In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  “Her ladyship’s thoughts seem to be rather lubricious this evening,” she concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used by her friend on some earlier occasion.

  In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend’s sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and broke away; and then they began to chase one another about the room, scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like wings, clucking and squealing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle Vinteuil collapsed on to the sofa, with her friend lying on top of her. The latter now had her back turned to the little table on which the old music-master’s portrait had been arranged. Mlle Vinteuil realised that her friend would not see it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she herself had just noticed it for the first time: “Oh! there’s my father’s picture looking at us; I can’t think who can have put it there; I’m sure I’ve told them a dozen times that it isn’t the proper place for it.”

  I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was evidently in regular use for ritual profanations, for the friend replied in words which were clearly a liturgical response: “Let him stay there. He can’t bother us any longer. D’you think he’d start whining, and wanting to put your overcoat on for you, if he saw you now with the window open, the ugly old monkey?”

  To which Mlle Vinteuil replied in words of gentle reproach—“Come, come!”—which testified to the goodness of her nature, not that they were prompted by any resentment at hearing her father spoken of in this fashion (for that was evidently a feeling which she had trained herself, by a long course of sophistries, to keep in close subjection at such moments), but rather because they were a sort of curb which, in order not to appear selfish, she herself applied to the gratification which her friend was attempting to procure for her. It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of the wickedness she was striving to emulate. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with tenderness by a woman who had shown herself so implacable towards the defenceless dead, and, springing on to her friend’s lap she held out a chaste brow to be kissed precisely as a daughter would have done, with the exquisite sensation that they would thus, between them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty by robbing M. Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred rights of fatherhood. Her friend took Mlle Vinteuil’s head between her hands and placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection she had for her, as well as by the desire to bring what distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.

  “Do you know what I should like to do to this old horror?” she said, taking up the photograph. And she murmured in Mlle Vinteuil’s ear something that I could not distinguish.

  “Oh! You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Not dare to spit on it? On that?” said the friend with studied brutality.

  I heard no more, for Mlle Vinteuil, with an air that was at once languid, awkward, bustling, honest and sad, came to the window and drew the shutters close; but I knew now what was the reward that M. Vinteuil, in return for all the suffering that he had endured in his lifetime on account of his daughter, had received from her after his death.

  And yet I have since reflected that if M. Vinteuil had been able to be present at this scene, he might still, in spite of everything, have continued to believe in his daughter’s goodness of heart, and perhaps in so doing he would not have been altogether wrong. It was true that in Mlle Vinteuil’s habits the appearance of evil was so absolute that it would have been hard to find it exhibited to such a degree of perfection outside a convinced sadist; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre and not under the homely lamp of an actual country house that one expects to see a girl encouraging a friend to spit upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for her alone; and when we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally sadism that is responsible for it. It is possible that, without being in the least inclined towards sadism, a daughter might be guilty of equally cruel offences as those of Mlle Vinteuil against the memory and the wishes of her dead father, but she would not give them deliberate expression in an act so crude in its symbolism, so lacking in subtlety; the criminal element in her behaviour would be less evident to other people, and even to herself, since she would not admit to herself that she was doing wrong. But, appearances apart, in Mlle Vinteuil’s soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element was probably not unmixed. A sadist of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be, for in that case the evil would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her, and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; and as for virtue, respect for the dead, filial affection, since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in profaning them. Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to identify with, the wicked, and to make their partners do likewise, in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. And I could understand how she must have longed for such an escape when I saw how impossible it was for her to effect it. At the moment when she wished to be thought the very antithesis of her father, what she at once suggested to me were the mannerisms, in thought and speech, of the poor old piano-teacher. Far more than his photograph, what she really desecrated, what she subordinated to her pleasures though it remained between them and her and prevented her from any direct enjoyment of them, was the likeness between her face and his, his mother’s blue eyes which he had handed down to her like a family jewel, those gestures of courtesy and kindness which interposed between her vice and herself a phraseology, a mentality which were not designed for vice and which prevented her from recognising it as something very different from the numberless little social duties and courtesies to which she must devote herself every day. It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by evil thoughts such as ordinarily had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil. Perhaps Mlle Vinteuil felt that at heart her friend was not altogether bad, nor really sincere when she gave vent to those blasphemous utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving and returning those kisses, those smiles, those glances, all feigned, perhaps, but akin in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would have been evinced not by an ordinarily kind, suffering person but by a cruel and wanton one. She could delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed enjoying the pleasures which, with so perverted an accomplice, a girl might enjoy who really did harbour such barbarous feelings towards her father’s memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of evil as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one in which it was so refreshing to sojourn, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

  If the Méséglise way was fairly easy, it was a very different matter when we took the Guermantes way, for that meant a long walk, and we must first make sure of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a spell of fine days; when Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was falling on the “poor crops,” gazing up at the sky and seeing there only an occasional white cloud floating upon its calm blue surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed:
“They look just like a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their snouts! Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor labourers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come, pitter-patter all over the place, and think no more of where it’s falling than if it was the sea!”; when my father had received the same favourable reply from the gardener and the barometer several times in succession, then someone would say at dinner: “Tomorrow, if the weather holds, we might go the Guermantes way.” And off we would set, immediately after lunch, through the little garden gate into the Rue des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with clumps of grass among which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its name, from which, I felt, its odd characteristics and cantankerous personality derived, a street for which one might search in vain through the Combray of today, for the village school now occupies its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects, pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath a Renaissance rood-screen and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Romanesque choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it must have been in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice standing, but pierce through it and “restore” the Rue des Perchamps. And for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance than is generally at the disposal of restorers: the pictures which it has preserved—perhaps the last surviving in the world today, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion—of what Combray looked like in my childhood days; pictures which, because it was the old Combray that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as moving—if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works, reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me—as those old engravings of the Last Supper or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark’s.

  We would pass, in the Rue de l’Oiseau, in front of the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesché, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some litigation with their tenants, or to receive homage from them. We would come at length to the Mall, among whose tree-tops I could distinguish the steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able to sit down and spend the whole day there reading and listening to the bells, for it was so blissful and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do, had simply—in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight—pressed, at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence.

  The great charm of the Guermantes way was that we had beside us, almost all the time, the course of the Vivonne. We crossed it first, ten minutes after leaving the house, by a foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux. And every year, when we arrived at Combray, on Easter Sunday, after the sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the sumptuous preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they have not contrived to banish seem more sordid than usual) the river flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its only companions a clump of premature daffodils and early primroses, while here and there burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem drooping beneath the weight of the drop of perfume stored in its tiny horn. The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which at this point would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a hazel tree, beneath which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to have taken root. At Combray, where I could always detect the blacksmith or grocer’s boy through the disguise of a verger’s uniform or chorister’s surplice, this fisherman was the only person whom I was never able to identify. He must have known my family, for he used to raise his hat when we passed; and then I would be just on the point of asking his name when someone would signal to me to be quiet or I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow-path, which ran along the top of a steep bank several feet above the stream. The bank on the other side was lower, stretching in a series of broad meadows as far as the village and the distant railway-station. Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville. Nothing was left now but a few barely visible stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad surface of the fields, and a few broken battlements from which, in their day, the cross-bowmen had hurled their missiles and the watchmen had gazed out over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l’Exempt, fiefs all of them of Guermantes by which Combray was hemmed in, but now razed to the level of the grass and overrun by the boys from the lay brothers’ school who came there for study or recreation—a past that had almost sunk into the ground, lying by the water’s edge like an idler taking the air, yet giving me much food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not only the little town of today but an historic city vastly different, gripping my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups. For the buttercups grew past numbering in this spot which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added lustre, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their golden expanse, until it became potent enough to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty; and so it had been from my earliest childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards them before I could even properly spell their charming name—a name fit for the Prince in some fairy-tale—immigrants, perhaps, from Asia centuries ago, but naturalised now for ever in the village, satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water’s edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping none the less like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East.

  I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the Vivonne to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their turn were enclosed, at once “containers” whose transparent sides were like solidified water and “contents” plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, conjured up an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than they would have done standing upon a table laid for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water in which my hands could not grasp it and the insoluble glass in which my palate could not enjoy it. I made up my mind to come there again with a fishing-line; meanwhile I procured some bread from our picnic basket, and threw pellets of it into the Vivonne which seemed to bring about a process of super-saturation, for the water at once solidified round them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had no doubt been holding in solution, invisible and on the verge of entering the stage of crystallisation.

  Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants. At first they appeared singly—a lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it was unhappily placed, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen, reach out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a mom
ent before moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt Léonie, who present year after year the unchanging spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they constantly imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable and baneful dietetics. Such as these was the water-lily, and reminiscent also of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired about them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.

  But further on the current slackened, at a point where the stream ran through a property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks hereabouts were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a strawberry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges. Further on, the flowers were more numerous, paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream, as after the sad dismantling of some fête galante, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely care while, a little further again, others, pressed close together in a veritable floating flower-bed, suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this watery garden—this celestial garden, too, for it gave the flowers a soil of a colour more precious, more moving than their own, and, whether sparkling beneath the water-lilies in the afternoon in a kaleidoscope of silent, watchful and mobile contentment, or glowing, towards evening, like some distant haven, with the roseate dreaminess of the setting sun, ceaselessly changing yet remaining always in harmony, around the less mutable colours of the flowers themselves, with all that is most profound, most evanescent, most mysterious—all that is infinite—in the passing hour, it seemed to have made them blossom in the sky itself