of Woman in one of the sculptures at Orvieto. And as counterpart, the second episode more than twenty years later, the murder of old Karamazov, the infamy committed against the Karamazov family by the madwoman’s son, Smerdiakov, followed shortly afterwards by another act as mysteriously sculpturesque and unexplained, of a beauty as obscure and natural as the childbirth in old Karamazov’s garden, Smerdiakov hanging himself, his crime accomplished. Actually I wasn’t straying as far from Dostoievsky as you thought when I mentioned Tolstoy, who imitated him a great deal. In Dostoievsky there’s concentrated, still tense and peevish, a great deal of what was to blossom later on in Tolstoy. There’s that proleptic gloom of the primitives which the disciples will brighten and dispel.”
“What a bore it is that you’re so lazy, my sweet. Just look at your view of literature, so much more interesting than the way we were made to study it; the essays that they used to make us write about Esther: ‘Monsieur,’—you remember,” she said with a laugh, less from a desire to make fun of her masters and herself than from the pleasure of finding in her memory, in our common memory, a recollection that was already quite venerable.
But while she was speaking, and I thought once more of Vinteuil, it was the other, the materialist hypothesis, that of there being nothing, that in turn presented itself to my mind. I began to doubt again; I told myself that after all it might be the case that, if Vinteuil’s phrases seemed to be the expression of certain states of soul analogous to that which I had experienced when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea, there was nothing to assure me that the vagueness of such states was a sign of their profundity rather than of our not having yet learned to analyse them, so that there might be nothing more real in them than in other states. And yet that happiness, that sense of certainty in happiness while I was drinking the cup of tea, or when I smelt in the Champs-Elysées a smell of mouldering wood, was not an illusion. In any case, whispered the spirit of doubt, even if these states are more profound than others that occur in life, and defy analysis for that very reason, because they bring into play too many forces of which we have hitherto been unaware, the charm of certain phrases of Vinteuil’s music makes us think of them because it too defies analysis, but this does not prove that it has the same profundity; the beauty of a phrase of pure music can easily appear to be the image of or at least akin to an unintellectual impression which we have received, but simply because it is unintellectual. And why then do we suppose to be specially profound those mysterious phrases which haunt certain quartets and this septet by Vinteuil?
It was not, however, his music alone that Albertine played me; the pianola was to us at times like a scientific magic lantern (historical and geographical), and on the walls of this room in Paris, supplied with inventions more modern than my room at Combray, I would see extending before me, according to whether Albertine played me Rameau or Borodin, now an eighteenth-century tapestry sprinkled with cupids and roses, now the Eastern steppe in which sounds are muffled by the boundless distances and the soft carpet of snow. And these fleeting decorations were as it happened the only ones in my room, for although, at the time of inheriting my aunt Léonie’s fortune, I had resolved to become a collector like Swann, to buy pictures and statues, all my money went on horses, a motor-car, dresses for Albertine. But did not my room contain a work of art more precious than all these—Albertine herself? I looked at her. It was strange to me to think that it was she, she whom I had for so long thought it impossible even to know, who now, a wild beast tamed, a rosebush to which I had acted as the prop, the framework, the trellis of its life, was seated thus, day by day, at home, by my side, before the pianola, with her back to my bookcase. Her shoulders, which I had seen drooping sullenly when she was carrying her golf-clubs, now leaned against my books. Her shapely legs, which on the first day I had with good reason imagined as having manipulated throughout her girlhood the pedals of a bicycle, now rose and fell alternately upon those of the pianola, upon which Albertine, who had acquired an elegance which made me feel her more my own, because it was from myself that it came, pressed her shoes of cloth of gold. Her fingers, at one time accustomed to handlebars, now rested upon the keys like those of a St Cecilia. Her throat, the curve of which, seen from my bed, was strong and full, at that distance and in the lamplight appeared pinker, less pink however than her face, bent forward in profile, which my gaze, issuing from the innermost depths of myself, charged with memories and burning with desire, invested with such a brilliancy, such an intensity of life that its relief seemed to stand out and turn with the same almost magic power as on the day, in the hotel at Balbec, when my vision was clouded by my overpowering desire to kiss her; and I prolonged each of its surfaces beyond what I was able to see and beneath what concealed it from me and made me feel all the more strongly—eyelids which half hid her eyes, hair that covered the upper part of her cheeks—the relief of those superimposed planes; her eyes (like two facets that alone have yet been polished in the matrix in which an opal is still embedded), become more resistant than metal while remaining more brilliant than light, disclosed, in the midst of the blind matter overhanging them, as it were the mauve, silken wings of a butterfly placed under glass; and her dark, curling hair, presenting different conformations whenever she turned to ask me what she was to play next, now a splendid wing, sharp at the tip, broad at the base, black, feathered and triangular, now massing the contours of its curls in a powerful and varied chain, full of crests, of watersheds, of precipices, with its soft, creamy texture, so rich and so multiple, seeming to exceed the variety that nature habitually achieves and to correspond rather to the desire of a sculptor who accumulates difficulties in order to emphasise the suppleness, the vibrancy, the fullness, the vitality of his creation, brought out more strongly, but interrupting in order to cover it, the animated curve and, as it were, the rotation of the smooth, roseate face, with its glazed matt texture as of painted wood. And, by contrast with all this relief, by the harmony also which united them with her, who had adapted her attitude to their form and purpose, the pianola which half concealed her like an organ-case, the bookcase, the whole of that corner of the room, seemed to be reduced to the dimensions of a lighted sanctuary, the shrine of this angel musician, a work of art which, presently, by a charming magic, was to detach itself from its niche and offer to my kisses its precious, rose-pink substance. But no, Albertine was for me not at all a work of art. I knew what it meant to admire a woman in an artistic fashion, having known Swann. For my own part, however, no matter who the woman might be, I was incapable of doing so, having no sort of power of detached observation, never knowing what it was that I saw, and I had been amazed when Swann added retrospectively an artistic dignity—by comparing her to me, as he liked to do gallantly to her face, to some portrait by Luini, by recalling in her attire the gown or the jewels of a picture by Giorgione—to a woman who had seemed to me to be devoid of interest. Nothing of that sort with me. Indeed, to tell the truth, when I began to regard Albertine as an angel musician glazed with a marvellous patina whom I congratulated myself upon possessing, it was not long before I found her uninteresting; I soon became bored in her company; but these moments were of brief duration: one only loves that in which one pursues the inaccessible, one only loves what one does not possess, and very soon I began to realise once more that I did not possess Albertine. I saw flitting across her eyes, now the hope, now the memory, perhaps
the regret, of joys which I could not guess at, which in that case she preferred to renounce rather than reveal to me, and which, glimpsing no more of them than that gleam in her pupils, I no more perceived than does the spectator who has been refused admission to the theatre, and who, his face glued to the glass panes of the door, can take in nothing of what is happening on the stage. (I do not know whether this was the case with her, but it is a strange thing—like evidence of a belief in good in the most incredulous—this perseverance in falsehood shown by all those who deceive us. It would be no good our telling them that their lies hurt us more than a confession, it would be no good their realising it for themselves, they would start lying again a moment later, to remain consistent with what they had always told us that they were, or with what they had told us that we were to them. Similarly, an atheist who values his life will let himself be burned alive rather than give the lie to the view that is generally held of his bravery.) During these hours, I used sometimes to see hover over her face, in her expression, in her pout, in her smile, the reflexion of those inner visions the contemplation of which made her on these evenings unlike her usual self, remote from me to whom they were denied. “What are you thinking about, my darling?” “Why, nothing.” Sometimes, in answer to the reproaches I made to her that she told me nothing, she would at one moment tell me things which she was not unaware that I knew as well as anyone (like those statesmen who will never give you the least bit of news, but speak to you instead of what you could have read for yourself in the papers the day before), at another would describe without any precise details, in the manner of false confidences, bicycle rides that she had had at Balbec, the year before our first meeting. And as though I had guessed aright long ago, when I inferred therefrom that she must be a girl who was allowed a great deal of freedom, who went on long jaunts, the mention of those rides insinuated between Albertine’s lips the same mysterious smile that had captivated me in those first days on the front at Balbec. She spoke to me also of the excursions she had made with some girlfriends through the Dutch countryside, of returning to Amsterdam in the evening, at a late hour, when a dense and happy crowd of people, almost all of whom she knew, thronged the streets and the towpaths of the canals, of which I felt that I could see reflected in Albertine’s brilliant eyes, as in the glancing windows of a fast-moving carriage, the innumerable, flickering lights. How much more deserving of the name indifference is so-called aesthetic curiosity compared with the painful, unwearying curiosity I felt as to the places in which Albertine had stayed, as to what she might have been doing on a particular evening, her smiles, the expressions in her eyes, the words that she had uttered, the kisses that she had received! No, never would the jealousy that I had felt one day of Saint-Loup, if it had persisted, have caused me this immense uneasiness. This love between women was something too unfamiliar; there was nothing to enable me to form a precise and accurate idea of its pleasures, its quality. How many people, how many places (even places which did not concern her directly, vague haunts of pleasure where she might have enjoyed some pleasure, places where there are a great many people, where people brush against one) had Albertine—like a person who, shepherding all her escort, a whole crowd, past the barrier in front of her, secures their admission to the theatre—from the threshold of my imagination or of my memory, where I paid no attention to them, introduced into my heart! Now, the knowledge that I had of them was internal, immediate, spasmodic, painful. Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 310
