In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him first this way, then that, towards a state of happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and yet precise. And then suddenly, having reached a certain point from which he was preparing to follow it, after a momentary pause, abruptly it changed direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, fragile, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards new vistas. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound. But when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new beauty which deepens his own sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again.

  Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation. He had so long ceased to direct his life towards any ideal goal, confining himself to the pursuit of ephemeral satisfactions, that he had come to believe, without ever admitting it to himself in so many words, that he would remain in that condition for the rest of his days. More than this, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in (although he could not have expressly denied) their reality. Thus he had grown into the habit of taking refuge in trivial considerations, which enabled him to disregard matters of fundamental importance. Just as he never stopped to ask himself whether he would not have done better by not going into society, but on the other hand knew for certain that if he had accepted an invitation he must put in an appearance, and that afterwards, if he did not actually call, he must at least leave cards upon his hostess, so in his conversation he took care never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about anything, but instead would supply facts and details which were valid enough in themselves and excused him from showing his real capacities. He would be extremely precise about the recipe for a dish, the dates of a painter’s birth and death, and the titles of his works. Sometimes, in spite of himself, he would let himself go so far as to express an opinion on a work of art, or on someone’s interpretation of life, but then he would cloak his words in a tone of irony, as though he did not altogether associate himself with what he was saying. But now, like a confirmed invalid in whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or sometimes an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have brought about such an improvement in his health that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead belatedly a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he had made people play to him to see whether he might not perhaps discover his phrase therein, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of re-creative influence, he was conscious once again of the desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life. But, never having managed to find out whose work it was that he had heard played that evening, he had been unable to procure a copy and had finally forgotten the quest. He had indeed, in the course of that week, encountered several of the people who had been at the party with him, and had questioned them; but most of them had either arrived after or left before the piece was played; some had indeed been there at the time but had gone into another room to talk, and those who had stayed to listen had no clearer impression than the rest. As for his hosts, they knew that it was a recent work which the musicians whom they had engaged for the evening had asked to be allowed to play; but, as these last had gone away on tour, Swann could learn nothing further. He had, of course, a number of musical friends, but, vividly as he could recall the exquisite and inexpressible pleasure which the little phrase had given him, and could see in his mind’s eye the forms that it had traced, he was quite incapable of humming it to them. And so, at last, he ceased to think of it.

  But that night, at Mme Verdurin’s, scarcely had the young pianist begun to play than suddenly, after a high note sustained through two whole bars, Swann sensed its approach, stealing forth from beneath that long-drawn sonority, stretched like a curtain of sound to veil the mystery of its incubation, and recognised, secret, murmuring, detached, the airy and perfumed phrase that he had loved. And it was so peculiarly itself, it had so individual, so irreplaceable a charm, that Swann felt as though he had met, in a friend’s drawing-room, a woman whom he had seen and admired in the street and had despaired of ever seeing again. Finally the phrase receded, diligently guiding its successors through the ramifications of its fragrance, leaving on Swann’s features the reflection of its smile. But now, at last, he could ask the name of his fair unknown (and was told that it was the andante of Vinteuil’s sonata for piano and violin); he held it safe, could have it again to himself, at home, as often as he wished, could study its language and acquire its secret.

  And so, when the pianist had finished, Swann crossed the room and thanked him with a vivacity which delighted Mme Verdurin.

  “Isn’t he a charmer?” she asked Swann, “doesn’t he just understand his sonata, the little wretch? You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be made to express all that? Upon my word, you’d think it was everything but the piano! I’m caught out every time I hear it; I think I’m listening to an orchestra. Though it’s better, really, than an orchestra, more complete.”

  The young pianist bowed as he answered, smiling and underlining each of his words as though he were making an epigram: “You are most generous to me.”

  And while Mme Verdurin was saying to her husband, “Run and fetch him a glass of orangeade; he’s earned it,” Swann began to tell Odette how he had fallen in love with that little phrase. When their hostess, who was some way off, called out, “Well! It looks to me as though someone was saying nice things to you, Odette!” she replied, “Yes, very nice,” and he found her simplicity delightful. Then he asked for information about this Vinteuil: what else he had done, at what period in his life he had composed the sonata, and what meaning the little phrase could have had for him—that was what Swann wanted most to know.

  But none of these people who professed to admire this musician (when Swann had said that the sonata was really beautiful Mme Verdurin had exclaimed, “Of course it’s beautiful! But you don’t dare to confess that you don’t know Vinteuil’s sonata; you have no right not to know it!”—and the painter had added, “Ah, yes, it’s a very fine bit of work, isn’t it? Not, of course, if you want something ‘obvious,’ something ‘popular,’ but, I mean to say, it makes a very great impression on us artists”), none of them seemed ever to have asked himself these questions, for none of them was able to answer them.

  Even to one or two particular remarks made by Swann about his favourite phrase: “D’you know, that’s a funny thing; I had never noticed it. I may as well tell you that I don’t much care about peering at things through a microscope, and pricking myself on pin-points of difference. No, we don’t waste time splitting hairs in this house,” Mme Verdurin replied, while Dr Cottard gazed at her with open-mouthed admiration and studious zeal as she skipped lightly from one stepping-stone to another of her stock of ready-made phrases. Both he, however, and Mme Cottard, with a kind of common sense which is shared by many people of humble origin, were careful not to express an opinion, or to pretend to admire a piece of music which they confessed to each other, once they were back at home, that they no more understood than they could understand the art of “Master” Biche. Inasmuch as the public cannot recognise the charm, the beauty, even the outlines of nature save in the stereotyped impressions of an art which they have gradually assimilated, while an original artist starts by rejecting those stereotypes, so M. and Mme Cottard, typical, in this respect, of the public, were incapable of finding, either in Vinteuil’s sonata or in Biche’s portraits, what cons
tituted for them harmony in music or beauty in painting. It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as though he were striking at random from the piano a medley of notes which bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colours at random on his canvases. When, in one of these, they were able to distinguish a human form, they always found it coarsened and vulgarised (that is to say lacking in the elegance of the school of painting through whose spectacles they were in the habit of seeing even the real, living people who passed them in the street) and devoid of truth, as though M. Biche had not known how the human shoulder was constructed, or that a woman’s hair was not ordinarily purple.

  However, when the “faithful” were scattered out of earshot, the doctor felt that the opportunity was too good to be missed, and so (while Mme Verdurin was adding a final word of commendation of Vinteuil’s sonata), like a would-be swimmer who jumps into the water so as to learn, but chooses a moment when there are not too many people looking on: “Yes, indeed; he’s what they call a musician di primo cartello!” he exclaimed with sudden determination.

  Swann discovered no more than that the recent appearance of Vinteuil’s sonata had caused a great stir among the most advanced school of musicians, but that it was still unknown to the general public.

  “I know someone called Vinteuil,” said Swann, thinking of the old piano-teacher at Combray who had taught my grandmother’s sisters.

  “Perhaps he’s the man,” cried Mme Verdurin.

  “Oh, no, if you’d ever set eyes on him you wouldn’t entertain the idea.”

  “Then to entertain the idea is to settle it?” the doctor suggested.

  “But it may well be some relation,” Swann went on. “That would be bad enough; but, after all, there’s no reason why a genius shouldn’t have a cousin who’s a silly old fool. And if that should be so, I swear there’s no known or unknown form of torture I wouldn’t undergo to get the old fool to introduce me to the man who composed the sonata; starting with the torture of the old fool’s company, which would be ghastly.”

  The painter understood that Vinteuil was seriously ill at the moment, and that Dr Potain despaired of his life.

  “What!” cried Mme Verdurin, “Do people still call in Potain?”

  “Ah! Mme Verdurin,” Cottard simpered, “you forget that you are speaking of one of my colleagues—I should say one of my masters.”

  The painter had heard it said that Vinteuil was threatened with the loss of his reason. And he insisted that signs of this could be detected in certain passages in the sonata. This remark did not strike Swann as ridiculous; but it disturbed him, for, since a work of pure music contains none of the logical sequences whose deformation, in spoken or written language, is a proof of insanity, so insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as the insanity of a dog or a horse, although instances may be observed of these.

  “Don’t speak to me about your masters; you know ten times as much as he does!” Mme Verdurin answered Dr Cottard, in the tone of a woman who has the courage of her convictions and is quite ready to stand up to anyone who disagrees with her. “At least you don’t kill your patients!”

  “But, Madame, he is in the Academy,” replied the doctor with heavy irony. “If a patient prefers to die at the hands of one of the princes of science … It’s much smarter to be able to say, ‘Yes, I have Potain.’ ”

  “Oh, indeed! Smarter, is it?” said Mme Verdurin. “So there are fashions, nowadays, in illness, are there? I didn’t know that … Oh, you do make me laugh!” she screamed suddenly, burying her face in her hands. “And here was I, poor thing, talking quite seriously and never realising that you were pulling my leg.”

  As for M. Verdurin, finding it rather a strain to raise a laugh for so little, he was content with puffing out a cloud of smoke from his pipe, reflecting sadly that he could no longer catch up with his wife in the field of amiability.

  “D’you know, we like your friend very much,” said Mme Verdurin when Odette was bidding her good night. “He’s so unaffected, quite charming. If they’re all like that, the friends you want to introduce to us, by all means bring them.”

  M. Verdurin remarked that Swann had failed, all the same, to appreciate the pianist’s aunt.

  “I dare say he felt a little out of his depth, poor man,” suggested Mme Verdurin. “You can’t expect him to have caught the tone of the house already, like Cottard, who has been one of our little clan now for years. The first time doesn’t count; it’s just for breaking the ice. Odette, it’s agreed that he’s to join us tomorrow at the Châtelet. Perhaps you might call for him?”

  “No, he doesn’t want that.”

  “Oh, very well; just as you like. Provided he doesn’t fail us at the last moment.”

  Greatly to Mme Verdurin’s surprise, he never failed them. He would go to meet them no matter where, sometimes at restaurants on the outskirts of Paris which were little frequented as yet, since the season had not yet begun, more often at the theatre, of which Mme Verdurin was particularly fond. One evening at her house he heard her remark how useful it would be to have a special pass for first nights and gala performances, and what a nuisance it had been not having one on the day of Gambetta’s funeral. Swann, who never spoke of his brilliant connexions, but only of those not highly thought of in the Faubourg Saint-Germain whom he would have considered it snobbish to conceal, and among whom he had come to include his connexions in the official world, broke in: “I’ll see to that. You shall have it in time for the Danicheff revival. I happen to be lunching with the Prefect of Police tomorrow at the Elysée.”

  “What’s that? The Elysée?” Dr Cottard roared in a voice of thunder.

  “Yes, at M. Grévy’s,” replied Swann, a little embarrassed at the effect which his announcement had produced.

  “Are you often taken like that?” the painter asked Cottard with mock-seriousness.

  As a rule, once an explanation had been given, Cottard would say: “Ah, good, good; that’s all right, then,” after which he would show not the least trace of emotion. But this time Swann’s last words, instead of the usual calming effect, had that of raising to fever-pitch his astonishment at the discovery that a man with whom he himself was actually sitting at table, a man who had no official position, no honours or distinction of any sort, was on visiting terms with the Head of State.

  “What’s that you say? M. Grévy? You know M. Grévy?” he demanded of Swann, in the stupid and increduluous tone of a constable on duty at the palace who, when a stranger asks to see the President of the Republic, realising at once “the sort of man he is dealing with,” as the newspapers say, assures the poor lunatic that he will be admitted at once, and directs him to the reception ward of the police infirmary.

  “I know him slightly; we have some friends in common” (Swann dared not add that one of these friends was the Prince of Wales). “Besides, he is very free with his invitations, and I assure you his luncheon-parties are not the least bit amusing. They’re very simple affairs, too, you know—never more than eight at table,” he went on, trying desperately to cut out everything that seemed to show off his relations with the President in a light too dazzling for the doctor’s eyes.

  Whereupon Cottard, at once conforming in his mind to the literal interpretation of what Swann was saying, decided that invitations from M. Grévy were very little sought after, were sent out, in fact, into the highways and byways. And from that moment he was no longer surprised to hear that Swann, or anyone else, was “always at the Elysée”; he even felt a little sorry for a man who had to go to luncheon-parties which he himself admitted were a bore.

  “Ah, good, good; that’s quite all right, then,” he said, in the tone of a suspicious customs official who, after hearing your explanations, stamps your passport and lets you proceed on your journey without troubling to examine your luggage.

  “I can well believe you don’t find them amusing, those lunch
eons. Indeed, it’s very good of you to go to them,” said Mme Verdurin, who regarded the President of the Republic as a bore to be especially dreaded, since he had at his disposal means of seduction, and even of compulsion, which, if employed to captivate her “faithful,” might easily make them default. “It seems he’s as deaf as a post and eats with his fingers.”

  “Upon my word! Then it can’t be much fun for you, going there.” A note of pity sounded in the doctor’s voice; and then struck by the number—only eight at table—“Are these luncheons what you would describe as ‘intimate’?” he inquired briskly, not so much out of idle curiosity as from linguistic zeal.

  But so great was the prestige of the President of the Republic in the eyes of Dr Cottard that neither the modesty of Swann nor the malevolence of Mme Verdurin could wholly efface it, and he never sat down to dinner with the Verdurins without asking anxiously, “D’you think we shall see M. Swann here this evening? He’s a personal friend of M. Grevy’s. I suppose that means he’s what you’d call a ‘gentleman’?” He even went to the length of offering Swann a card of invitation to the Dental Exhibition.

  “This will let you in, and anyone you take with you,” he explained, “but dogs are not admitted. I’m just warning you, you understand, because some friends of mine went there once without knowing, and bitterly regretted it.”

  As for M. Verdurin, he did not fail to observe the distressing effect upon his wife of the discovery that Swann had influential friends of whom he had never spoken.

  If no arrangement had been made to go out, it was at the Verdurins’ that Swann would find the “little nucleus” assembled, but he never appeared there except in the evenings, and rarely accepted their invitations to dinner, in spite of Odette’s entreaties.

  “I could dine with you alone somewhere, if you’d rather,” she suggested.