In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Mme de Guermantes, “all the more so as du Lau was always as red as a turkeycock.”

  “Yes, I remember hearing that description quoted,” said Gilberte, without adding that it had been quoted by her father, who was, as we know, a great admirer of Saint-Simon.

  She liked also to speak of the Prince d’Agrigente and of M. de Bréauté for another reason. The Prince d’Agrigente had inherited his title from the House of Aragon, but the family domains were in Poitou. As for his country house, the house, that is to say, in which he lived, it was not the property of his own family but had come to him from his mother’s first husband, and was situated approximately halfway between Martinville and Guermantes. And so Gilberte spoke of him and of M. de Bréauté as of country neighbours who reminded her of her old home. Strictly speaking there was an element of falsehood in this attitude, since it was only in Paris, through the Comtesse Mole, that she had come to know M. de Bréauté, albeit he had been an old friend of her father’s. As for her pleasure in speaking of the country round Tansonville, it may have been sincere. Snobbery is with certain people analogous to those beverages in which the agreeable is mixed with the beneficial. Gilberte took an interest in some lady of fashion because she possessed priceless books and portraits by Nattier which my former friend would probably not have taken the trouble to inspect in the Bibliothèque Nationale or the Louvre, and I imagine that, in spite of their even greater proximity, the magnetic influence of Tansonville would have had less effect in drawing Gilberte towards Mme Sazerat or Mme Goupil than towards M. d’Agrigente.

  “Oh! poor Babal and poor Gri-gri,” said Mme de Guermantes, “they’re in a far worse state than du Lau. I’m afraid they haven’t long to live, either of them.”

  When M. de Guermantes had finished reading my article, he complimented me in somewhat qualified terms. He regretted the slightly hackneyed style with its “turgid metaphors as in the antiquated prose of Chateaubriand;” on the other hand he congratulated me wholeheartedly for “keeping myself busy”: “I like a man to do something with what God gave him. I don’t like useless people who are always self-important or fidgety. A fatuous breed!”

  Gilberte, who was acquiring the ways of society with extreme rapidity, declared how proud she would be to be able to say that she was the friend of an author. “You can imagine that I shall tell people that I have the pleasure, the honour of your acquaintance.”

  “You wouldn’t care to come with us tomorrow to the Opéra-Comique?” the Duchess asked me; and it struck me that it would be doubtless in that same box in which I had first beheld her, and which had seemed to me then as inaccessible as the underwater realm of the Nereids. But I replied in a melancholy tone: “No, I’m not going to the theatre just now; I’ve lost a friend to whom I was greatly attached.” I almost had tears in my eyes as I said this, and yet for the first time it gave me a sort of pleasure to speak about it. It was from that moment that I began to write to everyone saying that I had just experienced a great sorrow, and to cease to feel it.

  When Gilberte had gone, Mme de Guermantes said to me: “You didn’t understand my signals. I was trying to hint to you not to mention Swann.” And, as I apologised: “But I absolutely sympathise: I was on the point of mentioning him myself, but I stopped short just in time, it was terrible. You know, it really is a great bore,” she said to her husband, seeking to mitigate my own error by appearing to believe that I had yielded to a propensity common to everyone and difficult to resist.

  “What am I supposed to do about it?” replied the Duke. “You’d better tell them to take those drawings upstairs again, since they make you think about Swann. If you don’t think about Swann, you won’t speak about him.”

  On the following day I received two congratulatory letters which surprised me greatly, one from Mme Goupil, the Combray lady, whom I had not seen for many years and to whom, even at Combray, I had scarcely ever spoken. A reading-room had given her the chance of seeing the Figaro. Thus, when anything occurs in one’s life which makes some stir, messages come to one from people situated so far outside the zone of one’s acquaintance, and one’s memory of whom is already so remote, that they seem to be placed at a great distance, especially in the dimension of depth. A forgotten friendship of one’s schooldays, which has had a score of opportunities of recalling itself to one’s mind, gives us a sign of life, if in a negative sense. Thus for instance Bloch, whose opinion of my article I should have loved to know, did not write to me. It is true that he had read the article and was to admit it later, but as it were backhandedly. For he himself contributed an article to the Figaro some years later, and was anxious to inform me immediately of the event. Since what he regarded as a privilege had fallen to him as well, the envy that had made him pretend to ignore my article ceased, as though by the lifting of a compressor, and he spoke to me about it, though not at all in the way in which he hoped to hear me talk about his: “I knew that you too had written an article,” he told me, “but I didn’t think I ought to mention it to you, for fear of hurting your feelings, because one oughtn’t to speak to one’s friends about the humiliating things that happen to them. And it’s obviously humiliating to write in the organ of the sabre and the aspergillum, of afternoon tea, not to mention the holy-water stoup.” His character remained unaltered, but his style had become less precious, as happens to certain people who shed their mannerisms, when, ceasing to compose symbolist poetry, they take to writing serial novels.

  To console myself for his silence, I re-read Mme Goupil’s letter; but it was lacking in warmth, for if the aristocracy employ certain formulas which form a sort of palisade, between them, between the initial “Monsieur” and the “sentiments distingués” of the close, cries of joy and admiration may spring up like flowers, and their clusters spill over the palisade their adoring fragrance. But bourgeois conventionality enwraps even the content of letters in a tissue of “your well-deserved success,” at best “your great success.” Sisters-in-law, faithful to their upbringing and tight-laced in their respectable stays, think that they have overflowed into the most distressing enthusiasm if they have written “my kindest regards.” “Mother joins me” is a superlative with which one is rarely indulged.

  I received another letter as well as Mme Goupil’s, but the name of the writer, Sanilon, was unknown to me. It was in a plebeian hand and a charming style. I was distressed not to be able to discover who had written to me.

  Two days later I found myself rejoicing at the thought that Bergotte was a great admirer of my article, which he had been unable to read without envy. But a moment later my joy subsided. For Bergotte had written me not a word. I had simply wondered whether he would have liked the article, fearing that he would not. As I was asking myself the question, Mme de Forcheville had replied that he admired it enormously and considered it the work of a great writer. But she had told me this while I was asleep: it was a dream. Almost all our dreams respond thus to the questions which we put to ourselves with complicated statements, stage productions with several characters, which however have no future.

  As for Mlle de Forcheville, I could not help feeling saddened when I thought of her. What? Swann’s daughter, whom he would have so loved to see at the Guermantes’, whom the latter had refused to give their great friend the pleasure of inviting—to think that she was now spontaneously sought after by them, time having passed, time that renews all things, that infuses a new personality, based upon what we have been told about them, into people whom we have not seen for a long time, during which we ourselves have grown a new skin and acquired new tastes. But when, to this daughter of his, he used from time to time to say, taking her in his arms and kissing her: “How comforting it is, my darling, to have a daughter like you; one day when I’m no longer here, if people still mention your poor papa, it will be only to you and because of you,” Swann, in thus pinning a timorous and anxious hope of survival on his daughter after his death, was as mistaken as an old banker who, having made a
will in favour of a little dancer whom he is keeping and who has very nice manners, tells himself that though to her he is no more than a great friend, she will remain faithful to his memory. She had very nice manners while her feet under the table sought the feet of those of the old banker’s friends who attracted her, but all this very discreetly, behind an altogether respectable exterior. She will wear mourning for the worthy man, will feel relieved to be rid of him, will enjoy not only the ready money, but the real estate, the motor-cars that he has bequeathed to her, taking care to remove the monogram of the former owner which makes her feel slightly ashamed, and will never associate her enjoyment of the gift with any regret for the giver. The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less poignant than those of the other kind; many daughters regard their fathers merely as the old men who leave their fortunes to them. Gilberte’s presence in a drawing-room, instead of being an occasion for people to speak of her father from time to time, was an obstacle in the way of their seizing the opportunities that might still have remained for them to do so, and that were becoming more and more rare. Even in connexion with the things he had said, the presents he had given, people acquired the habit of not mentioning him, and she who ought to have kept his memory young, if not perpetuated it, found herself hastening and completing the work of death and oblivion.

  And it was not only with regard to Swann that Gilberte was gradually completing the process of forgetting; she had accelerated in me that process with regard to Albertine. Under the influence of desire, and consequently of the desire for happiness which Gilberte had aroused in me during the few hours in which I had supposed her to be someone else, a certain number of miseries, of painful preoccupations, which only a little while earlier had obsessed my mind, had slipped away from me, carrying with them a whole block of memories, probably long since crumbling and precarious, with regard to Albertine. For if many memories, which were connected with her, had at the outset helped to keep alive in me my grief for her death, in return that grief had itself fixed those memories. So that the modification of my sentimental state, prepared for no doubt obscurely day by day by the continuous erosions of forgetfulness, but realised abruptly as a whole, gave me the impression, which I remember having felt that day for the first time, of a void, of the suppression in myself of a whole segment of my associations of ideas, such as a man feels in whose brain a long-impaired artery has burst, so that a whole section of his memory is abolished or paralysed. I no longer loved Albertine. At most, on certain days, when the weather was of the sort which, by modifying, by awakening one’s sensibility, brings one back into relationship with the real, I felt painfully sad in thinking of her. I was suffering from a love that no longer existed. Thus does an amputee, in certain kinds of weather, feel pain in the limb that he has lost.

  The disappearance of my suffering, and of all that it carried away with it, left me diminished, as recovery from an illness which has occupied a big place in one’s life often does. No doubt it is because memories are not always true that love is not eternal, and because life is made up of a perpetual renewal of cells. But this renewal, in the case of memories, is nevertheless retarded by one’s attention, which temporarily arrests and freezes what is bound to change. And since it is the case with grief as with the desire for women that one magnifies it by thinking about it, having plenty of other things to do should make it easier not only to be chaste but to forget.

  By another reaction, if (though it was a distraction—the desire for Mlle d’Eporcheville—that had suddenly brought home to me the tangible reality of forgetting) it remains true that it is time that gradually brings forgetfulness, forgetfulness in its turn does not fail to alter profoundly our notion of time. There are optical errors in time as there are in space. The persistence within me of an old impulse to work, to make up for lost time, to change my way of life, or rather to begin to live, gave me the illusion that I was still as young as in the past; and yet the memory of all the events that had succeeded one another in my life (and also of those that had succeeded one another in my heart, for when one has greatly changed, one is misled into supposing that one has lived longer) in the course of those last months of Albertine’s existence, had made them seem to me much longer than a year, and now this forgetfulness of so many things, separating me by gulfs of empty space from quite recent events which they made me think remote, because I had had what is called “the time” to forget them, by its fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all the landmarks—distorted, dislocated my sense of distances in time, contracted in one place, distended in another, and made me suppose myself now further away from things, now much closer to them, than I really was. And as in the new spaces, as yet unexplored, which extended before me, there would be no more trace of my love for Albertine than there had been, in the time lost which I had just traversed, of my love for my grandmother, my life appeared to me—offering a succession of periods in which, after a certain interval, nothing of what had sustained the previous period survived in that which followed—as something utterly devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self, something as useless in the future as it was protracted in the past, something that death might as well put an end to at this point or that, without in the least concluding it, as those courses of French history in the sixth form at school which stop short indiscriminately, according to the whim of the curriculum or the professor, at the Revolution of 1830, or that of 1848, or the end of the Second Empire.

  Perhaps then the fatigue and sadness that I felt arose not so much from my having loved in vain what I was already forgetting as from my beginning to enjoy the company of new living people, purely social figures, mere friends of the Guermantes, offering no interest in themselves. It was easier perhaps to reconcile myself to the discovery that she whom I had loved was no more, after a certain interval of time, than a pale memory, than to the rediscovery in myself of that futile activity which makes us waste time decorating our lives with a human vegetation which is robust but parasitic, which likewise will become nothing when it is dead, which already is alien to all that we have ever known, but which nevertheless our garrulous, melancholy, conceited senility seeks to cultivate. The newcomer who would find it easy to endure the prospect of life without Albertine had made his appearance in me, since I had been able to speak of her at Mme de Guermantes’s in the language of grief without any real suffering. The possible advent of these new selves, which ought each to bear a different name from the preceding one, was something I had always dreaded, because of their indifference to the object of my love—long ago in connexion with Gilberte when her father told me that if I went to live in Oceania I would never wish to return, quite recently when I had read with such a pang in my heart the memoirs of a mediocre writer who, separated by life from a woman whom he had adored when he was young, meets her as an old man without pleasure, without any desire to see her again. Yet he was bringing me on the contrary, this newcomer, at the same time as oblivion an almost complete elimination of suffering, a possibility of comfort—this newcomer, so dreaded yet so beneficent, who was none other than one of those spare selves which destiny holds in reserve for us, and which, paying no more heed to our entreaties than a clear-sighted and thus all the more authoritative physician, it substitutes in spite of us, by a timely intervention, for the self that has been too seriously wounded. This process, as it happens, automatically occurs from time to time, like the decay and renewal of our tissues, but we notice it only if the former self contained a great grief, a painful foreign body, which we are surprised to find no longer there, in our amazement at having become another person to whom the sufferings of his predecessor are no more than the sufferings of a stranger, of which we can speak with compassion because we do not feel them. Indeed we are unconcerned about having undergone all those sufferings, since we have only a vague remembrance of having suffered them. It may well be that likewise our nightmares are horrifying. But on waking we are another pe
rson, who cares little that the person whose place he takes has had to flee from a gang of cut-throats during the night.

  No doubt this self still maintained some contact with the old, as a friend who is indifferent to a bereavement speaks of it nevertheless to the persons present in a suitable tone of sorrow, and returns from time to time to the room in which the widower who has asked him to receive the company for him may still be heard weeping. I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. Albertine had no cause to reproach her friend. The man who was usurping his name was merely his heir. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, had often heard the other speak of Albertine; through that other self, through the stories it gathered from it, it thought that it knew her, it found her lovable, it loved her; but it was only a love at second hand.

  Another person in whom the process of forgetting, as far as Albertine was concerned, was probably more rapid at this time, and indirectly enabled me to register a little later a new advance which that process had made in myself (and this is my memory of my second stage before finally forgetting), was Andrée. I can scarcely indeed but cite this forgetting of Albertine as, if not the sole cause, if not even the principal cause, at any rate a conditioning and necessary cause of a conversation which occurred between Andrée and myself about six months after the conversation I have already reported, and in which her words were very different from those that she had used on the former occasion. I remember that it was in my room because at that moment I found pleasure in having semi-carnal relations with her, by reason of the collective aspect which my love for the girls of the little band had originally had and now assumed once more, a love that had long been undivided among them and only for a while associated exclusively with Albertine’s person, during the months that had preceded and followed her death.