In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  From then on I could no longer believe that it was a case of homonymy. It would have been too great a coincidence that of these three girls one should be named Mlle d’Eporcheville, that she should be precisely (and this was an initial, highly relevant corroboration of my supposition) the one who had looked at me in that way, almost smiling at me, and that it should not be she who frequented houses of assignation.

  Then began a day of wild excitement. Even before setting out to buy everything in which I thought it proper to array myself in order to create a favourable impression when I went to call upon Mme de Guermantes two days later, when (the concierge had informed me) the young lady would be coming back to see the Duchess, in whose house I should thus find a willing girl with whom I would arrange a rendezvous (for I could easily find an opportunity of speaking to her alone in a corner of the drawingroom), I decided, to make assurance doubly sure, to telegraph Robert to ask him for the girl’s exact name and description, hoping to have his reply within forty-eight hours (I did not think for an instant of anything else, not even of Albertine), for I was determined, whatever might happen to me in the meantime, even if I had to be carried down in a chair because I was too ill to walk, to pay a call on the Duchess at the appropriate hour. If I telegraphed to Saint-Loup it was not that I had any lingering doubt as to the identity of the person, it was not that the girl whom I had seen and the girl of whom he had spoken were still distinct personalities in my mind. I had no doubt whatever that they were the same person. But in my impatience at the enforced interval of forty-eight hours, it was a pleasure to me, it gave me already a sort of secret power over her, to receive a telegram concerning her, filled with detailed information. At the telegraph office, as I drafted my message with the animation of a man who is fired by hope, I remarked how much less helpless I was now than in my boyhood, and in relation to Mlle d’Eporcheville than I had been in relation to Gilberte. I had merely had to take the trouble to write out my telegram, and thereafter the clerk had only to take it from me, and the swiftest channels of electric communication to transmit it, and the whole length and breadth of France and the Mediterranean, together with the whole of Robert’s roistering life applied to the identification of the person I had just met, would be placed at the service of the romance which I had just sketched out and to which I need no longer give a thought, for they would undertake to bring it to a conclusion one way or the other before twenty-four hours had passed. Whereas in the old days, brought home by Françoise from the Champs-Elysées, brooding alone in the house over my impotent desires, unable to make use of the practical devices of civilisation, I loved like a savage, or indeed, for I was not even free to move about, like a flower. From this moment onwards I was in a continual fever; a request from my father to go away with him for a couple of days, which would have obliged me to forgo my visit to the Duchess, filled me with such rage and despair that my mother intervened and persuaded my father to allow me to remain in Paris. But for several hours my fury refused to be allayed, while my desire for Mlle d’Eporcheville was increased a hundredfold by the obstacle that had been placed between us, by the fear which I had felt for a moment that those hours of my visit to Mme de Guermantes, at the prospect of which I smiled in constant anticipation, as at an assured blessing of which nothing could deprive me, might not occur. Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. However that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us. Had I been obliged to draw from memory a portrait of Mlle d’Eporcheville, to furnish a description of her, or even to recognise her in the street, I should have found it impossible. I had glimpsed her in profile, on the move, and she had struck me as being simple, pretty, tall and fair; I could not have said more. But all the reflexes of desire, of anxiety, of the mortal blow struck by the fear of not seeing her if my father took me away, all these things, associated with an image of which on the whole I knew nothing, and as to which it was enough that I knew it to be agreeable, already constituted a state of love. At last, on the following morning, after a night of happy sleeplessness I received Saint-Loup’s telegram: “De l’Orgeville, de particle, orge barley, like rye, ville, like town, small, dark, plump, is at present in Switzerland.” It was not the girl.

  A moment later my mother came into my room with the mail, put it down carelessly on my bed as though she were thinking of something else, and withdrew at once to leave me on my own. And I, who was familiar with my dear Mamma’s little subterfuges and knew that one could always read the truth in her face without fear of being mistaken, if one took as a key to the cipher her desire to give pleasure to others, I smiled and thought: “There must be something interesting for me in the post, and Mamma assumed that indifferent, absent-minded air so that my surprise might be complete and so as not to be like the people who take away half your pleasure by telling you of it beforehand. And she didn’t stay with me because she was afraid that out of pride I might conceal my pleasure and so feel it less keenly.” Meanwhile, on reaching the door, my mother had run into Françoise who was coming into the room, and forcing her to turn back, had dragged her out with her, somewhat alarmed, offended and surprised; for Françoise considered that her duties conferred upon her the privilege of entering my room at any hour of the day and of remaining there if she chose. But already, upon her features, astonishment and anger had vanished beneath a dark and sticky smile of transcendent pity and philosophical irony, a viscous liquid secreted, in order to heal her wound, by her outraged self-esteem. So that she might not feel herself despised, she despised us. Moreover she knew that we were masters, in other words capricious creatures, who, not being conspicuously intelligent, take pleasure in imposing by fear upon clever people, upon servants, in order to prove that they are the masters, absurd tasks such as boiling water in times of epidemic, washing down a room with a damp cloth, and leaving it at the very moment when you wanted to come into it. Mamma had placed the post by my side, so that I might not overlook it. I could see however that it consisted only of newspapers. No doubt there was some article by a writer whom I admired, which, as he wrote seldom, would be a surprise for me. I went to the window, and drew back the curtains. Above the pale and misty daylight, the sky glowed pink, like the stoves that are being lighted in kitchens at that hour, and the sight of it filled me with hope and with a longing to spend the night in a train and awake at the little country station where I had seen the milk-girl with the rosy cheeks.

  I opened the Figaro. What a bore! The main article had the same title as the article which I had sent to the paper and which had not appeared. But not merely the same title … why, here were several words that were absolutely identical. This was really too bad. I must write and complain. Meanwhile I could hear Françoise who, indignant at having been banished from my room, into which she considered that she had the right of entry, was grumbling: “It’s a proper shame, a kid I saw brought into the world. I didn’t see him when his mother bore him, to be sure. But when I first knew him, to say the most, it wasn’t five years since he was birthed!” But it wasn’t merely a few words, it was the whole thing, and there was my signature … It was my article that had appeared at last! But my brain which, even at that period, had begun to show signs of age and to tire easily, continued for a moment longer to reason as though it had not understood that this was my article, like an old man who is obliged to complete a movement that he has begun even if it has become unnecessary, even if an unforeseen obstacle, in the face of which he ought at once to draw back, makes it dangerous. Then I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still warm and damp from the press and the morning fog in which it is distributed, at daybreak, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once.

  What I was ho
lding in my hand was not a particular copy of the newspaper, but one out of the ten thousand; it was not merely what had been written by me, but what had been written by me and read by everyone. To appreciate exactly the phenomenon which was occurring at this moment in other houses, it was essential that I read this article not as its author but as one of the readers of the paper; what I was holding in my hand was not only what I had written, it was the symbol of its incarnation in so many minds. But then came an initial anxiety. Would the reader who had not been forewarned see this article? I opened the paper carelessly as would such a reader, even assuming an air of not knowing what there was this morning in my paper, of being in a hurry to look at the social and political news. But my article was so long that my eye, which was avoiding it (in order to be absolutely fair and not load the dice in my favour, as a person who is waiting counts very slowly on purpose) picked up a fragment of it in passing. But many of those readers who notice the main article and even read it do not look at the signature; I myself would be quite incapable of saying who had written the main article of the day before. And I now made up my mind always to read them, and the author’s name too; but, like a jealous lover who refrains from being unfaithful to his mistress in order to believe in her fidelity, I reflected sadly that my own future attention would not compel, had not compelled the reciprocal attention of other people. And besides, there were those who would have gone out shooting, and those who would have left the house too early. But still, a few people would read it. I did as they would do: I began. Although I was well aware that many people who read this article would find it detestable, at the moment of reading it the meaning that each word conveyed to me seemed to me to be printed on the paper, and I could not believe that every other reader on opening his eyes would not see directly the images that I saw, assuming—with the same naivety as those who believe that it is the actual speech they have uttered that proceeds just as it is along the telephone wires—that the author’s thought is directly perceived by the reader, whereas quite other thoughts form in the latter’s mind; at the very moment in which I was trying to be an ordinary reader, my mind was rewriting my article while reading it. If M. de Guermantes did not understand some sentence which would appeal to Bloch, he might, on the other hand, be amused by some reflexion which Bloch would scorn. Thus, a fresh admirer presenting himself for each section which the previous reader seemed to disregard, the article as a whole was lifted to the skies by a swarm of readers and prevailed over my own self-distrust, since I no longer needed to bolster it. The truth of the matter is that the value of an article, however remarkable it may be, is like that of those passages in parliamentary reports in which the words “We shall see,” uttered by the Minister, only take on their full consequence when read thus: THE PRIME MINISTER, MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR AND OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS: “We shall see!” (Loud exclamations on the extreme Left. “Hear, hear,” from some Left and Centre benches)—an ending better than the middle and worthy of the beginning. Part of the beauty—and it is the original flaw in this type of literature, from which the famous Lundis are not exempt—lies in the impression made on the readers. It is a collective Venus, of which we have but one truncated limb if we confine ourselves to the thought of the author, for it is fully realised only in the minds of his readers. In them it finds completion. And since a crowd, even a select crowd, is not an artist, this final seal which it sets upon the article must always retain a trace of the commonplace. Thus Sainte-Beuve, on a Monday, could imagine Mme de Boigne in her four-poster bed reading his article in the Constitutionnel, and appreciating some pretty sentence which he had taken a long delight in composing and which might never, perhaps, have flowed from his pen had he not thought it opportune to stuff it into his article in order to make a more far-reaching impression. Doubtless the Chancellor,27 reading it too, would mention it during the visit he would pay to his old friend and mistress a little later. And when he dropped him home in his carriage that evening, the Duc de Noailles in his grey trousers would tell him what had been thought of it in society, if a note from Mme d’Arbouville had not already informed him.

  And setting my own self-distrust against the ten-thousand-fold approbation which now sustained me, I drew as much strength and hope for my talent from reading the article at this moment as I drew misgivings when what I had written was addressed only to myself. I saw at that same hour my thought—or at least, failing my thought for those who were incapable of understanding it, the repetition of my name and as it were an embellished evocation of my person—shine on countless people, colour their own thoughts in an auroral light which filled me with more strength and triumphant joy than the multiple dawn which at that moment was blushing at every window. I saw Bloch, the Guermantes, Legrandin, Andrée, extracting from every sentence the images that it enclosed at the very moment in which I was endeavouring to be an ordinary reader, while reading as author, but not only as author. In order that the impossible creature I was endeavouring to be should combine all the opposites that might be most favourable to me, if I read as an author I judged myself as a reader, without any of the qualms that may be felt about a written text by him who compares it with the ideal which he has sought to express in it. Those passages which, when I wrote them, were so colourless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that the reading of them was a torture to me, had only accentuated in me the sense of my own impotence and of my incurable lack of talent. But now, in forcing myself to be a reader, I transferred to others the painful duty of judging me, and I succeeded at least in making a clean sweep of what I had attempted to do in reading what I had written. I read the article while forcing myself to imagine that it had been written by someone else. Then all my images, all my reflexions, all my epithets taken in themselves, untarnished by the memory of the failure which they represented in relation to my aims, charmed me by their brilliance, their unexpectedness, their profundity. And when I became aware of too blatant a weakness, taking refuge in the spirit of the ordinary and astonished reader, I said to myself: “Bah! how could a reader possibly notice that? There may well be something lacking there, but good heavens, they ought to be pleased! There are enough good things in it to be getting on with, more than they usually get.”

  And thus, no sooner had I finished this comforting perusal than I who had not had the courage to re-read my manuscript wanted to start again immediately, for there is nothing of which one can say more aptly than of an old article by oneself that “it bears re-reading.” I made up my mind to send Françoise out to buy more copies—in order to give them to my friends, I would tell her, but in reality to feel at first hand the miracle of the multiplication of my thought and to read, as though I were another person who had just opened the Figaro, the same sentences in another copy. It was, as it happened, a very long time since I had seen the Guermantes: I would go and pay them a visit in order to find out what people thought of my article.

  I thought of some female reader into whose room I would have loved to penetrate and to whom the newspaper would convey, if not my thought, which she would be incapable of understanding, at least my name, like a eulogy of me. But eulogies awarded to somebody one doesn’t love do not captivate the heart any more than the thoughts of a mind one is unable to penetrate attract the mind. With regard to other friends, however, I told myself that if the state of my health continued to grow worse and I could no longer see them, it would be pleasant to continue to write, in order thus to have access to them still, to speak to them between the lines, to make them share my thoughts, to please them, to be received into their hearts. I told myself this because, social relations having hitherto had a place in my daily life, a future in which they would no longer figure alarmed me, and because this expedient which would enable me to remain in the thoughts of my friends, perhaps to arouse their admiration, until the day when I should be well enough to begin to see them again, was a solace to m
e; I told myself this, but I was well aware that it was not true, that although I chose to imagine their attention as the object of my pleasure, that pleasure was an internal, spiritual, self-generated pleasure which they could not give me and which I could find not in conversing with them, but in writing far away from them, and that if I began to write in the hope of seeing them indirectly, in the hope they might have a better idea of me, in the hope of preparing for myself a better position in society, perhaps writing would relieve me of the wish to see them, and I should no longer have any desire to enjoy the position in society which literature might have given me, because my pleasure would be no longer in society but in literature.