CHAPTER 3
Staying in Venice
my mother had taken me with her to spend a few weeks in Venice, and—since we can find beauty not only in the humblest but also in the most precious things—I sampled there impressions analogous to those that I had so often felt previously in Combray, but transposed into an entirely different, richer mode. When someone came to open my shutters at ten o’clock in the morning, I saw the glow, not of the slates of St. Hilaire splendidly transfigured into black marble, but of the gold of the angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark’s. With outstretched arms, and so gleaming with sunlight that it was almost impossible to behold him directly, he promised me joy half an hour later on the Piazzetta, a promise more reliable than his previous mission to bring tidings of Great Joy to men of good will. He was all that I could glimpse, as long as I lay in bed, but since the world is little more than a vast sundial where a single sunlit segment allows us to tell the time, from the very first morning I thought of the shops in the church square in Combray which were always about to close when I arrived for Mass on Sundays, while the smell of the straw in the market rankled under the burgeoning heat of the sun. But by the second day, what I saw when I awoke, and my reason for rising (because it had come to take the place of memories of Combray in my memory and my desires), were the impressions of my first day in Venice, Venice whose everyday life was no less real than that of Combray and where it was a pleasure, as in Combray, to go down into the festive street on Sunday mornings, but a street which was a whole stretch of liquid sapphire, cooled by soft breezes and so deep-dyed that my tired eyes could relax and look steadily at it with no fear that it might fade. Just as in Combray’s rue de l’Oiseau the good citizens emerged from houses aligned side by side in a row along the main street, so too did the inhabitants of this new city; but the Combray houses’ habit of casting a little shadow at their foot was entrusted to palaces of porphyry and jasper, over whose arched doorways heads of bearded gods jutted out of alignment, like the door knockers in Combray, and their reflections darkened the tones, not of brown earth, but of splendid blue waters. The shadow that would have flowed from the awning of the dress shop or the hairdresser’s sign in Combray became, on the Piazza, the little blue flowers that the relief of a Renaissance façade cast at its foot over the desert of the sunlit paving stones, although it is true that, in Venice as in Combray, when the sun beat down more strongly, they were forced to lower their shutters on the banks of their canal. But these shutters were deployed between the quatrefoils and the tendrils of Gothic windows. You could say the same of our own hotel window, at whose balustrade my mother waited for me, gazing at the canal with a patience that she would never have shown before, in Combray, in the days when she invested in me hopes that had never been rewarded and wanted to hide from me the extent of her love for me. Now she clearly felt that a show of coldness would change nothing, and the affection which she lavished on me resembled the food that is no longer forbidden to a sick person when we realize that they have no chance of recovery. To be sure, the modest features that gave my aunt Léonie’s window overlooking the rue de l’Oiseau its individual character—its asymmetry caused by the unequal distance between the two neighboring windows, the excessive height of the wooden window-ledge, the bent handle that opened the shutters and the two swathes of shiny blue satin that were separated and held apart by tiebacks—could all find their echo in our hotel in Venice. There too I heard that special, eloquent language which helps us recognize from afar the dwelling where we come home to dine and which later remains in our memory like a testimony declaring that for a period of time this dwelling was ours; but in Venice the task of saying so devolved, not as in Combray and almost everywhere else, upon the simplest or even the ugliest things, but upon an ogive still half recalling its Arabic origins, on a façade that is reproduced in every illustrated book on art and cast in plaster in every museum, as one of the masterpieces of medieval domestic architecture; I glimpsed this ogive from far away, when I had only just passed by San Giorgio Maggiore, and as it caught sight of me, its soaring lancet arches supplemented its welcoming smile with a distinguished, superior, almost impenetrable gaze. And, because, behind its multicolored marble balustrade, Mama waited for me, her face, while she read, surrounded by a light veil of tulle (as heart-rendingly white for me as her hair) which I sensed that my mother, on drying her eyes, had pinned to her straw hat partly in order to seem “properly dressed” in the eyes of the hotel residents, but above all to seem to me to be less in mourning, less sad, almost consoled for the death of my grandmother; because, having not recognized me straight away, as soon as I called out to her from my gondola, she sent her love winging its way toward me, from the depths of her heart, a love that would cease only when it had no object left to sustain it, on the surface of the passionate gaze which she cast intensely in my direction, which she sought to enhance by forming her lips into a smile which seemed, within the frame and beneath the canopy of the more discreet smile of the ogive illuminated by the midday sun, to lean forward to embrace me,—because of that, this window has taken on in my memory the sweetness of things that played their part beside us just as a particular hour chimed, the same for us and them; and, however replete with admirable form its mullions may be, this illustrious window bears for me the familiar features of a man of genius frequented by chance for a month at a holiday resort and led to strike up a friendship with us, and if thereafter, each time I see a cast of this window in a museum, I have to fight back my tears, it is because it tells me quite simply the thing that I find most moving of all, “I remember your mother very well.”
Then as I went to meet Mama, who had left the window, I felt the same sense of coolness on leaving the midday heat that I had experienced at Combray when I went up to my bedroom; but in Venice it was wafted by a sea breeze, and not up a small, narrow wooden staircase but up the noble surfaces of marble steps, constantly splashed with flashes of glaucous sunlight, adding the lesson of Veronese to the useful lesson of Chardin, which I had learned on a previous occasion. And since in Venice it is works of art and magnificent monuments that are entrusted with conveying the impressions of everyday life, it would distort the nature of the city, if, on the pretext that the most famous examples of the Venice of certain painters are coldly aesthetic (except for some superb studies by Maxime Dethomas),1 we were to represent only its impoverished aspects, at the points where its habitual splendor fades, and if, in trying to make Venice more familiar and true, we were to make it look like Aubervilliers. Reacting quite naturally to the artificial Venice produced by bad painters, we could reproach the greatest artists with studying only the Venice that they found more realistic, with its humble campi and deserted side canals. This was the Venice that I explored in the afternoons, if I did not go out with my mother. For this was where I found it easier to meet women of the people, match-sellers and bead-stringers, glass- or lace-workers, young working-girls whose long black, fringed shawls were no barrier to my love, since I had nearly forgotten Albertine, yet some were more attractive than others, for I did still remember her a little. I wonder if anyone could have told me exactly how far, in this passionate perusal of Venetian women, what was due to them, and what to Albertine, or my former desire to travel to Venice. Our slightest desire, although striking its own, unique chord, contains within it the fundamental notes on which our whole lives are based. And if perchance we suppressed one or other of these notes, even unheard, even unconscious, a note bearing absolutely no relation to the object of our pursuit, we would none the less feel our whole desire for this object fade away. There was much that I did not attempt to elucidate in the midst of my excited pursuit of Venetian girls. My gondola followed the side canals, as if the mysterious hand of a genie were guiding me through the byways of this oriental city, the more I advanced along the canals the more they seemed to show me the way, slicing through a neighborhood that they divided, as their narrow and arbitrarily traced furrows barely perturbed the tall houses and t
heir small Moorish windows; and like a magical guide holding a candle between his fingers to light my passage, they cast ahead of them a ray of sunlight and opened a pathway for it. You could sense that between the humble dwellings that the little canal had just divided, and which otherwise would have formed a compact whole, there was so little space available that a church bell-tower or a garden trellis would directly overhang the rio, as in a flooded city. But for the churches, as for the gardens which underwent the same process of transposition as occurred in the Grand Canal, the sea was so willing to act as a means of communication, like a side or main street, that on either side of the Canaletto, churches rose out of the water in this old, crowded and poor neighborhood. They had become busy, humble parishes, openly displaying the evidence of their run-down state and their frequentation by numerous people of the lower classes; thus the gardens traversed by the trough of the canal trailed their startled leaves and fruit down to the water’s edge, and thus on the corner of a house whose rough-hewn sandstone was still as raw as if freshly cut, little boys, caught off-guard but maintaining their balance, dangled their seaworthy legs like those of sailors sitting on a swinging bridge whose two halves had just parted, letting the sea flow between them. Sometimes a more beautiful monument appeared, popping up like a present in a lucky dip, a small ivory temple with its Corinthian columns and its pediment adorned with an allegorical statue, somewhat out of place in the midst of the everyday things with which it was entangled, for although we made way for it to pass, the peristyle that the canal had allotted to it still looked more like a quay for unloading fruit and vegetables. I had the impression, further enhanced by my desire, that I was not out of doors, but rather that I was entering some increasingly secret place, for on every occasion I found something new moving into place to one side of me or the other, a small monument or an unsuspected campo still endowed with that air of surprise affected by beautiful things which we see for the first time but whose aims and functions we do not yet understand. I returned on foot by the narrow calli, stopping to talk to working-girls, as Albertine might have done before me, and I wished that she were with me. Yet they could not be the same girls; at the time when Albertine was in Venice they would still have been children. But whereas previously I had been unfaithful through cowardice in one way or another to each of the desires that I had at first believed unique, since I had sought an analogous object rather than the original which I no longer hoped to find, now I quite deliberately sought out women that Albertine had not known in person, and even avoided those women that I had previously desired. It is true that I often recalled, with the violence of unassuaged desire, some girl from Méséglise or Paris, like the milkmaid seen at the foot of a hill one morning on my first trip to Balbec. Alas, however, I remembered them as they were then, that is, such as they certainly were no longer. In this way, where formerly I would have been led to inflect my impression of the constancy of desire by seeking to replace a convent schoolgirl that I had lost sight of by a similar schoolgirl, now when I sought out the adolescent girls that had disturbed me or Albertine, I had to allow yet another exception to the rule of the uniqueness of desire; those I now must chase were not the girls who were sixteen at the time, but those who were sixteen now, for what I now loved, despite the specific qualities of the person, and what escaped me, was youth itself. I realized that the youth of the girls whom I had known existed only in the fires of my memory, and that it was not the girls themselves, however desirous of obtaining them I was when my memory presented them to me, that I should pluck, if I truly wanted to harvest the season’s youth in full flower.
The sun was still high in the sky when I went to meet my mother on the Piazzetta. We hailed a gondola. “How your poor grandmother would have loved such simple elegance!” Mama said to me, pointing out the Doges’ Palace as it contemplated the sea, imbued with the ideas that the architect had entrusted it with and which it faithfully conserved, as it mounted a silent watch for its absent Doges. “She would even have liked the delicacy of those shades of pink, because there is nothing mawkish about them. How your grandmother would have loved Venice, and how familiar, how close to nature, she would have found all this beauty, so full of things that it needs no arrangement, offering itself in its own guise, the Doges’ Palace with its cubic forms, the columns that you say come from Herod’s Palace, in the middle of the Piazzetta and, even less calculated, placed as if space were lacking elsewhere, the pillars of St. John of Acre and the horses on the balcony of St. Mark’s! Your grandmother would have been as delighted to see the sun set on the Doges’ Palace as over a mountain-top.” And there was indeed some truth in what my mother said, for, while the gondola brought us back up the Grand Canal, we watched the line of palaces as we passed between them reflecting the changing light and the passing day on their pink flanks, changing with them, less after the fashion of private dwellings and famous monuments than that of a chain of marble cliffs beneath which we travel by boat in the evening to watch the sun set. Thus the dwellings disposed on either side of the canal reminded us of natural sites, but inspired by a nature using the human imagination to create its works. Yet at the same time (because of the constantly urban nature of the impressions offered by Venice, despite being set almost out at sea, on its waves where the ebb and flow of the tide are perceptible twice a day and which first at high tide flood over, and then at low tide uncover the magnificent external staircases of the palaces), as we would have done in Paris on the boulevards, on the Champs-Élysées or in the Bois or any wide, fashionable avenue, we passed in the misty evening light the most beautiful women, nearly all foreign, leaning languidly on the cushions of their floating equipage, waiting in line, stopping at a palace, asking if the friend that they wanted to call on was at home and, while awaiting the reply, they prepared their card just in case, in order to leave it as they would have done at the door of the Hôtel de Guermantes, consulting their guide-book to check the period and the style of the palace, even as they were rocked all the while by the eddies of these sparkling, spirited waters, as if on the crest of a blue wave which reared in panic to feel itself caught between the dancing gondola and the resounding marble. And thus even an outing to call on a friend or to do some shopping was not only three things in one but still unique, in this Venice where the slightest social call takes on at once both the form and the charm of a visit to a museum and that of a naval maneuver.
Several of the palaces on the Grand Canal had been converted into hotels, and, whether because we fancied a change or from politeness toward Mme Sazerat, whom we had chanced to encounter—as one always meets some unforeseen, inopportune acquaintance on any journey—and whom Mama had invited out, we wished to try dinner in a different hotel from our own, one where they claimed that the cuisine was better. While my mother was paying the gondolier and escorting Mme Sazerat into the private room that she had booked, I preferred to take a look at the main dining-hall of the restaurant, with its fine marble pillars, once entirely covered with frescoes, which had since been badly restored. Two waiters were conversing in Italian, which I translate as follows:
“Are the old couple going to eat in their room? They never give notice. What a nuisance, I don’t know whether to reserve their table (non so se bisogna conservar loro la tavola). Oh well, who cares if they do come down and find that it’s taken! I can’t understand why we invite forestieri like them to stay in such a chic hotel. They are not our kind of people.”
Despite his disdain, the waiter would have preferred to know what decision to take about the table, and he was on the point of sending the liftboy up to their floor to find out, when, before he had time to ask, the answer was given: he had just spotted the old lady entering the room. Despite the sad and tired air that the weight of passing years bestows, and despite a sort of red, leprous eczema covering her face, I had no difficulty in recognizing beneath her bonnet, in her black tunic, created by W***,2 but looking to the uninitiated as if it belonged to an old concierge, the Marquise d
e Villeparisis. As chance would have it, the place where I stood studying the remains of a fresco on the fine marble wall was behind the very table where Mme de Villeparisis had just sat down.
“So M. de Villeparisis will soon be down. During the month that they’ve spent here they have only once eaten separately,” said the waiter.
I was wondering with which of her relatives it was she was traveling and whom they were calling M. de Villeparisis, when, a few moments later, I saw him approach her table and sit down beside her. It was her former lover, M. de Norpois.
His advanced age had affected the timbre of his voice, but on the other hand had made his language, formerly so reserved, truly intemperate. Perhaps the cause should be sought in the ambitions that he felt he no longer had time to achieve and which filled him with all the more vehemence and excitement; perhaps in the fact that, abandoned by the political life which he had longed to engage in, he believed, with the naïvety born of desire, that his withering criticism of those he aspired to replace would drive them into retirement. Thus we see politicians convinced that the cabinet to which they have not been appointed cannot last out the week. It would in any case be excessive to claim that M. de Norpois had entirely forgotten the traditional usage of diplomatic language. As soon as conversation turned to “affairs of state,” he became once more, as we shall see, the man whom we previously knew, but for the rest of the time he held forth about one rival or another with the senile violence that drives some octogenarians to run after women, despite being in no position to cause them harm.
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