In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief and family memories, pleaded her inability to rebut my theories, saying: “I don’t know how to espress myself,” I would gloat over her admission with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr Percepied; and if she went on: “All the same she was kith and kindle; there’s always the respect due to kindle,” I would shrug my shoulders and say to myself: “It’s really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who makes such howlers,” adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to emulate when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life.

  My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used to take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of reading, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid across my shoulders and set out; my body, which in a long spell of enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, now felt the need, like a spinning-top wound up and let go, to expend it in every direction. The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the bushes adjoining Montjouvain, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation. Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them. When I try to reckon up all that I owe to the Méséglise way, all the humble discoveries of which it was either the fortuitous setting or the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy slope which overlooks Montjouvain, that I was struck for the first time by this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression. After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had struggled cheerfully, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, beside a little hut with a tiled roof in which M. Vinteuil’s gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, glittered anew in the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut and the still wet tiles of the roof, on the ridge of which a hen was strutting. The wind tugged at the wild grass growing from cracks in the wall and at the hen’s downy feathers, which floated out horizontally to their full extent with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink reflection which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!” But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.

  And it was at that moment, too—thanks to a peasant who went past, apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly got a poke in the face from my umbrella, and who replied somewhat coolly to my “Fine day, what! Good to be out walking!”—that I learned that identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all men in accordance with a pre-established order. Later on, whenever a long spell of reading had put me in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I was longing to talk would at that very moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had just been thinking of my parents with affection, and forming resolutions of the kind most calculated to please them, they would have been using the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely as I was about to fling myself into their arms.

  Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be added an alternative feeling which I was unable to distinguish clearly from it, a feeling stimulated by the desire to see appear before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my arms. Springing up suddenly, and without giving me time to trace it accurately to its source among so many thoughts of a very different kind, the pleasure which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior to that which I derived from them. I found an additional merit in everything that was in my mind at that moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled roof, the grass growing out of the wall, the village of Roussainville into which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the steeple of its church, as a result of this fresh emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, mysterious and propitious breeze. But if, for me, this desire that a woman should appear added something more exalting to the charms of nature, they in their turn enlarged what I might have found too restricted in the charms of the woman. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that her kisses would reveal to me the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year; and, my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds. Moreover—just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set aside, we believe with the profoundest faith in the originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may happen to be—the passing figure whom my desire evoked seemed to be not just any specimen of the genus “woman,” but a necessary and natural product of this particular soil. For at that time everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction. I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Méséglise or Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for Balbec and Méséglise. The pleasure they might give me would have seemed less genuine, I should no longer have believed in it, if I had modified the conditions as I pleased. To meet a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from Méséglise in Paris would have been like receiving the present of a shell which I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure she might give me all those other pleasures amidst which my imagination had enwrapped her. But to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl whom I invariably saw dappled with the shadows of their leaves was to me herself a plant of local growth, merely of a higher species than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to get closer than through them to the intimate savour of the country. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses would themselves be of a special kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from anyone else) since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct, formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate aim for which one seeks a woman’s company, or as the cause of the preliminary perturbation that one feels. Scarcely does one think of it as a pleasure in store for one; rather does one call it her charm; for one does not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself
. Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it simply raises to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glances, the kisses, of the woman by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for her kindness of heart and for her touching predilection for us, which we measure by the blessings and the happiness that she showers upon us.

  Alas, it was in vain that I implored the castle-keep of Roussainville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant of my earliest desires when, at the top of our house in Combray, in the little room that smelt of orris-root, I could see nothing but its tower framed in the half-opened window as, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of exploration or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which for all I knew was deadly—until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail smeared the leaves of the flowering currant that drooped around me. In vain did I call upon it now. In vain did I compress the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I might go as far as the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did I find there the peasant-girl whom I should not have failed to meet had I been with my grandfather and thus unable to engage her in conversation. I would stare interminably at the trunk of a distant tree, from behind which she would emerge and come to me; I scanned the horizon, which remained as deserted as before; night was falling; it was without hope now that I concentrated my attention, as though to draw up from it the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale, exhausted earth, and it was no longer with exhilaration but with sullen rage that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from among which no more living creatures emerged than if they had been trees painted on the stretched canvas background of a panorama, when, unable to resign myself to returning home without having held in my arms the woman I so greatly desired, I was yet obliged to retrace my steps towards Combray, and to admit to myself that the chance of her appearing in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, and I ceased to think of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realised, as being shared by others, or as having any existence outside myself. They seemed to me now no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any connection with nature, with the world of real things, which from then onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, what the railway carriage on the bench of which a traveller is reading to pass the time is to the fictional events of his novel.

  It is perhaps from another impression which I received at Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at the time remained obscure to me, that there arose, long afterwards, the notion I was to form of sadism. We shall see, in due course, that for quite other reasons the memory of this impression was to play an important part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot weather; my parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day, had told me that I might stay out as late as I pleased; and having gone as far as the Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the reflection of the tiled roof of the hut, I had lain down in the shade and fallen asleep among the bushes on the steep slope overlooking the house, just where I had waited for my parents, years before, one day when they had gone to call on M. Vinteuil. It was almost dark when I awoke, and I was about to get up and go away, but I saw Mlle Vinteuil (or thought, at least, that I recognised her, for I had not seen her often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, whereas she was now growing into a young woman), who had probably just come in, standing in front of me, and only a few feet away, in that room in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly open; the lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her being able to see me; but if I had moved away I would have made a rustling sound among the bushes, she would have heard me, and she might have thought that I had been hiding there in order to spy upon her.

  She was in deep mourning, for her father had recently died. We had not gone to see her; my mother had not wished it, by reason of a virtue which alone set limits to her benevolence—namely, modesty; but she pitied the girl from the depths of her heart. My mother had not forgotten the sad last years of M. Vinteuil’s life, his complete absorption, first in having to play mother and nursery-maid to his daughter, and, later, in the suffering she had caused him; she could see the tortured expression which was never absent from the old man’s face in those last years; she knew that he had finally given up hope of finishing the task of copying out the whole of his later work, the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano-teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves, though we did not despise them because they meant so much to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he sacrificed them to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain unknown for ever. My mother thought, too, of that other and still more cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of a future of honourable and respected happiness for his daughter; when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts’ old music-teacher, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so much more bitter, which Mlle Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father. “Poor M. Vinteuil,” my mother would say, “he lived and died for his daughter, without getting his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only come to him from her.”

  At the far end of Mlle Vinteuil’s sitting-room, on the mantelpiece, stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch, just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside, then flung herself down on a sofa and drew towards her a little table on which she placed the photograph, as M. Vinteuil had placed beside him the piece of music which he would have liked to play to my parents. Presently her friend came into the room. Mlle Vinteuil greeted her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head and moving to one side of the sofa as though to make room for her. But no sooner had she done this than she evidently felt that she might seem to be imposing on her friend a posture which she might consider importunate. She thought that her friend would perhaps prefer to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair; she felt that she had been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright; stretching herself out again over the whole of the sofa, she closed her eyes and began to yawn, as if to suggest that drowsiness was the sole reason for her recumbent position. Despite the brusque and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion, I could recognise in her the obsequious and reticent gestures and sudden scruples that had characterised her father. Presently she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to close the shutters and not succeeding.

  “Leave them open,” said her friend. “I’m hot.”

  “But it’s too tiresome! People will see us,” Mlle Vinteuil answered.

  But then she must have guessed that her friend would think that she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she did indeed wish to hear but, from discretion, would have preferred her friend to be the first to speak. And so her face, which I could not see very clearly, must have assumed the expression which my grandmother had once found so delightful, when she hastily went on: “When I say ‘see us’ I mean, of course, see us reading. It’s so tiresome to think that whatever trivial little thing you do someone’s eyes are on you.”

  With
an instinctive rectitude and a gentility beyond her control, she refrained from uttering the premeditated words which she had felt to be indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden entreated and reined back a rough and swaggering trooper.

  “Oh, yes, it’s so extremely likely that people are looking at us at this time of night in this densely populated district!” said her friend sarcastically. “And what if they are?” she went on, feeling bound to annotate with a fond and mischievous wink these words which she recited out of good-naturedness, as a text which she knew to be pleasing to Mlle Vinteuil, in a tone of studied cynicism. “And what if they are? All the better that they should see us.”

  Mlle Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. Her sensitive and scrupulous heart was ignorant of the words that ought to flow spontaneously from her lips to match the scene for which her eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the limitations of her true nature to find the language appropriate to the vicious young woman she longed to be thought, but the words which she imagined such a young woman might have uttered with sincerity sounded false on her own lips. And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her impulse towards audacity and was interlarded with: “You’re sure you aren’t cold? You aren’t too hot? You don’t want to sit and read by yourself?…