In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  I was so convinced that it would be absurd to be jealous of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, inasmuch as Albertine gave not the least sign of wanting to see them again, and among all the plans for a holiday in the country which we had formed had herself rejected Combray, so near to Montjouvain, that often I would ask her to play to me some of Vinteuil’s music, without its causing me pain. Once only this music had been an indirect cause of jealousy. This was when Albertine, who knew that I had heard it performed at Mme Verdurin’s by Morel, spoke to me one evening about him, expressing a keen desire to go and hear him play and to make his acquaintance. This, as it happened, was shortly after I had learned of the letter, unintentionally intercepted by M. de Charlus, from Lea to Morel. I wondered whether Lea might not have mentioned him to Albertine. The words “you naughty girl,” “you vicious thing,” came back to my horrified mind. But precisely because Vinteuil’s music was in this way painfully associated with Léa—and not with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend—when the anguish caused by Lea had subsided, I could listen to this music without pain; one malady had cured me of the possibility of the others. In the music I had heard at Mme Verdurin’s, phrases I had not noticed, obscure larvae that were then indistinct, turned into dazzling architectural structures; and some of them became friends, that I had scarcely distinguished, that at best had appeared to me to be ugly, so that I could never have supposed that they were like those people, antipathetic at first sight, whom we discover to be what they really are only after we have come to know them well. Between the two states there was a real transmutation. At the same time, phrases which had been quite distinct the first time but which I had not then recognised, I identified now with phrases from other works, such as that phrase from the Sacred Variation for Organ which, at Mme Verdurin’s, had passed unperceived by me in the septet, where nevertheless, like a saint that had stepped down from the sanctuary, it found itself consorting with the composer’s familiar sprites. Moreover, the phrase evoking the joyful clanging of the bells at noon, which had seemed to me too unmelodious, too mechanical in its rhythm, had now become my favourite, either because I had grown accustomed to its ugliness or because I had discovered its beauty. This reaction from the disappointment which great works of art cause at first may in fact be attributed to a weakening of the initial impression or to the effort necessary to lay bare the truth—two hypotheses which recur in all important questions, questions about the truth of Art, of Reality, of the Immortality of the Soul; we must choose between them; and, in the case of Vinteuil’s music, this choice was constantly presenting itself under a variety of forms. For instance, this music seemed to me something truer than all known books. At moments I thought that this was due to the fact that, what we feel about life not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary, that is to say intellectual expression describes it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose it as does music, in which the sounds seem to follow the very movement of our being, to reproduce that extreme inner point of our sensations which is the part that gives us that peculiar exhilaration which we experience from time to time and which, when we say “What a fine day! What glorious sunshine!” we do not in the least communicate to others, in whom the same sun and the same weather evoke quite different vibrations. In Vinteuil’s music, there were thus some of those visions which it is impossible to express and almost forbidden to contemplate, since, when at the moment of falling asleep we receive the caress of their unreal enchantment, at that very moment in which reason has already deserted us, our eyes seal up and before we have had time to know not only the ineffable but the invisible, we are asleep. It seemed to me, when I abandoned myself to this hypothesis that art might be real, that it was something even more than the merely nerve-tingling joy of a fine day or an opiate night that music can give; a more real, more fruitful exhilaration, to judge at least by what I felt. It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture or a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some definite spiritual reality, or life would be meaningless. Thus nothing resembled more closely than some such phrase of Vinteuil the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments in my life, when gazing, for instance, at the steeples of Martinville, or at certain trees along a road near Balbec, or, more simply, at the beginning of this book, when I tasted a certain cup of tea. Like that cup of tea, all those sensations of light, the bright clamour, the boisterous colours that Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination, insistently but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something that I might compare to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium. But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he “heard” the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. “Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world. “If it were not so late, my sweet,” I said to her, “I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise as I do, my little Albertine, the same in the sonata, in the septet, in the other works, would be, say for instance in Barbey dAurevilly, a hidden reality revealed by a physical sign, the physiological blush of the Bewitched, of Aimée de Spens, of old Clotte, the hand in the Rideau cramoisi, the old manners and customs, the old words, the ancient and peculiar trades behind which there is the Past, the oral history made by the herdsmen with their mirror, the noble Norman cities redolent of England and charming as a Scottish village, the hurler of curses against which one can do nothing, la Vellini, the Shepherd, a similar sensation of anxiety in a passage, whether it be the wife seeking her husband in Une vieille maîtresse, or the husband in L’Ensorcelée scouring the plain and the Bewitched herself coming out from mass. Another example of Vinteuil’s key-phrases is that stonemason’s geometry in the novels of Thomas Hardy.”

  Vinteuil’s phrases made me think of the “little phrase” and I told Albertine that it had been as it were the national anthem of the love of Swann and Odette, “the parents of Gilberte, whom I believe you know. You told me she was a bad girl. Didn’t she try to have relations with you? She spoke to me about you.”

  “Yes, you see, her parents used to send a carriage to fetch her from school when the weather was bad, and I seem to remember she took me home once and kissed me,” she said, after a momentary pause, laughing as though it were an amusing revelation. “She asked me all of a sudden whether I was fond of women.” (But if she only “seemed to remember” that Gilberte had taken her home, how could she say with such precision that Gilberte had asked her this odd question?) “In fact, I don’t know what weird idea came into my head to fool her, but I told her that I was.” (It was as though Albertine was afraid that Gilberte had told me this and did not want me to see that she was lying to me.) “But we did nothing at all.” (It was strange, if they had exchanged these confidences, that they should have done nothing, especially as, before this, they had kissed, according to Albertine.) “She took me home like that four or five times, perhap
s more, and that’s all.”

  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 the
re are many other great qualities 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.”