Alas! that first matinée was to prove a bitter disappointment. My father offered to drop my grandmother and me at the theatre, on his way to the Commission. Before leaving the house he said to my mother: “Try and have a good dinner for us tonight; you remember I’m bringing de Norpois back with me.” My mother had not forgotten. And ever since the day before, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of cooking at which she was so gifted, stimulated, moreover, by the prospect of a new guest, and knowing that she would have to compose, by methods known to her alone, a dish of boeuf à la gelée, had been living in the effervescence of creation; since she attached the utmost importance to the intrinsic quality of the materials which were to enter into the fabric of her work, she had gone herself to the Halles to procure the best cuts of rump-steak, shin of beef, calves’-feet, just as Michelangelo spent eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Julius II. Françoise expended on these comings and goings so much ardour that Mamma, at the sight of her flaming cheeks, was alarmed lest our old servant should fall ill from overwork, like the sculptor of the Tombs of the Medici in the quarries of Pietrasanta. And overnight Françoise had sent to be cooked in the baker’s oven protected with breadcrumbs, like a block of pink marble packed in sawdust, what she called a “Nev’-York ham.” Believing the language to be less rich in words than it is, and her own ears untrustworthy, the first time she had heard someone mention York ham she had thought, no doubt—feeling it to be hardly conceivable that the dictionary could be so prodigal as to include at once a “York” and a “New York”—that she had misheard, and that the ham was really called by the name already familiar to her. And so, ever since, the word York was preceded in her ears, or before her eyes when she read it in an advertisement, by the affix “New” which she pronounced “Nev’.” And it was with the utmost conviction that she would say to her kitchen-maid: “Go and get me some ham from Olida’s. Madame told me especially that it must be Nev’-York.”
On that particular day, if Françoise was consumed by the burning certainty of creative genius, my lot was the cruel anxiety of the seeker after truth. No doubt, so long as I had not yet heard Berma speak, I still felt some pleasure. I felt it in the little square that lay in front of the theatre, in which, in two hours’ time, the bare boughs of the chestnut-trees would gleam with a metallic lustre as the lighted gas-lamps showed up every detail of their structure; and before the ticket attendants, whose selection, advancement and ultimate fate depended upon the great artist—for she alone held power in this administration at the head of which ephemeral and purely nominal managers followed one after the other in an obscure succession—who took our tickets without even glancing at us, so preoccupied were they in seeing that all Mme Berma’s instructions had been duly transmitted to the new members of the staff, that it was clearly understood that the hired applause must never sound for her, that the windows must all be kept open so long as she was not on the stage and every door closed tight the moment she appeared, that a bowl of hot water must be concealed somewhere close to her to make the dust settle. And, indeed, at any moment now her carriage, drawn by a pair of horses with flowing manes, would be stopping outside the theatre, she would alight from it muffled in furs, and, crossly acknowledging people’s salutes, would send one of her attendants to find out whether a stage box had been kept for her friends, what the temperature was “in front,” who were in the other boxes, how the programme sellers were turned out; theatre and audience being to her no more than a second, outer cloak which she would put on, and the medium, the more or less good conductor, through which her talent would have to pass. I was happy, too, in the theatre itself; since I had made the discovery that—contrary to the notion so long entertained by my childish imagination—there was but one stage for everybody, I had supposed that I should be prevented from seeing it properly by the presence of the other spectators, as one is when in the thick of a crowd; now I registered the fact that, on the contrary, thanks to an arrangement which is, as it were, symbolical of all spectatorship, everyone feels himself to be the centre of the theatre; which explained to me why, when Françoise had been sent once to see some melodrama from the top gallery, she had assured us on her return that her seat had been the best in the house, and that instead of finding herself too far from the stage she had been positively frightened by the mysterious and living proximity of the curtain. My pleasure increased further when I began to distinguish behind this lowered curtain such obscure noises as one hears through the shell of an egg before the chicken emerges, sounds which presently grew louder and suddenly, from that world which, impenetrable to our eyes, yet scrutinised us with its own, addressed themselves indubitably to us in the imperious form of three consecutive thumps as thrilling as any signals from the planet Mars. And—once this curtain had risen—when on the stage a writing-table and a fireplace, in no way out of the ordinary, had indicated that the persons who were about to enter would be, not actors come to recite as I had once seen some of them do at an evening party, but real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me, my pleasure still endured. It was broken by a momentary uneasiness: just as I was pricking up my ears in readiness before the piece began, two men appeared on the stage obviously furious with one another since they were talking so loud that in this auditorium where there were at least a thousand people one could hear every word, whereas in quite a small café one is obliged to ask the waiter what two individuals who appear to be quarrelling are saying; but at that moment, while I sat astonished to find that the audience was listening to them without protest, submerged as it was in a unanimous silence upon which presently a little wave of laughter broke here and there, that these insolent fellows were the actors, and that the short piece known as “the curtain-raiser” had now begun. It was followed by an interval so long that the audience, having returned to their seats, grew impatient and began to stamp their feet. I was terrified at this; for just as in the report of a criminal trial, when I read that some noble-minded person was coming, in defiance of his own interests, to testify on behalf of an innocent man, I was always afraid that they would not be nice enough to him, would not show enough gratitude, would not recompense him lavishly, and that he, in disgust, would then range himself on the side of injustice, so now, assimilating genius with virtue, I was afraid lest Berma, vexed by the bad behaviour of so ill-bred an audience—in which, on the contrary, I should have liked her to recognise with gratification a few celebrities to whose judgment she would be bound to attach importance—should express her displeasure and disdain by acting badly. And I looked round imploringly at these stamping brutes, who were about to shatter, in their insensate rage, the rare and fragile impression which I had come to seek. The last moments of my pleasure were during the opening scenes of the Phèdre. The heroine herself does not appear in these first scenes of the second act; and yet, as soon as the curtain rose, and another curtain, of red velvet this time, was drawn aside (a curtain which was used to halve the depth of the stage in all the plays in which the star appeared), an actress entered from the back who had the face and voice which, I had been told, were those of Berma. The cast must therefore have been changed; all the trouble that I had taken in studying the part of the wife of Theseus was wasted. But a second actress now responded to the first. I must have been mistaken in supposing that the first was Berma, for the second resembled her even more closely and, more than the other, had her diction. Both of them, moreover, embellished their roles with noble gestures—which I could clearly distinguish, and could appreciate in their relation to the text, while they raised and let fall the folds of their beautiful robes—and also with skilful changes of tone, now passionate, now ironical, which made me understand the significance of lines that I had read to myself at home without paying sufficient attention to what they really meant. But all of a sudden, in the cleft of the red curtain that veiled her sanctuary, as in a frame
, a woman appeared, and instantly, from the fear that seized me, far more anxious than Berma’s own fear could be, lest someone should upset her by opening a window, or drown one of her lines by rustling a programme, or annoy her by applauding the others and by not applauding her enough, from the way in which, from that moment, more absolutely than Berma herself, I considered theatre, audience, play and my own body only as an acoustic medium of no importance save in the degree to which it was favourable to the inflexions of that voice, I realised that the two actresses whom I had been admiring for some minutes bore not the least resemblance to her whom I had come to hear. But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased; in vain did I strain towards Berma eyes, ears, mind, so as not to let one morsel escape me of the reasons which she would give me for admiring her, I did not succeed in gleaning a single one. I could not even, as I could with her companions, distinguish in her diction and in her playing intelligent modulations or beautiful gestures. I listened to her as though I were reading Phèdre, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma’s talent had added anything at all to them. I could have wished—in order to be able to explore them fully, to try to discover what it was in them that was beautiful—to arrest, to immobilise for a time before my senses every inflexion of the artist’s voice, every expression of her features; at least I did attempt, by dint of mental agility, by having, before a line came, my attention ready and tuned to catch it, not to waste upon preparations any morsel of the precious time that each word, each gesture occupied, and, thanks to the intensity of my observation, to contrive to penetrate as far into them as if I had had whole hours to spend upon them by myself. But how short their duration was! Scarcely had a sound been received by my ear than it was displaced there by another. In one scene, where Berma stands motionless for a moment, her arm raised to the level of her face, bathed, by some artifice of lighting, in a greenish glow, before a back-cloth painted to represent the sea, the whole house broke out in applause; but already the actress had moved, and the tableau that I should have liked to study existed no longer. I told my grandmother that I could not see very well, and she handed me her glasses. But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand. I thought that it was no longer Berma but her image that I was seeing in the magnifying lenses. I put the glasses down. But perhaps the image that my eye received of her, diminished by distance, was no more exact; which of the two Bermas was the real one? As for her declaration to Hippolyte, I had greatly counted on that, since, to judge by the ingenious significance which her companions were disclosing to me every moment in less beautiful passages, she would certainly render it with modulations more surprising than any which, when reading the play at home, I had contrived to imagine; but she did not attain even to the heights which Oenone or Aricie would naturally have reached, she planed down into a uniform chant the whole of a speech in which there were mingled together contrasts so striking that the least intelligent of actresses, even the pupils of an academy, could not have missed their effect; besides which, she delivered it so rapidly that it was only when she had come to the last line that my mind became aware of the deliberate monotony which she had imposed on it throughout.
Then at last I felt my first impulse of admiration, which was provoked by the frenzied applause of the audience. I mingled my own with theirs, endeavouring to prolong it so that Berma, in her gratitude, should surpass herself, and I be certain of having heard her on one of her great days. A curious thing, by the way, was that the moment when this storm of enthusiasm broke loose was, as I afterwards learned, that in which Berma has one of her finest inspirations. It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit all around them a sort of radiation to which the crowd is sensitive. Thus it is that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting reports from which an educated man can derive little enlightenment stimulate in the crowd an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognises the popular perception of that “aura” which surrounds momentous happenings and which may be visible hundreds of miles away. One learns of a victory either after the event, when the war is over, or at once, from the hilarious joy of one’s hall porter. One discovers the touch of genius in Berma’s acting either a week after one has heard her, from a review, or else on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls. But this immediate recognition by the crowd being mingled with a hundred others, all erroneous, the applause came most often at wrong moments, apart from the fact that it was mechanically produced by the effect of the applause that had gone before, just as in a storm, once the sea is sufficiently disturbed, it will continue to swell even after the wind has begun to subside. No matter; the more I applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act. “I say,” a fairly ordinary-looking woman sitting next to me was saying, “she fairly gives it you, she does; you’d think she’d do herself an injury, the way she runs about. I call that acting, don’t you?” And happy to find these reasons for Berma’s superiority, though not without a suspicion that they no more accounted for it than a peasant’s gawping exclamations—“That’s a good bit of work. It’s all gold, look! Fine, ain’t it?”—would for that of the Gioconda or Benvenuto’s Perseus, I greedily imbibed the rough wine of this popular enthusiasm. Nevertheless, when the curtain had fallen for the last time, I was disappointed that the pleasure for which I had so longed had not been greater, but at the same time I felt the need to prolong it, not to relinquish for ever, by leaving the auditorium, this strange life of the theatre which for a few hours had been mine, and from which I should have torn myself away as though I were being dragged into exile by going straight home, had I not hoped there to learn a great deal more about Berma from her admirer M. de Norpois, to whom I was indebted already for having been permitted to go to Phèdre.
I was introduced to him before dinner by my father, who summoned me into his study for the purpose. As I entered, the Ambassador rose, held out his hand, bowed his tall figure and fixed his blue eyes attentively on my face. As the foreign visitors who used to be presented to him, in the days when he still represented France abroad, were all more or less (even the famous singers) persons of note, with regard to whom he therefore knew that he would be able to say later on, when he heard their names mentioned in Paris or in Petersburg, that he remembered perfectly the evening he had spent with them in Munich or Sofia, he had formed the habit of impressing upon them, by his affability, the pleasure he felt in making their acquaintance; but in addition to this, being convinced that in the life of foreign capitals, in contact at once with all the interesting personalities that passed through them and with the manners and customs of the native populations, one acquired a deeper insight than could be gleaned from books into the history, the geography, the traditions of the different nations, and into the intellectual trends of Europe, he would exercise upon each newcomer his keen power of observation, so as to decide at once with what manner of man he had to deal. It was some time since the Government had entrusted him with a post abroad, but as soon as anyone was introduced to him, his eyes, as though they had not yet received notification of their master’s retirement, began their fruitful observation, while by his whole attitude he endeavoured to convey that the stranger’s name was not unknown to him. And so, while speaking to me kindly and with the air of self-importance of a man who is conscious of the vastness of his experience, he never ceased to examine me with a sagacious curiosity for his own profit, as though I had been some exotic custom, some historic and instructive monument or some star on tour. And in this way he gave proof, in his attitude towards me, at once of the majestic benevolence of the sage Mentor and of the zealous curiosity of the young Anacharsis.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II Page 3