In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  No doubt this trivial song which I had heard a hundred times did not interest me in the least. I could give no pleasure to myself or anyone else by listening to it religiously to the end. After all, none of the already familiar phrases of this sentimental ditty was capable of furnishing me with the resolution I needed; what was more, each of these phrases, when it came and went in its turn, became an obstacle in the way of my putting that resolution into effect, or rather it forced me towards the contrary resolution not to leave Venice, for it made me too late for the train. Wherefore this occupation, devoid of any pleasure in itself, of listening to O sole mio was charged with a profound, almost despairing melancholy. I was well aware that in reality it was the resolution not to go that I was making by remaining there without stirring, but to say to myself: “I’m not going,” which in that direct form was impossible, became possible in this indirect form: “I’m going to listen to one more phrase of O sole mio;” but the practical significance of this figurative language did not escape me and, while I said to myself: “After all, I’m only listening to one more phrase,” I knew that the words meant: “I shall remain by myself in Venice.” And it was perhaps this melancholy, like a sort of numbing cold, that constituted the despairing but hypnotic charm of the song. Each note that the singer’s voice uttered with a force and ostentation that were almost muscular stabbed me to the heart. When the phrase was completed down below and the song seemed to be at an end, the singer had still not had enough and resumed at the top as though he needed to proclaim once more my solitude and despair.

  My mother must by now have reached the station. In a little while she would be gone. I was gripped by the anguish that was caused me by the sight of the Canal which had become diminutive now that the soul of Venice had fled from it, of that commonplace Rialto which was no longer the Rialto, and by the song of despair which O sole mio had become and which, bellowed thus beside the insubstantial palaces, finally reduced them to dust and ashes and completed the ruin of Venice; I looked on at the slow realisation of my distress, built up artistically, without haste, note by note, by the singer as he stood beneath the astonished gaze of the sun arrested in its course beyond San Giorgio Maggiore, with the result that the fading light was to combine for ever in my memory with the shiver of my emotion and the bronze voice of the singer in an equivocal, unalterable and poignant alloy.

  Thus I remained motionless, my will dissolved, no decision in sight. Doubtless at such moments our decision has already been made: our friends can often predict it, but we ourselves are unable to do so, otherwise we should be spared a great deal of suffering.

  But suddenly, from caverns darker than those from which flashes the comet which we can predict—thanks to the unsuspected defensive power of inveterate habit, thanks to the hidden reserves which by a sudden impulse it hurls at the last moment into the fray—my will to action arose at last; I set off in hot haste and arrived, when the carriage doors were already shut, but in time to find my mother flushed with emotion and with the effort to restrain her tears, for she thought that I was not coming. “You know,” she said, “your poor grandmother used to say: It’s curious, there’s nobody who can be as unbearable or as nice as that child.” Then the train started and we saw Padua and Verona come to meet us, to speed us on our way, almost on to the platforms of their stations, and, when we had drawn away from them, return—they who were not travelling and were about to resume their normal life—one to its plain, the other to its hill.

  The hours went by. My mother was in no hurry to read her two letters, which she had merely opened, and tried to prevent me from pulling out my pocket-book at once to take from it the letter which the hotel porter had given me. She was always afraid of my finding journeys too long and too tiring, and put off as long as possible, so as to keep me occupied during the final hours, the moment at which she would seek fresh distractions for me, bring out the hard-boiled eggs, hand me the newspapers, untie the parcel of books which she had bought without telling me. We had long passed Milan when she decided to read the first of her two letters. At first I sat watching her, as she read it with an air of astonishment, then raised her head, her eyes seeming to come to rest upon a succession of distinct and incompatible memories which she could not succeed in bringing together. Meanwhile I had recognised Gilberte’s handwriting on the envelope which I had just taken from my pocket-book. I opened it. Gilberte wrote to inform me that she was marrying Robert de Saint-Loup. She told me that she had sent me a telegram about it to Venice but had had no reply. I remembered that I had been told that the telegraphic service there was inefficient. I had never received her telegram. Perhaps she would refuse to believe this. All of a sudden I felt in my brain a fact, which was installed there in the guise of a memory, leave its place and surrender it to another fact. The telegram that I had received a few days earlier, and had supposed to be from Albertine, was from Gilberte. As the somewhat laboured originality of Gilberte’s handwriting consisted chiefly, when she wrote a line, in introducing into the line above it the strokes of her t’s which appeared to be underlining the words, or the dots over her t’s which appeared to be punctuating the sentence above them, and on the other hand in interspersing the line below with the tails and flourishes of the words immediately above, it was quite natural that the clerk who dispatched the telegram should have read the loops of s’s or y’s in the line above as an “-ine” attached to the word “Gilberte.” The dot over the i of Gilberte had climbed up to make a suspension point. As for her capital G, it resembled a Gothic A. The fact that, in addition to this, two or three words had been misread, had dovetailed into one another (some of them indeed had seemed to me incomprehensible), was sufficient to explain the details of my error and was not even necessary. How many letters are actually read into a word by a careless person who knows what to expect, who sets out with the idea that the message is from a certain person? How many words into the sentence? We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural. A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises.

  Chapter Four

  NEW ASPECT OF

  ROBERT DE SAINT-LOUP

  “Oh, it’s too incredible,” said my mother. “You know at my age one has ceased to be astonished at anything, but I assure you that nothing could be more unexpected than the news I’ve just read in this letter.”

  “Well,” I replied, “I don’t know what it is, but however astonishing it may be, it can’t be quite so astonishing as what I’ve learnt from mine. It’s a marriage. Robert de Saint-Loup is marrying Gilberte Swann.”

  “Ah!” said my mother, “then that must be what’s in the other letter, which I haven’t yet opened, for I recognised your friend’s hand.”

  And my mother smiled at me with that faint trace of emotion which, ever since she had lost her own mother, she felt at every event, however insignificant, that concerned human creatures who were capable of grief and recollection and who themselves also mourned their dead. And so my mother smiled at me and spoke to me in a gentle voice, as though she were afraid, by treating this marriage lightly, of belittling the melancholy feelings that it might arouse in Swann’s widow and daughter, in Robert’s mother who had resigned herself to being parted from her son, all of whom Mamma, in her kindness of heart, in her gratitude for their kindness to me, endowed with her own faculty of filial, conjugal and maternal emotion.

  “Was I right in saying that you wouldn’t produce anything as astonishing?” I asked her.

  “On the contrary,” she replied in a gentle tone, “it’s I who have the most extraordinary news, I shan’t say the greatest or the smallest, for that quotation from Sevigne which everyone produces who knows
nothing else that she ever wrote used to sicken your grandmother as much as ‘What a pretty thing hay-making is.’ We don’t deign to collect such hackneyed Sevigne. This letter is to announce the marriage of the Cambremer boy.”

  “Oh!” I remarked with indifference, “to whom? But in any case the personality of the bridegroom robs this marriage of any sensational character.”

  “Unless the bride’s personality supplies it.”

  “And who is the bride in question?”

  “Ah, if I tell you straight away, that will spoil the fun. Come on, see if you can guess,” said my mother who, seeing that we had not yet reached Turin, wished to keep something in reserve for me as meat and drink for the rest of the journey.

  “But how do you expect me to know? Is it someone brilliant? If Legrandin and his sister are satisfied, we may be sure that it’s a brilliant marriage.”

  “I can’t answer for Legrandin, but the person who informs me of the marriage says that Mme de Cambremer is delighted. I don’t know whether you will call it a brilliant marriage. To my mind, it suggests the days when kings used to marry shepherdesses, and in this case the shepherdess is even humbler than a shepherdess, charming as she is. It would have amazed your grandmother, but would not have displeased her.”

  “But who in the world is this bride?”

  “It’s Mlle d’Oloron.”

  “That sounds to me tremendous and not in the least shepherdessy, but I don’t quite gather who she can be. It’s a title that used to be in the Guermantes family.”

  “Precisely, and M. de Charlus conferred it, when he adopted her, upon Jupien’s niece. It’s she who’s marrying the young Cambremer.”

  “Jupien’s niece! It isn’t possible!”

  “It’s the reward of virtue. It’s a marriage from the last chapter of one of Mme Sand’s novels,” said my mother. (“It’s the wages of vice, a marriage from the end of a Balzac novel,” thought I.)

  “After all,” I said to my mother, “it’s quite natural, when you think of it. Here are the Cambremers established in that Guermantes clan among which they never hoped to pitch their tent; what is more, the girl, adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable since the Cambremers have lost theirs; and after all she’s the adopted daughter, and in the Cambremers’ eyes probably the real daughter—the natural daughter—of a person whom they regard as a Prince of the Blood. A bastard of a semi-royal house has always been regarded as a flattering alliance by the nobility of France and other countries. Indeed, without going so far back, to the Lucinges,32 only the other day, not more than six months ago, you remember the marriage of Robert’s friend and that girl whose only social qualification was that she was supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be the natural daughter of a sovereign prince.”

  My mother, without abandoning the caste ethos of Combray in the light of which my grandmother ought to have been scandalised by such a marriage, being anxious above all to show the validity of her mother’s judgment, added: “Anyhow, the girl is worth her weight in gold, and your dear grandmother wouldn’t have had to draw upon her immense goodness, her infinite tolerance, to keep her from condemning young Cambremer’s choice. Do you remember how distinguished she thought the girl was, long ago, when she went into the shop to have a stitch put in her skirt? She was only a child then. And now, even if she has rather run to seed and become an old maid, she’s a different woman, a thousand times more perfect. But your grandmother saw all that at a glance. She found the little niece of a jobbing tailor more ‘noble’ than the Duc de Guermantes.”

  But even more necessary than to extol my grandmother was it for my mother to decide that it was “better” for her that she had not lived to see the day. This was the culmination of her daughterly love, as though she were sparing my grandmother a final grief.

  “And yet, can you imagine for a moment,” my mother said to me, “what old Swann—not that you ever knew him, of course—would have felt if he could have known that he would one day have a great-grandchild in whose veins the blood of old mother Moser who used to say: ‘Ponchour Mezieurs’ would mingle with the blood of the Duc de Guise!”

  “But you know, Mamma, it’s much more surprising than that. Because the Swanns were very respectable people, and, given the social position that their son acquired, his daughter, if he himself had made a decent marriage, might have married very well indeed. But everything had to start again from scratch because he married a whore.”

  “Oh, a whore, you know, people were perhaps rather malicious. I never quite believed it all.”

  “Yes, a whore; indeed I shall let you have some … family revelations one of these days.”

  Lost in reverie, my mother said: “To think of the daughter of a woman whom your father would never allow me to greet marrying the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis on whom your father wouldn’t allow me to call at first because he thought her too grand for me!” Then: “And the son of Mme de Cambremer to whom Legrandin was so afraid of having to give us a letter of introduction because he didn’t think us smart enough, marrying the niece of a man who would never dare to come to our flat except by the service stairs! … All the same, your poor grandmother was absolutely right—you remember—when she said that the high aristocracy did things that would shock the middle classes and that Queen Marie-Amélie was spoiled for her by the overtures she made to the Prince de Condé’s mistress to get her to persuade him to make his will in favour of the Duc d’Aumale. You remember too how it shocked her that for centuries past daughters of the house of Gramont who were veritable saints had borne the name Corisande in memory of Henri IV’s liaison with one of their ancestresses. These things may perhaps also occur among the middle classes, but they conceal them better. Can’t you imagine how it would have amused your poor grandmother!” Mamma added sadly, for the joys which it grieved us to think that my grandmother was deprived of were the simplest joys of life—an item of news, a play, or even something more trifling still, a piece of mimicry, which would have amused her. “Can’t you imagine her astonishment! But still, I’m sure that your grandmother would have been shocked by these marriages, that they would have grieved her; I feel that it’s better that she never knew about them,” my mother went on, for, when confronted with any event, she liked to think that my grandmother would have received an utterly distinctive impression from it which would have stemmed from the marvellous singularity of her nature and have been uniquely significant. If anything sad or painful occurred which could not have been foreseen in the past—the disgrace or ruin of one of our old friends, some public calamity, an epidemic, a war, a revolution—my mother would say to herself that perhaps it was better that Grandmamma had known nothing about it, that it would have grieved her too much, that perhaps she would not have been able to endure it. And when it was a question of something shocking like these two marriages, my mother, by an impulse directly opposite to that of the malicious people who are pleased to imagine that others whom they do not like have suffered more than is generally supposed, would not, in her tenderness for my grandmother, allow that anything sad or diminishing could ever have happened to her. She always imagined my grandmother as being above the assaults even of any evil which might not have been expected to occur, and told herself that my grandmother’s death had perhaps been a blessing on the whole, inasmuch as it had shut off the too ugly spectacle of the present day from that noble nature which could never have become resigned to it. For optimism is the philosophy of the past. The events that have occurred being, among all those that were possible, the only ones which we have known, the harm that they have caused seems to us inevitable, and we give them the credit for the slight amount of good that they could not help bringing with them, for we imagine that without them it would not have occurred. My mother sought at the same time to form a more accurate idea of what my grandmother would have felt when she learned these tidings, and to believe that it was impossible for our minds, less exalted than hers, to form any such idea. “Can’t y
ou imagine,” she said to me first of all, “how astonished your poor grandmother would have been!” And I felt that my mother was distressed by her inability to tell her the news, regretting that my grandmother would never know it, and feeling it to be somehow unjust that the course of life should bring to light facts which my grandmother would never have believed, thus rendering erroneous and incomplete, retrospectively, the knowledge of people and society which my grandmother had taken to the grave, the marriage of the Jupien girl and Legrandin’s nephew being calculated to modify her general notions of life, no less than the news—had my mother been able to convey it to her—that people had succeeded in solving the problems, which my grandmother had regarded as insoluble, of aerial navigation and wireless telegraphy. But as we shall see, this desire that my grandmother should share in the blessings of our modern science was soon, in its turn, to appear too selfish to my mother.