As for my mother, perhaps the Ambassador had not the type of mind towards which she felt herself most attracted. And it must be said that his conversation furnished so exhaustive a glossary of the superannuated forms of speech peculiar to a certain profession, class and period—a period which, for that profession and that class, might be said not to have altogether passed away—that I sometimes regret not having kept a literal record simply of the things that I heard him say. I should thus have obtained an effect of old-fashioned usage by the same process and at as little expense as that actor at the Palais-Royal who, when asked where on earth he managed to find his astounding hats, answered, “I do not find my hats. I keep them.” In a word, I suppose that my mother considered M. de Norpois a trifle “out-of-date,” which was by no means a fault in her eyes, so far as manners were concerned, but attracted her less in the realm, not, in this instance, of ideas—for those of M. de Norpois were extremely modern—but of idiom. She felt, however, that she was paying a delicate compliment to her husband when she spoke admiringly of the diplomat who had shown so remarkable a predilection for him. By reinforcing in my father’s mind the good opinion that he already had of M. de Norpois, and so inducing him to form a good opinion of himself also, she knew that she was carrying out that wifely duty which consisted in making life pleasant and comfortable for her husband, just as when she saw to it that his dinner was perfectly cooked and served in silence. And as she was incapable of deceiving my father, she compelled herself to admire the Ambassador in order to be able to praise him with sincerity. In any event she could naturally appreciate his air of kindliness, his somewhat antiquated courtesy (so ceremonious that when, as he was walking along the street, his tall figure rigidly erect, he caught sight of my mother driving past, before raising his hat to her he would fling away the cigar that he had just lighted), his conversation, so elaborately circumspect, in which he referred as seldom as possible to himself and always considered what might interest the person to whom he was speaking, and his promptness in answering a letter, which was so astonishing that whenever my father, just after posting one himself to M. de Norpois, saw his handwriting on an envelope, his first impulse was always one of annoyance that their letters must unfortunately have crossed: it was as though he enjoyed at the post office the special and luxurious privilege of supplementary deliveries and collections at all hours of the day and night. My mother marvelled at his being so punctilious although so busy, so friendly although so much in demand, never realising that “although,” with such people, is invariably an unrecognised “because,” and that (just as old men are always wonderful for their age, and kings extraordinarily simple, and country cousins astonishingly well-informed) it was the same system of habits that enabled M. de Norpois to meet so many social demands and to be so methodical in answering letters, to go everywhere and to be so friendly when he came to us. Moreover she made the mistake which everyone makes who is unduly modest; she rated everything that concerned herself below, and consequently outside, the range of other people’s duties and engagements. The letter which it seemed to her so meritorious in my father’s friend to have written us promptly, since in the course of the day he must have had so many letters to write, she excepted from that great number of letters of which it was only one; in the same way she did not consider that dining with us was, for M. de Norpois, merely one of the innumerable activities of his social life: she never guessed that the Ambassador had trained himself, long ago, to look upon dining-out as part of his diplomatic functions, and to display, at table, an inveterate charm which it would have been too much to have expected him specially to discard when he came to dine with us.
The evening on which M. de Norpois first appeared at our table, in a year when I still went to play in the Champs-Elysées, has remained fixed in my memory because the afternoon of the same day was that upon which I at last went to a matinée to see Berma in Phèdre, and also because in talking to M. de Norpois I realised suddenly, and in a new and different way, how completely the feelings aroused in me by all that concerned Gilberte Swann and her parents differed from those which the same family inspired in everyone else.
It was no doubt the dejection into which I was plunged by the approach of the New Year holidays during which, as she herself had informed me, I was to see nothing of Gilberte, that prompted my mother to suggest one day, in the hope of distracting my mind: “If you’re still longing to see Berma, I think your father might perhaps allow you to go; your grandmother can take you.”
But it was because M. de Norpois had told him that he ought to let me see Berma, that it was an experience for a young man to remember in later life, that my father, who had hitherto been so resolutely opposed to my going and wasting my time, with the added risk of my falling ill again, on what he used to shock my grandmother by calling “futilities,” was now not far from regarding this outing recommended by the Ambassador as vaguely forming part of a sum of precious formulae for success in a brilliant career. My grandmother, who, in renouncing on my behalf the benefit which, according to her, I should have derived from hearing Berma, had made a considerable sacrifice in the interests of my health, was surprised to find that this last had become of no account at a mere word from M. de Norpois. Reposing the unconquerable hopes of her rationalist spirit in the strict course of fresh air and early hours which had been prescribed for me, she now deplored as something disastrous the infringement of these rules that I was about to commit, and in anguished tones exclaimed “How frivolous you are!” to my father, who replied angrily “What! So now it’s you who don’t want him to go! It’s really a bit much, after your telling us all day and every day that it would be so good for him.”
M. de Norpois had also brought about a change in my father’s plans in a matter of far greater importance to myself. My father had always wanted me to be a diplomat, and I could not endure the thought that, even if I were to remain for some years attached to the Ministry, I might run the risk of being sent later on as ambassador to capitals in which there would be no Gilberte. I should have preferred to return to the literary projects which I had formerly planned and abandoned in the course of my wanderings along the Guermantes way. But my father had steadily opposed my devoting myself to literature, which he regarded as vastly inferior to diplomacy, refusing even to dignify it with the title of career, until the day when M. de Norpois, who had little love for the more recent generations of diplomatic officials, assured him that it was quite possible, as a writer, to attract as much attention, to receive as much consideration, to exercise as much influence as in the ambassadorial world, and at the same time to preserve more independence.
“Well, well, I should never have believed it—old Norpois doesn’t at all disapprove of the idea of your taking up writing,” my father had reported. And as he had a certain amount of influence himself, he imagined that there was nothing that could not be arranged, no problem for which a happy solution might not be found in the conversation of people who counted. “I shall bring him back to dinner, one of these days, from the Commission. You must talk to him a bit, so that he can get some idea of your calibre. Write something good that you can show him; he’s a great friend of the editor of the Deux-Mondes; he’ll get you in there; he’ll fix it all, the cunning old fox; and, upon my soul, he seems to think that diplomacy, nowadays . . . !”
My happiness at the prospect of not being separated from Gilberte made me desirous, but not capable, of writing something good which could be shown to M. de Norpois. After a few laboured pages, the tedium of it made the pen drop from my fingers, and I wept with rage at the thought that I should never have any talent, that I was not gifted, that I could not even take advantage of the chance that M. de Norpois’s coming visit offered me of spending the rest of my life in Paris. The recollection that I was to be taken to see Berma alone distracted me from my grief. But just as I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence, so I should not have cared to see the great actress except in one of th
ose classic parts in which Swann had told me that she touched the sublime. For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have qualms lest our soul imbibe inferior impressions which might lead us to form a false estimate of the value of Beauty. Berma in Andromaque, in Les Caprices de Marianne, in Phèdre, was one of those famous spectacles which my imagination had long desired. I should enjoy the same rapture as on the day when a gondola would deposit me at the foot of the Titian of the Frari or the Carpaccios of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni, were I ever to hear Berma recite the lines beginning,
They say a prompt departure takes you from us,
Prince . . .
I was familiar with them from the simple reproduction in black and white which was given of them upon the printed page; but my heart beat furiously at the thought—as of the realisation of a long-planned voyage—that I should see them at length bathed and brought to life in the atmosphere and sunshine of the golden voice. A Carpaccio in Venice, Berma in Phèdre, masterpieces of pictorial or dramatic art which the glamour, the dignity attaching to them made so vividly alive for me, that is to say so indivisible, that if I had been to see Carpaccios in one of the galleries of the Louvre, or Berma in some piece of which I had never heard, I should not have experienced the same delicious amazement at finding myself at last, with wide-open eyes, before the unique and inconceivable object of so many thousand dreams. Then, expecting as I did from Berma’s playing the revelation of certain aspects of nobility and tragic grief, it seemed to me that whatever greatness, whatever truth there might be in her playing must be enhanced if the actress superimposed it upon a work of real value, instead of what would, after all, be but embroidering a pattern of truth and beauty upon a commonplace and vulgar web.
Finally, if I went to see Berma in a new play, it would not be easy for me to assess her art and her diction, since I should be unable to discriminate between a text which was not already familiar to me and what she added to it by her vocal inflexions and gestures, an addition which would seem to me to be an integral part of it; whereas the old plays, the classics which I knew by heart, presented themselves to me as vast and empty walls, reserved and made ready for my inspection, on which I should be able to appreciate without restriction the devices by which Berma would cover them, as with frescoes, with the perpetually fresh discoveries of her inspiration. Unfortunately, for some years now, since she had abandoned the serious stage to throw in her lot with a commercial theatre where she was the star, she had ceased to appear in classic parts, and in vain did I scan the hoardings, they never advertised any but the newest pieces, written specially for her by authors in fashion at the moment. When, one morning, searching through the column of theatre advertisements to find the afternoon performances for the week of the New Year holidays, I saw there for the first time—at the foot of the bill, after some probably insignificant curtain-raiser, whose title was opaque to me because it contained all the particulars of a plot I did not know—two acts of Phèdre with Mme Berma, and, on the following afternoons, Le Demi-Monde and Les Caprices de Marianne, names which, like that of Phèdre, were for me transparent, filled with light only, so familiar were those works to me, illuminated to their very depths by the revealing smile of art. They seemed to me to invest with a fresh nobility Mme Berma herself when I read in the newspapers, after the programme of these performances, that it was she who had decided to show herself once more to the public in some of her early creations. She was conscious, then, that certain roles have an interest which survives the novelty of their first production or the success of a revival; she regarded them, when interpreted by herself, as museum pieces which it might be instructive to set once more before the eyes of the generation which had admired her in them long ago, or of the one which had never yet seen her in them. In thus advertising, in the middle of a column of plays intended only to while away an evening, this Phèdre, whose title was no bigger than any of the rest, nor set in different type, she added to it, as it were, the unspoken comment of a hostess who, on introducing you to her other guests before going in to dinner, casually mentions amid the string of names which are the names of guests and nothing more, and without any change of tone:—“M. Anatole France.”
The doctor who was attending me—the same who had forbidden me to travel—advised my parents not to let me go to the theatre; I should only be ill again afterwards, perhaps for weeks, and in the long run derive more pain than pleasure from the experience. The fear of this might have availed to stop me, if what I had anticipated from such a spectacle had been only a pleasure which a subsequent pain could offset and annul. But what I demanded from this performance—as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from pleasure: verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me again by any trivial incident—even though it were to cause me bodily suffering—of my otiose existence. At most, the pleasure which I might experience during the performance appeared to me as the perhaps necessary form of the perception of these truths; and I hoped only that the predicted ailments would not begin until the play was finished, so that this pleasuse should not be in any way compromised or spoiled. I implored my parents, who, after the doctor’s visit, were no longer inclined to let me go to Phèdre. I recited to myself all day long the speech beginning,
They say a prompt departure takes you from us . . .
trying out every inflexion and intonation that could be put into it, the better to appreciate the unexpected way which Berma would have found of uttering the lines. Concealed, like the Holy of Holies, beneath the veil that screened her from my gaze and behind which I invested her from one moment to the next with a fresh aspect, according to whichever of the words of Bergotte (in the booklet that Gilberte had found for me) came to my mind—“plastic nobility,” “Christian hair shirt” or “Jansenist pallor,” “Princess of Troezen and of Cleves,” “Mycenean drama,” “Delphic symbol,” “solar myth”—the goddess of beauty whom Berma’s acting was to reveal to me was enthroned, night and day, upon an altar perpetually lit, in the sanctuary of my mind—on whose behalf my stern and fickle parents were to decide whether or not it was to enshrine, and for all time, the perfections of the Deity unveiled in that same spot where her invisible form now reigned. And with my eyes fastened on that inconceivable image, I strove from morning to night to overcome the barriers which my family were putting in my way. But when these had at last fallen, when my mother—although this matinée was actually to coincide with the meeting of the Commission from which my father had promised to bring M. de Norpois home to dinner—had said to me, “Very well, we don’t want to make you unhappy—if you think you will enjoy it so very much, you must go,” when this visit to the theatre, hitherto forbidden and unattainable, depended now on myself alone, then for the first time, being no longer troubled by the wish that it might cease to be impossible, I wondered whether it was desirable, whether there were not other reasons than my parents’ prohibition which should have made me abandon it. In the first place, whereas I had hated them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me also with a pain through which the purpose of life now appeared to me as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and life itself seemed good or evil only in so far as my parents were happy or sad. “I would rather not go, if it distresses you,” I told my mother, who, on the contrary, strove hard to expel from my mind any lurking fear that she might regret my going, since that, she said, would spoil the pleasure which I should otherwise derive from Phèdre and in consideration of which she and my father had reversed their earlier decision. But then this sort of obligation to find pleasure in the performance seemed to me very burdensome. Besides, if I returned home ill, should I be well again in time to be able to go to the Champs-Elysées as soon as the holidays were over and Gilberte return
ed? Against all these arguments I set, in order to decide which course I should take, the idea, invisible there behind its veil, of Berma’s perfection. I placed on one side of the scales “Making Mamma unhappy,” “risking not being able to go to the Champs-Elysées,” and on the other, “Jansenist pallor,” “solar myth,” until the words themselves grew dark and clouded in my mind’s vision, ceased to say anything to me, lost all their force; and gradually my hesitations became so painful that if I had now opted for the theatre it would have been only in order to bring them to an end and he delivered from them once and for all. It would have been to fix a term to my sufferings, and no longer in the expectation of an intellectual benediction, yielding to the attractions of perfection, that I would have allowed myself to be led, not now to the Wise Goddess, but to the stern, implacable Divinity, faceless and unnamed, who had been surreptitiously substituted for her behind her veil. But suddenly everything was altered. My desire to go and see Berma received a fresh stimulus which enabled me to await the coming of the matinée with impatience and with joy. Having gone to take up my daily station, as excruciating, of late, as that of a stylite, in front of the column on which the playbills were displayed, I had seen there, still moist and wrinkled, the complete bill of Phèdre, which had just been pasted up for the first time (and on which, I must confess, the rest of the cast furnished no additional attraction which could help me to decide). But it gave to one of the goals between which my indecision wavered a form at once more concrete and—inasmuch as the bill bore the date not of the day on which I was reading it but that on which the performance would take place, and the very hour at which the curtain would rise—almost imminent, already well on the way to its realisation, so that I jumped for joy before the column at the thought that on that day, and at that hour precisely, I should be sitting there in my seat, ready to hear the voice of Berma; and for fear lest my parents might not now be in time to secure two good seats for my grandmother and myself, I raced back to the house, whipped on by the magic words which had now taken the place in my mind of “Jansenist pallor” and “solar myth”: “Ladies will not be admitted to the stalls in hats. The doors will be closed at two o’clock.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II Page 2