In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of Giotto’s Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow; she could find no stimulus for that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity with which she was familiar, having been moved to it often enough by the perusal of newspapers, nor any other pleasure of the same kind, in her boredom and irritation at being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very sufferings the printed account of which had moved her to tears, she relapsed into ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter sarcasm, saying, when she thought that we were out of earshot: “Well, she should have been careful not to do what got her into this! She enjoyed it well enough, I dare say, so she’d better not put on any airs now! All the same, he must have been a godforsaken young fellow to go with the likes of her. Dear, dear, it’s just as they used to say in my poor mother’s day:

  Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,

  And dirty sluts in plenty,

  Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses

  When the heart is one-and-twenty.”

  Although, when her grandson had a slight cold in his head, she would set off at night, even if she were unwell, instead of going to bed, to see whether he had everything he needed, covering ten miles on foot before daybreak so as to be back in time for work, this same love for her own people, and her desire to establish the future greatness of her house on a solid foundation, found expression, in her policy with regard to the other servants, in one unvarying maxim, which was never to let any of them set foot in my aunt’s room; indeed she showed a sort of pride in not allowing anyone else to come near my aunt, preferring, when she herself was ill, to get out of bed and to administer the Vichy water in person, rather than to concede to the kitchen-maid the right of entry into her mistress’s presence. There is a species of hymenoptera observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which she lays her eggs, will furnish the larvae, when hatched, with a docile, inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister to her unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of stratagems so cunning and so pitiless that, many years later, we discovered that if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout that summer, it was because their smell gave the poor kitchen-maid who had to prepare them such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my aunt’s service.

  Alas! we had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one of the Sundays following our meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after which my father had been forced to confess himself mistaken, as mass drew to an end and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world, something else invaded the church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that Mme Goupil, Mme Percepied (everyone, in fact, who not so long before, when I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, engrossed in their prayers, and who I might even have thought oblivious of my entry had not their feet moved slightly to push away the little kneeling-bench which was preventing me from getting to my chair) had begun to discuss with us out loud all manner of utterly mundane topics as though we were already outside in the Square, we saw Legrandin on the sunbaked threshold of the porch dominating the many-coloured tumult of the market, being introduced by the husband of the lady we had seen him with on the previous occasion to the wife of another large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin’s face wore an expression of extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a deep bow, with a subsidiary backward movement which brought his shoulders sharply up into a position behind their starting-point, a gesture in which he must have been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme de Cambremer. This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin’s rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance, this wave lashed into a tempest by an obsequious alacrity of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew. The lady gave him some message for her coachman, and as he walked over to her carriage the impression of shy and respectful happiness which the introduction had stamped upon his face still lingered there. Rapt in a sort of dream, he smiled, then began to hurry back towards the lady; as he was walking faster than usual, his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; and altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, to the exclusion of all other considerations, as though he were the passive, wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile we were coming out through the porch and were about to pass close beside him; he was too well bred to turn his head away, but he fixed his eyes, which had suddenly changed to those of a seer lost in the profundity of his vision, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us and so had no need to acknowledge our presence. His face was as artless as ever above his plain, single-breasted jacket, which looked as though conscious of having been led astray and plunged willy-nilly into surroundings of detested splendour. And a spotted bow-tie, stirred by the breezes of the Square, continued to float in front of Legrandin like the standard of his proud isolation and his noble independence. When we reached the house my mother discovered that the baker had forgotten to deliver the cream tart and asked my father to go back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the church we met Legrandin coming towards us with the same lady, whom he was escorting to her carriage. He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find expression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability that went far beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible to the chatelaine, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.

  Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him on this same Sunday evening. “Come, and bear your aged friend company,” he had said to me. “Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from some land to which we shall never return, come and let me breathe from the far country of your adolescence the scent of those spring flowers among which I also used to wander many years ago. Come with the primrose, the love-vine, the buttercup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to perfume the alleys of your great-aunt’s garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the polychrome hues of the pansies, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart, for the two butterflies that have waited outside all morning, the closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose.”

  The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused to believe tha
t he could have been impolite.

  “You admit yourself that he appears there at church quite simply dressed and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion.” She added that in any event, even if, assuming the worst, he had been intentionally rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing. And indeed my father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s underlying character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit’s own testimony, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes, which are alone of importance in indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.

  I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by moonlight. “There is a charming quality, is there not,” he said to me, “in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you will read in time to come asserts that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And see you this, my boy, there comes in all our lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.”

  I listened to M. Legrandin’s words which always seemed to me so pleasing; but I was preoccupied by the memory of a lady whom I had seen recently for the first time and thinking, now that I knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I summoned up all my courage and said to him: “Tell me, sir, do you by any chance know the lady … the ladies of Guermantes?”—glad, too, in pronouncing this name, to secure a sort of power over it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my day-dreams and giving it an objective existence in the world of spoken things.

  But, at the sound of the name Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of our friend’s blue eyes a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow. His fringed eyelids darkened and drooped. His mouth, set in a bitter grimace, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes remained full of pain, like the eyes of a handsome martyr whose body bristles with arrows.

  “No, I don’t know them,” he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly in order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself—in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family—might very well have been not forced upon, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.

  “No,” he went on, explaining by his words the tone in which they were uttered, “no, I don’t know them, I’ve never wanted to; I’ve always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart, you know, I’m a bit of a Jacobin. People are always coming to me about it, telling me I’m mistaken in not going to Guermantes, that I make myself seem ill-bred, uncivilised, an old bear. But that’s not the sort of reputation that can frighten me; it’s too true! In my heart of hearts I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books and pictures, and the light of the moon when the fresh breeze of your youth wafts to my nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes can no longer distinguish.”

  I did not understand very clearly why, in order to refrain from going to the houses of people whom one did not know, it should be necessary to cling to one’s independence, or how this could give one the appearance of a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their displeasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come to light, that it should do so in his absence, a long way away, and “by default.” In a word, he was a snob. No doubt he would never have said any of this in the poetical language which my family and I so much enjoyed. And if I asked him, “Do you know the Guermantes family?” Legrandin the talker would reply, “No, I’ve never wished to know them.” But unfortunately the talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because this other could tell compromising stories about our own Legrandin and his snobbishness; and this other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that twisted smile, the undue gravity of the tone of his reply, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had instantaneously been stabbed and prostrated like a St Sebastian of snobbery: “Oh, how you hurt me! No, I don’t know the Guermantes family. Do not remind me of the great sorrow of my life.” And since this other, irrepressible, blackmailing Legrandin, if he lacked our Legrandin’s charming vocabulary, showed an infinitely greater promptness in expressing himself, by means of what are called “reflexes,” when Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he had already spoken, and however much our friend deplored the bad impression which the revelations of his alter ego must have caused, he could do no more than endeavour to mitigate them.

  This is not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he himself was one, since it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them. Upon ourselves they react only indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our primary motives other, auxiliary motives, less stark and therefore more seemly. Never had Legrandin’s snobbishness prompted him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would encourage his imagination to make that duchess appear, in his eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would gain acquaintance with the duchess, assuring himself that he was yielding to the attractions of mind and heart which the vile race of snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition the social activity of Legrandin and its primary cause.

  At home, meanwhile, we no longer had any illusions about M. Legrandin, and our relations with him had become much more distant. Mamma was greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin which he never admitted to, which he continued to call the unpardonable sin, snobbery. As for my father, he found it difficult to take Legrandin’s airs in so light-hearted and detached a spirit; and when there was talk, one year, of sending me to spend the summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother, he said: “I simply must tell Legrandin that you’re going to Balbec, to see whether he’ll offer to introduce you to his sister. He probably doesn’t remember telling us that she lived within a mile of the place.”

  My grandmother, who held that when one went to the seaside one ought to be on the beach
from morning to night sniffing the salt breezes, and that one should not know anyone there because visits and excursions are so much time filched from the sea air, begged him on no account to speak to Legrandin of our plans; for already, in her mind’s eye, she could see his sister, Mme de Cambremer, alighting from her carriage at the door of our hotel just as we were on the point of going out fishing, and obliging us to remain indoors to entertain her. But Mamma laughed at her fears, thinking to herself that the danger was not so threatening, and that Legrandin would show no undue anxiety to put us in touch with his sister. As it happened, there was no need for any of us to introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who, without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of visiting those parts, walked into the trap uninvited one evening when we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.

  “There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?” he said to my father, “a blue, especially, more floral than aerial, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that little pink cloud there, has it not also the tint of some flower, a carnation or hydrangea? Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the Channel, where Normandy merges into Brittany, have I observed such copious examples of that sort of vegetable kingdom of the atmosphere. Down there, in that unspoiled country near Balbec, there is a charmingly quiet little bay where the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which, by the by, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and insignificant; but in that moist and gentle atmosphere these celestial bouquets, pink and blue, will blossom all at once of an evening, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade. Others shed their flowers at once, and then it is lovelier still to see the sky strewn with their innumerable petals, sulphur or rose-pink. In that bay, which they call the Bay of Opal, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened, like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast, to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every winter many a brave vessel falls victim to the perils of the sea. Balbec! the most ancient bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil, the true Ar-mor, the sea, the land’s end, the accursed region which Anatole France—an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to read—has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes, they are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and charming soil which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is to be able to make excursions into such primitive and beautiful regions only a step or two away!”