The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

by Joachim Neugroschel

  Now and then the image of the man she has seen only two or three times, and for moments at that, the man who has such a tiny space in the exterior events of her life and such an absorbing space in her mind and her heart, virtually monopolizing them altogether—his image blurs before the weary eyes of her memory. She no longer sees him, no longer recalls his features, his silhouette, barely remembers his eyes. Still, that image is all she has of him. She goes mad at the thought that she might lose that image, that her desire (which, granted, tortures her, but which is entirely herself now, in which she has taken refuge, fleeing everything she values, the way you value your own preservation, your life, good or bad)—that her desire could vanish, leaving nothing but a feeling of malaise, a suffering in dreams, of which she would no longer know the cause, would no longer see it even in her mind or cherish it there. But then Monsieur de Laléande’s image reappears after that momentary blurring of inner vision. Her grief can resume and it is almost a joy.

  How will Madame de Breyves endure going back to Paris, to which he will not return before January? What will she do until then? What will she do, what will he do after that?

  I wanted to leave for Biarritz twenty times over and bring back Monsieur de Laléande. The consequences might be terrible, but I do not have to examine them; she will not stand for it. Nonetheless I am devastated to see those small temples throbbing from within, beating strongly enough to be shattered by the interminable blows of this inexplicable love. This love gives her life the rhythm of anxiety. Often she imagines him coming to Trouville, approaching her, telling her he loves her. She sees him, her eyes glow. He speaks to her in that toneless voice of dreams, a voice that prohibits us from believing yet forces us to listen. It is he. He speaks to her in those words that make us delirious even though we never hear them except in dreams when we see the very shiny and poignant, the divine and trusting smile of two destinies uniting.

  Thus she is awakened by the feeling that the two worlds of reality and her desire are parallel, that it is as impossible for them to join together as it is for a body and the shadow it casts. Then, remembering that minute in the cloakroom when his elbow grazed her elbow, when he offered her his body, which she could now press against her own if she had wished, if she had known, and which may remain forever remote from her, she is skewered by cries of despair and revolt like those heard on sinking ships. If, while strolling on the beach or in the woods, she allows a pleasure of contemplation or reverie, or at least a fragrance, a singing wafted and muffled by the wind—if she allows those things to take hold of her gently and let her forget her sorrow for an instant, then she suddenly feels a great blow to her heart, a painful wound; and, above the waves or the leaves, in the hazy skyline of woods or sea, she perceives the nebulous face of her invisible and ever-present conqueror, who, his eyes shining through the clouds as on the day when he offered himself to her, flees with his quiver after shooting one more arrow at her.

  PORTRAITS OF PAINTERS AND COMPOSERS

  Portraits of Painters

  ALFRED CUYP

  Cuyp, the setting sun dissolving in limpid air,

  Which is dimmed like water by a flight of gray doves,

  Golden moisture, halo on a bull or a birch,

  Blue incense of lovely days, smoking on the hillside,

  Or marsh of brightness stagnating in the empty sky.

  Horsemen are ready, a pink plume on each hat,

  A hand on the hip; the tangy air, turning their skin rosy,

  Lightly swells their fine blond curls,

  And, tempted by the hot fields, the cool waves,

  Without disturbing the herd of cattle

  Dreaming in a fog of pale gold and repose,

  They ride off to breathe those profound minutes.

  PAULUS POTTER

  Somber grief of skies uniformly gray,

  Sadder for being blue during rare bright intervals,

  And which allow the warm tears of a misunderstood sun

  To filter down upon the paralyzed plains;

  Potter, melancholy mood of the somber plains,

  Which stretch out, endless, joyless, colorless;

  The trees, the hamlet cast no shadows,

  The tiny, meager gardens have no flowers.

  A plowman lugs buckets home, and his puny mare

  Resigned, anxious, and dreamy,

  Uneasily listening to her pensive brain,

  Inhales in small gulps the strong breath of the wind.

  ANTOINE WATTEAU

  Twilight putting makeup on faces and trees,

  With its blue mantle, under its uncertain mask;

  Dust of kisses around weary lips. . . .

  Vagueness becomes tender, and nearness distance.

  The masquerade, another melancholy distance,

  Makes the gestures of love, unreal, mournful and bewitching.

  A poet’s caprice—or a lover’s prudence,

  For love needs skillful adornment—

  Boats and picnics are here, silence and music.

  ANTHONY VAN DYCK

  Gentle pride of hearts, noble grace of things

  That shine in the eyes, velvets and woods,

  Lovely elevated language of bearing and poses

  (The hereditary pride of women and kings!),

  You triumph, van Dyck, you prince of calm gestures,

  In all the lovely creatures soon to die,

  In every lovely hand that still can open;

  Suspecting nothing (what does it matter?),

  That hand gives you the palm fronds!

  The halting of horsemen, under pines, near water,

  Calm like them—like them so close to sobs—

  Royal children, already grave and magnificent,

  Resigned in their garments, brave in their plumed hats,

  With jewels that weep (like flaming waves)

  The bitterness of tears that fill the souls,

  Too proud to let them ascend to the eyes;

  And you above them all, a precious stroller,

  In a pale-blue shirt, one hand on your hip,

  The other hand holding a leafy fruit picked from its branch,

  I dream, uncomprehending, before your eyes and gestures:

  Standing, but relaxed, in this shadowy haven,

  Duke of Richmond, oh, young sage!—or charming madman?—

  I keep returning to you; a sapphire at your neck

  Has fires as sweet as your tranquil gaze.

  Portraits of Composers

  CHOPIN

  Chopin, sea of sighs, of tears, of sobs,

  Which a swarm of butterflies crosses without alighting,

  And they play over the sadness or dance over the waves.

  Dream, love, suffer, shout, soothe, charm, or cradle,

  You always let the sweet and dizzying oblivion

  Of your caprice run in between your sorrows

  Like butterflies flitting from flower to flower;

  Your joy is the accomplice of your grief;

  The ardor of the whirlwind increases the thirst for tears.

  The pale and gentle comrade of the moon,

  The prince of despair or the betrayed grand lord,

  You are exalted, more handsome for being pallid,

  By the sunlight flooding your sickroom, tearfully smiling

  At the patient and suffering at seeing him. . . .

  A smile of regret and tears of Hope!

  GLUCK

  A temple to love, to friendship, a temple to courage,

  Which a marquise had built in her English

  Garden, where many a putto, with Watteau bending his bow,

  Chooses glorious hearts as the targets of his rage.

  But the German artist—whom she would have dreamed for

  Knidos!—graver and deeper, sculpted without affectation

  The lovers and the gods whom you see on this frieze:

  Hercules has his funeral pyre in Armides’ gardens!

  The heels, when
dancing, no longer strike the path,

  Where the ashes of extinguished eyes and smiles

  Deaden our slow steps and turn the distances blue;

  The voices of the harpsichords are silent or broken.

  But your mute cry, Admetes and Iphigenia,

  Still terrifies us, proffered in a gesture

  And, swayed by Orpheus or braved by Alcestes,

  The Styx—without masts or sky—where your genius cast anchor.

  With love, Gluck, like Alcestes, conquered death,

  Inevitable for the whims of an era;

  He stands, an august temple to courage,

  On the ruins of the small temple to Love.

  SCHUMANN

  From the old garden, where friendship welcomed you,

  Hear boys and nests that whistle in the hedges,

  You lover, weary of so many marches and wounds,

  Schumann, dreamy soldier disappointed by war.

  The happy breeze imbues the shadow of the huge walnut tree

  With the scent of jasmine, where the doves fly past;

  The child reads the future in the flames of the hearth,

  The cloud or the wind speaks to your heart about graves.

  Your tears used to run at the shouts of the carnival,

  Or they blended their sweetness with the bitter victory

  Whose insane enthusiasm still quivers in your memory;

  You can weep without end: your rival has won.

  The Rhine rolls its sacred water toward Cologne.

  Ah! How gaily you sang on its shores

  On holidays! But, shattered by grief, you fall asleep. . . .

  Tears are raining in your illuminated darkness.

  Dream where the dead woman lives, where you are true

  To the ingrate, your hopes blossom and the crime is dust. . . .

  Then, the shredding lightning of awakening, in which thunder

  Strikes you again for the very first time.

  Flow, emit fragrance, march to the drumbeat or be lovely!

  Schumann, oh, confidant of souls and of flowers,

  Between your joyous banks holy river of sorrows,

  Pensive garden, tender, fresh, and faithful.

  Where the lyres, the moon, and the swallow kiss one another,

  A marching army, a dreaming child, a weeping woman!

  MOZART

  Italian woman on the arm of a Bavarian prince,

  Whose sad, frozen eyes delight in her languor!

  In his frosty gardens he holds to his heart

  Her shadow-ripened breasts, to drink the light.

  Her tender, German soul—a sigh so profound!—

  Finally tastes the ardent laziness of being loved;

  To hands too weak to hold it he delivers

  The radiant hope of his enchanted head.

  Cherubino! Don Giovanni! Far from fading oblivion,

  You stand in the scents of so many trampled flowers

  That the wind dispersed without drying their tears,

  From the Andalusian gardens to the graves of Tuscany!

  In the German park, where grief is hazy,

  The Italian woman is still queen of the night.

  Her breath makes the air sweet and spiritual,

  And her Magic Flute lovingly drips

  The coolness of sherbets, of kisses and skies,

  In the still hot shadow of a lovely day’s farewell.

  A YOUNG GIRL’S CONFESSION

  The cravings of the senses carry us hither and yon, but once the hour is past, what do you bring back? Remorse and spiritual dissipation. You go out in joy and you often return in sadness, so that the pleasures of the evening cast a gloom on the morning. Thus, the delight of the senses flatters us at first, but in the end it wounds and it kills.

  —THOMAS À KEMPIS: IMITATION OF CHRIST, BOOK I, CHAPTER 18

  Amid the oblivion we seek in false

  delights,

  The sweet and melancholy scent of lilac

  blossoms

  Wafts back more virginal through our

  intoxications.

  —HENRI DE RÉGNIER: SITES, POEM 8 (1887)

  At last my deliverance is approaching. Of course I was clumsy, my aim was poor, I almost missed myself. Of course it would have been better to die from the first shot; but in the end the bullet could not be extracted, and then the complications with my heart set in. It will not be very long now. But still, a whole week! It can last for a whole week more!—during which I can do nothing but struggle to recapture the horrible chain of events. If I were not so weak, if I had enough willpower to get up, to leave, I would go and die at Les Oublis, in the park where I spent all my summers until the age of fifteen. No other place is more deeply imbued with my mother, so thoroughly has it been permeated with her presence, and even more so her absence. To a person who loves, is not absence the most certain, the most effective, the most durable, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences?

  My mother would always bring me to Les Oublis at the end of April, leave two days later, visit for another two days in mid-May, then come to take me home during the last week of June. Her ever so brief visits were the sweetest thing in the world and the cruelest. During those two days she showered me with affection, while normally quite chary with it in order to inure me and calm my morbid sensitivity. On both evenings she spent at Les Oublis she would come to my bed and say good night, an old habit that she had cast off because it gave me too much pleasure and too much pain, so that, instead of falling asleep, I kept calling her back to say good night to me again, until I no longer dared to do so even though I felt the passionate need all the more, and I kept inventing new pretexts: my burning pillow, which had to be turned over, my frozen feet, which she alone could warm by rubbing them. . . .

  So many lovely moments were lovelier still because I sensed that my mother was truly herself at such times and that her usual coldness must have cost her dearly. On the day she left, a day of despair, when I clung to her dress all the way to the train, begging her to take me back to Paris, I could easily glimpse the truth amid her pretense, sift out her sadness, which infected all her cheerful and exasperated reproaches for my “silly and ridiculous” sadness, which she wanted to teach me to control, but which she shared. I can still feel my agitation during one of those days of her departures (just that intact agitation not adulterated by today’s painful remembrance), when I made the sweet discovery of her affection, so similar to and so superior to my own. Like all discoveries, it had been foreseen, foreshadowed, but so many facts seemed to contradict it!

  My sweetest impressions are of the years when she returned to Les Oublis, summoned by my illness. Not only was she paying me an extra visit, on which I had not counted, but she was all sweetness and tenderness, pouring them out, on and on, without disguise or constraint. Even in those times when they were not yet sweetened and softened by the thought that they would someday be lacking, her sweetness and tenderness meant so much to me that the joys of convalescence always saddened me to death: the day was coming when I would be sound enough for my mother to leave, and until then, I was no longer sick enough to keep her from reviving her severity, her unlenient justice.

  One day, the uncles I stayed with at Les Oublis had failed to tell me that my mother would be arriving; they had concealed the news because my second cousin had dropped by to spend a few hours with me, and they had feared I might neglect him in my joyful anguish of looking forward to my mother’s visit. That ruse may have been the first of the circumstances that, independent of my will, were the accomplices of all the dispositions for evil that I bore inside myself, like all children of my age, though to no higher degree. That second cousin, who was fifteen (I was fourteen), was already quite depraved, and he taught me things that instantly gave me thrills of remorse and delight. Listening to him, letting his hands caress mine, I reveled in a joy that was poisoned at its very source; soon I mustered the strength to get away from him and I fled into the p
ark with a wild need for my mother, who I knew was, alas, in Paris, and against my will I kept calling to her along the garden trails.

  All at once, while passing an arbor, I spotted her sitting on a bench, smiling and holding out her arms to me. She lifted her veil to kiss me, I flung myself against her cheeks and burst into tears; I wept and wept, telling her all those ugly things that required the ignorance of my age to be told, and that she knew how to listen to divinely, though failing to grasp them and softening their significance with a goodness that eased the weight on my conscience. This weight kept easing and easing; my crushed and humiliated soul kept rising lighter and lighter, more and more powerful, overflowing—I was all soul.

  A divine sweetness was emanating from my mother and from my recovered innocence. My nostrils soon inhaled an equally fresh and equally pure fragrance. It came from a lilac bush, on which a branch hidden by my mother’s parasol was already in blossom, suffusing the air with an invisible perfume. High up in the trees the birds were singing with all their might. Higher still, among the green tops, the sky was so profoundly blue that it almost resembled the entrance to a heaven in which you could ascend forever. I kissed my mother. Never have I recaptured the sweetness of that kiss. She left the next day, and that departure was crueler than all the ones preceding it. Having once sinned, I felt forsaken not only by joy but also by the necessary strength and support.

  All these separations were preparing me, in spite of myself, for what the irrevocable separation would be someday, even if, back then, I never seriously envisaged the possibility of surviving my mother. I had resolved to kill myself within a minute after her death. Later on, absence taught me far more bitter lessons: that you get accustomed to absence, that the greatest abatement of the self, the most humiliating torment is to feel that you are no longer tormented by absence. However, those lessons were to be contradicted in the aftermath.