The concièrge was still up, even though it was after midnight: an old woman with her gray hair pulled tightly back on both sides. She glanced up at Herma, then went back to her Petit Parisien. A dim bulb was burning in the entryway. Herma after some searching found the antiquated lift, opened the iron and glass door, and figured out which buttons to push to make it work. On the first floor she got out. It was very dark on the landing and she groped around trying to find a bell. Finally she knocked gently at the door.
When the door opened there was hardly any more light inside the apartment. An unkempt Marcel, smiling faintly and saying nothing, showed her in. He was swathed in woolen pyjamas and a pair of sweaters. It was warm in the room and a veil of moisture glistened on his face.
He closed the door behind her. They were standing in a large salon which had the air of not being used very much. It was almost bare of furniture; there was only a divan and a pair of chairs, all three with dust-covers over them, and an étagère with a small night-light burning on it. This accounted for the shadowy gloom as you came in. On the wall Herma made out a portrait of Marcel, evidently done a number of years before; it showed him as a young man in his twenties in evening dress and holding a cigarette. By the door was a mysterious object which proved to be an elephant’s foot adapted for holding umbrellas.
Still without a word, he led her across the room and through the door beyond. There, in the combined study and bedroom, it was a little lighter. There was a lamp with a glass shade on the writing desk and another smaller one by the bed. The bed was unmade and rumpled. In addition to the desk there was a table covered with stacks of paper, and there were more papers and books piled on the bed. An old-fashioned cabinet, high and narrow with a glass door, was devoted solely to medicines: a collection of bottles, vials, and papers containing powders, some of them torn and empty. On the top of the cabinet a saucer of Legras Powder smoldered, exuding a thread of smoke and a sharp odor of camphor. There were many other odors: the medicines, the not-very-clean bedclothes, the remains of food on various trays and dishes around the room, the chamber pot clearly visible under the bed. The walls, not only in the bedroom but in the salon as well, were lined with cork. Not a sound penetrated into the apartment from the outside.
He seemed perfectly well aware that these conditions under which he lived might seem odd to others. “You see,” he explained without asking her to take a seat (and indeed there was no place to sit except for the sofa across the room, which was also piled high with books and papers), “it’s the bad season for me. From April on—the pollen from the plane trees alone. If you were to bring a single flower into the apartment, I would be unable to breathe for a week. And the noise—the omnibus goes directly by on the boulevard. And under me on the ground floor there is a terrible doctor who, as far as I can tell, bangs saucepans together. I can’t tell you why.” If he could hear anything at all through the cork on the walls, Herma thought, he must have extraordinarily sensitive hearing. “And I must work,” he went on. “For me”—he waved his hand toward the papers scattered around the room—“it is the only thing of any importance.”
Here he smiled apologetically, as if to indicate a faint irony on the importance of the work; or more precisely, she had the impression, on the subject of the egotism of all artists and writers, himself and perhaps even Herma included.
He reached for an electric button at the end of a tangled cord by the bedside. After a few moments a sullen dark-faced young woman appeared in the doorway. Obviously she had been awakened from her sleep.
“Coffee,” said Marcel shortly.
In only ten minutes or so she came back with two small cups of black coffee and a bowl of sugar on a tray. She left again, all without having spoken a word.
“That is Anna. She’s the wife of Alfred.”
“They live here?”
“Yes. They occupy the other bedroom. She’s a tiresome creature. But Alfred … is necessary to me. He typewrites my manuscripts,” he added quickly. This was new information for Herma, who had supposed that Agostinelli was his chauffeur. And he, sensing perhaps that she was skeptical of this detail, went on to explain rather redundantly, “I’ve taught him to typewrite.”
They had both remained standing from the time they entered the room. She sipped her coffee. He barely touched his to his lips and then set it down. He seemed to be content to look at Herma, to study her in his leisurely, penetrating, and yet not unfriendly way. In his pyjamas, wrapped to the throat in sweaters, he looked even more like an oriental sorcerer, or a swami capable of levitation or long existence without nourishment. The light from the two lamps, illuminating him from below, intensified the orchidaceous quality of the pale face with its short beard and the shaggy hair falling over the brow. He moved slowly about the room, allowing his fingers to glide over this and that.
“But, even though I am not allowed to have flowers, other beautiful creatures come here,” he said with a glance and a smile. Suddenly she was aware again of his charm—dark and elaborate and yet somehow childlike. After a silence, and another examining look, he began, “You must find it strange …”
“Strange?”
“Not only this room, but … everything. Paris. Europe. Our old world.” He paused again for a moment, seeming to muse. “Each of us is different for every other. We are all characters in the private novels of those we know. I think of you somehow as a creature out of Paul et Virginie, or Atala—a farouche innocent child out of the paradise of the New World. The Girl of the Golden West.” Here again he showed by his smile that he was aware of her dislike for the part of Minnie.
“Or … do you know Fernand Khnopff?”
“I have one on my wall.”
“… One of those fey mysterious creatures in his paintings—half girl, half boy—whose innocence seems to conceal some secret … creatures from the other side of the world.”
Herma said nothing. He was striking a little too close. He seemed to see everything about her, to see inside her, as though she were made of glass. She turned away, pretending to examine a book on the table, in the hope that he would change the subject. In this she was successful; or perhaps with his own exquisite sensibility he was aware that he was embarrassing her. After a moment he asked in another voice, more casual, “What is it like in California?”
“Have you been to Nice?”
“Yes. Many times.”
“Well, it’s nothing like that. There are no grand hotels, no Promenade des Anglais. It’s hot and dusty. There are rows of orange groves, and towns with white wooden houses. And there are churches. They’re wooden and white too, with tall steeples.”
“I wouldn’t care for that, I like stones. Old stones. Des vieilles pierres …”
Here he seemed to fall into a reverie. His voice trailed off. When he resumed it was as though he were talking to himself.
“There is a small town called Illiers, near Chartres. When I was little I used to go there with my family in the summer, to stay with my aunt Amiot. The colored light of the windows there in the church, falling on certain old stones …”
He stopped, picked up one of the long columns of paper on the table and glanced at it, and set it down again.
Herma perceived. After a moment of silence she encouraged him, “What is your novel about?”
“How can I explain? It would be like showing you the back of a tapestry, and you would never understand the picture unless you could see it from the front.” He said nothing for a moment, and then he added, “It is very complicated.”
“I don’t read very many novels.”
“Yes. You told me once. Perhaps not very many people will want to read it. Only my friends. The NRF doesn’t want to publish it. I’ve had to pay Grasset to have some of it printed …”
Again, drifting around the room with his fingers gliding over things, he stopped at the table, hesitated, and picked up the long proof sheet sticky with fresh ink. He held it up to her, like a schoolboy showing his work, and smiled fool
ishly. Then he took it over to the bed and sat down by the lamp.
He read. “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” The voice was curiously unlike his ordinary speaking voice. It was high and scratchy, theatrical, slightly affected. It was not clear why he fell into this voice when reading—because of the great importance he attached to his work, or as a joke—out of irony.
“Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say, ‘I’m going to sleep.’ And a half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V …”
The scratchy and histrionic voice went on. He read for a long time, perhaps an hour. At one point Herma thought that she might have fallen asleep, but it was only that the voice that was telling the story was telling it from the world of sleep, so that the listener too was drawn into this transformed and transfigured, yet brilliant and detailed world of somnolence. She didn’t understand it very well. It was too hard—the sentences were too long and complex—but she understood that a voice—not the voice of Marcel but the voice of the words on the long columns of paper—was speaking seriously and precisely about itself, about its deepest and most profound experience in the dark vale of memory. The monstrous grammatical constructions were like enormous creatures that one couldn’t see all at once, only a limb here or a staring and uncanny eye there. Yet she was drawn, somehow, into the world of Combray and inhabited it, as one might inhabit the world of Fernand Khnopff.
“… a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision; that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upward so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upward …”
It was the mirror of the house on Boss Street. Elongate … monstrous funnel. A little prickly feeling seeped through her. Each of the details, the magic lantern, Golo “riding at a jerky trot,” the walk along Swann’s Way through the wheat, the Madeleine dipped in tea and melting on the tongue, happened to her, as though they had been drawn out of her own dim and forbidden memory.
She didn’t notice when he stopped. She only became aware, at a certain point, that he was no longer reading.
“It’s about Time.”
“Yes. Everything is. All novels are about Time. And everything is a novel.”
He seemed different. Perhaps it was only because he was tired. She looked at his invalid paleness, his nervous hands and his unconvincing, somehow frightened smile.
“You told me once that you were like Antonia in the Tales of Hoffmann.”
He seemed not to remember. Finally he said, “Yes, it’s because I’m not well, and because of my writing. My Art.” This with his apologetic smile. “It’s not really good for me. When I write, it gives me a fever, and that isn’t really good for me. Just as singing was not good for Antonia.” He glanced at the proofs on the table. “And yet, just like Antonia, I must.”
“And … Illiers. Do you still go there in the summer?”
“No. There is no one alive there that I know anymore. Now I go to the seaside. To Deauville or Cabourg. And I write about that too. I am writing about it now.” Putting aside the proofs, he turned to some manuscript sheets on the desk. Then he set them down again. “But perhaps this doesn’t interest you.”
“Yes, it does,” she said quickly. “It’s only that it’s—so deep. I’m not quite sure I follow it. But I like things that are deep.”
“If things are too deep, one can drown in them.”
She glanced at him. But he was smiling. It was not serious. He was only chiding her for not reading novels. The clock on the desk showed that it was after three in the morning. She got up from the sofa where she had been sitting on a heap of books.
“Please don’t leave. It is only now that I come to life.”
“I must. I have to sing again tomorrow night—that is, tonight.”
He rang, and the sullen-faced Anna appeared.
“Please go to St.-Augustin—it’s only a few steps—and get a taxi for the young lady.”
It wasn’t clear why he told Anna that it was only a few steps to St.-Augustin. Surely she must have known that. It was perhaps for her benefit—to demonstrate that, although Anna was a dreary creature, he didn’t intentionally treat her badly or put her to unnecessary discomfort. Herma could easily have walked to the square herself—more easily than Anna—since she was wide awake. But she said nothing.
“We are both nocturnal creatures,” he said. “You because your life is in the theater, and I—because it is the way I am. I can only sleep in the daytime. I have to take veronal and … other things.” He waved a limp hand at the collection of bottles in the cabinet. “They’re bad for me too. Very few things are good for me. One is the sea air.”
All this was rather disconnected. She waited for him to go on. After a moment he said, “Perhaps you would like to go to Cabourg with me. I am going next month. Alfred will drive us. He is also a chauffeur,” he explained superfluously, forgetting perhaps that it was Alfred who had driven them to the Ritz the night of the Tales of Hoffmann. “It will be perfectly proper. Anna will be along.” The mild and amused resignation of his lifted eyebrow showed what he thought of this part of the idea. “It’s charming at this time of the year. There are many diversions. Do you care for Baccarat?”
“No.”
Here he laughed outright at her directness. “Well, come anyhow. I love to be surrounded by young girls. And yet I am … not an ogre.”
So he knew that she knew.
Anna appeared to say that the taxi was below. Herma took his hand, which was moist and warm and seemed boneless. He stayed in the bedroom and didn’t show her to the door; neither did Anna, who disappeared wordlessly off into her part of the apartment. Herma went down in the lift and across the sidewalk to the taxi waiting with its door open.
Instead of telling the driver to take her to avenue Kléber, she said impulsively, “Place de l’Opéra.” The taxi went back along the route she had come by earlier in the evening: boulevard Haussmann, place St.-Augustin, rue Auber. It came out into the broad square illuminated with its ornate street lamps. Here she told the driver to stop.
The grandiose pillared facade of the Opéra, the dome with its patina of green, the caryatids with their lamps, everything was exactly the same. But now in the gray light of predawn it seemed shabby and grimy, somehow insubstantial, as though made from wood and canvas like a theatrical set, contrasted to the images that still lingered in her mind—the glowing and brilliant solidity, like the light of stained-glass windows playing on stone—of the world of Combray.
7.
Marcel meant the invitation seriously; there was nothing frivolous about him, in spite of his detached and faintly ironic way of looking at things, and he always meant what he said. But in the end it was Fred and not Herma who went with him to Cabourg in May. It was inevitable that Fred and Marcel should meet—Fred in fact called at boulevard Haussmann to deliver a pair of complimentary tickets to the Traviata at the Châtelet and found the door opened by the rumpled Oriental Sorcerer himself, who explained that he was “desolated” that he couldn’t accept the tickets on account of his health, but was “enchanted” that Fred had had the “exquisite courtesy” of thinking of him. It was inevitable too that Marcel, with his interest in everything that was different from himself, should be attracted to Fred, with his American frankness and o
ffhand manner, his slender and yet tough and assured good looks—even the strain of brash adolescent recklessness, the bad-boy or voyou quality that made him so attractive to women of a certain age.
In the month that followed Fred came now and then to boulevard Haussmann, although it was difficult because of their badly matched schedules. There was almost no time of the day when they were both awake and free, and if Fred went there late at night after one of Herma’s performances he got no sleep at all, and both he and Herma were cross the next day. The best time was in the late afternoon, when Marcel woke up and rang for tea, and had an hour or two before he ate his bizarre supper of buttered noodles, or an omelette with rusks, and then banished his visitor to set to work on the constantly growing mountain of manuscript on the desk.
And naturally Fred, like everyone else, was attracted to Marcel—his elaborate courtesy, his dark oriental beauty, his sensitive and necromantic intelligence that saw instantly through to one’s secrets and yet disarmed the victim with its admixture of compassion and intimacy. Beyond this, he was interested in him because he was a celebrity and there was never any harm in knowing a celebrity, and also because he was very odd, and odd people were always interesting.
Yet this was too crass a way to put it. No one was immune to Marcel’s charms, no one who knew him—although he had enemies and had even once—incredible as it seemed—fought a duel at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne—and he, Fred, was as charmed as the others. It was a pleasure to be in the presence of Marcel, under whatever circumstances; even if his cork-lined room smelled like an Algerian souk—or if he often chose to make strange, sly, and elaborately courteous remarks that seemed to reflect on individuals present—or if the three-way relations among Marcel, Agostinelli, and Anna were too dark and perilous a subject to be thought about very much. Even so implacable an enemy as Liane de Pougy had to concede Marcel’s charm. That was why she disliked him so much; because of the power he exerted over Reynaldo, even now years after their intimacy had turned into an ordinary friendship between two men. “Monsieur Marcel has enemies, but they are wrong, and even they know it,” as Agostinelli put it.
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