“Yes, that was it. I noticed it at the time; it was very shrewd. You can see that he has a profound experience of life.”
“It’s extraordinary that he should have dined with the Swanns, and that he seems to have found quite re spectable people there, government officials. How on earth can Mme Swann have managed to get hold of them?”
“Did you notice the malicious way he said: ‘It is a house which is especially attractive to gentlemen!’?”
And each of them attempted to reproduce the manner in which M. de Norpois had uttered these words, as they might have attempted to capture some intonation of Bressant’s voice or of Thiron’s in L’Aventurière or in Le Gendre de M. Poirier. But of all his sayings there was none so keenly relished as one was by Françoise, who, years afterwards, could not “keep a straight face” if we reminded her that she had been described by the Ambassador as “a first-rate chef,” a compliment which my mother had gone in person to transmit to her, like a War Minister passing on the congratulations of a visiting sovereign after reviewing the troops. I had, as it happened, preceded my mother to the kitchen. For I had extorted from Françoise, who though a pacifist was cruel, a promise that she would cause no undue suffering to the rabbit which she had to kill, and I had had no report yet of its death. Françoise assured me that it had passed away as peacefully as could be desired, and very swiftly. “I’ve never seen a beast like it; it died without saying a blessed word; you would have thought it was dumb.” Being but little versed in the language of beasts, I suggested that rabbits perhaps did not squeal like chickens. “Just wait till you see,” said Françoise, filled with contempt for my ignorance, “if rabbits don’t squeal every bit as much as chickens. Why, their voices are even louder.”
Françoise received the compliments of M. de Norpois with the proud simplicity, the joyful and (if only momentarily) intelligent expression of an artist when someone speaks to him of his art. My mother had sent her when she first came to us to several of the big restaurants to see how the cooking there was done. I had the same pleasure, that evening, in hearing her dismiss the most famous of them as mere cookshops, that I had had long ago when I learned with regard to theatrical artists that the hierarchy of their merits did not at all correspond to that of their reputations. “The Ambassador,” my mother told her, “assured me that he knows nowhere where one can get cold beef and soufflés as good as yours.” Françoise, with an air of modesty and of paying just homage to the truth, agreed, but seemed not at all impressed by the title “Ambassador”; she said of M. de Norpois, with the friendliness due to a man who had taken her for a chef: “He’s a good old soul, like me.” She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he arrived, but knowing that Mamma hated people lurking behind doors and at windows, and thinking that she would get to know from the other servants or from the porter that she had been keeping watch (for Françoise saw everywhere nothing but “jealousies” and “tale-bearings,” which played the same baleful and perennial role in her imagination as, for certain other people, the intrigues of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had contented herself with a peep from the kitchen window, “so as not to have words with Madame,” and from her momentary glimpses of M. de Norpois had “thought it was Monsieur Legrandin,” because of what she called his “agelity” and in spite of their having not a single point in common.
“Well then,” inquired my mother, “and how do you explain that nobody else can make an aspic as well as you—when you choose?” “I really couldn’t say how that becomes about,” replied Françoise, who had established no very clear line of demarcation between the verb “to come,” in certain of its meanings, and the verb “to become.” She was speaking the truth, moreover, if only in part, being scarcely more capable—or desirous—of revealing the mystery which ensured the superiority of her aspics or her creams than a well-dressed woman the secrets of her toilettes or a great singer those of her voice. Their explanations tell us little; it was the same with the recipes of our cook. “They do it in too much of a hurry,” she went on, alluding to the great restaurants, “and then it’s not all done together. You want the beef to become like a sponge, then it will drink up all the juice to the last drop. Still, there was one of those cafés where I thought they did know a little bit about cooking. I don’t say it was altogether my aspic, but it was very nicely done, and the soufflés had plenty of cream.”
“Do you mean Henry’s?” asked my father (who had now joined us), for he greatly enjoyed that restaurant in the Place Gaillon where he went regularly to regimental dinners. “Oh, dear no!” said Françoise with a mildness which cloaked a profound contempt. “I meant a little restaurant. At that Henry’s it’s all very good, sure enough, but it’s not a restaurant, it’s more like a—soup-kitchen.” “Weber’s, then?” “Oh, no, Monsieur, I meant a good restaurant. Weber’s, that’s in the Rue Royale; that’s not a restaurant, it’s a brasserie. I don’t know that the food they give you there is even served. I think they don’t even have any table-cloths; they just shove it down in front of you like that, with a take it or leave it.” “Ciro’s?” Françoise smiled. “Oh! there I should say the main dishes are ladies of the world.” (Monde meant for Françoise the demi-monde.) “Lord! they need them to fetch the boys in.”
We could see that, with all her air of simplicity, Françoise was for the celebrities of her profession a more ferocious “colleague” than the most jealous, the most self-infatuated of actresses. We felt, all the same, that she had a proper feeling for her art and a respect for tradition, for she added: “No, I mean a restaurant where it looked like they kept a very good little family table. It’s a place of some consequence, too. Plenty of custom there. Oh, they raked in the coppers, there, all right.” (Françoise, being thrifty, reckoned in coppers, where your plunger would reckon in gold.) “Madame knows the place well enough, down there to the right along the main boulevards, a little way back.” The restaurant of which she spoke with this blend of pride and good-humoured tolerance was, it turned out, the Café Anglais.
When New Year’s Day came, I first of all paid a round of family visits with Mamma who, so as not to tire me, had planned them beforehand (with the aid of an itinerary drawn up by my father) according to district rather than degree of kinship. But no sooner had we entered the drawing-room of the distant cousin whose claim to being visited first was that her house was at no distance from ours, than my mother was horrified to see standing there, his present of marrons glacés or déguisés in his hand, the bosom friend of the most sensitive of all my uncles, to whom he would at once go and report that we had not begun our round with him. And this uncle would certainly be hurt; he would have thought it quite natural that we should go from the Madeleine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he lived, before stopping at Saint-Augustin, on our way to the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine.
Our visits ended (my grandmother had dispensed us from the duty of calling on her, since we were to dine there that evening), I ran all the way to the Champs-Elysées to give to our own special stall-keeper, with instructions to hand it over to the person who came to her several times a week from the Swanns to buy gingerbread, the letter which, on the day when my beloved had caused me so much pain, I had decided to send her at the New Year, and in which I told her that our old friendship was vanishing with the old year, that I would now forget my grievances and disappointments, and that, from this first day of January, it was a new friendship that we were going to build, so solid that nothing could destroy it, so wonderful that I hoped Gilberte would go out of her way to preserve it in all its beauty and to warn me in time, as I promised to warn her, should either of us detect the least sign of a peril that might endanger it.
On the way home Françoise made me stop at the corner of the Rue Royale, before an open-air stall from which she selected for her own stock of presents photographs of Pius IX and Raspail, while for myself I purchased one of Berma. The wholesale admiration which that artist excited gave an air of slight impoverishment to this one face that she had t
o respond with, immutable and precarious like the garments of people who have none “spare,” this face on which she must continually expose to view only the tiny dimple upon her upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, and a few other physical characteristics, always the same, which, after all, were at the mercy of a burn or a blow. This face, moreover, would not in itself have seemed to me beautiful, but it gave me the idea and consequently the desire to kiss it, by reason of all the kisses that it must have sustained and for which, from its page in the album, it seemed still to be appealing with that coquettishly tender gaze, that artfully ingenuous smile. For Berma must indeed have felt for many young men those desires which she confessed under cover of the character of Phèdre, desires which everything, even the glamour of her name which enhanced her beauty and prolonged her youth, must make it so easy for her to appease. Night was falling; I stopped before a column of playbills, on which was posted the performance in which she was to appear on January 1. A moist and gentle breeze was blowing. It was a weather with which I was familiar; I suddenly had a feeling and a presentiment that New Year’s Day was not a day different from the rest, that it was not the first day of a new world in which I might, by a chance that was still intact, have made Gilberte’s acquaintance anew as at the time of the Creation, as though the past did not yet exist, as though, together with the lessons I could have drawn from them for my future guidance, the disappointments which she had sometimes brought me had been obliterated; a new world in which nothing should subsist from the old—save one thing, my desire that Gilberte should love me. I realised that if my heart hoped for such a regeneration all around it of a universe that had not satisfied it before, it was because it, my heart, had not altered, and I told myself that there was no reason to suppose that Gilberte’s had altered either; I felt that this new friendship was the same, just as there is no boundary ditch between their fore-runners and those new years which our desire, without being able to reach and so to modify them, invests, unknown to themselves, with a different name. For all that I might dedicate this new year to Gilberte, and, as one superimposes a religion on the blind laws of nature, endeavour to stamp New Year’s Day with the particular image that I had formed of it, it was in vain. I felt that it was not aware that people called it New Year’s Day, that it was passing in a wintry dusk in a manner that was not new to me: in the gentle breeze that blew around the column of playbills, I had recognised, had sensed the reappearance of, the eternal common substance, the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the old days and years.
I returned home. I had just spent the New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte. I was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.
When I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged on this festive evening, kept me awake. I thought of all the people who would end the night in pleasure, of the lover, the troop of debauchees perhaps, who would be going to meet Berma at the stage-door after the performance that I had seen announced for this evening. I was not even able, to calm the agitation which this idea engendered in me during my sleepless night, to assure myself that Berma was not, perhaps, thinking about love, since the lines that she recited, which she had long and carefully rehearsed, reminded her at every moment that love is an exquisite thing, as of course she already knew, and knew so well that she displayed its familiar pangs—only enriched with a new violence and an unsuspected sweetness—to her astonished audience, each member of which had felt them for himself. I lighted my candle again, to look at her face once more. At the thought that it was no doubt at that very moment being caressed by those men whom I could not prevent from giving to Berma and receiving from her joys superhuman but vague, I felt an emotion more cruel than voluptuous, a longing that was presently intensified by the sound of the horn, as one hears it on the nights of the mid-Lent festival and often of other public holidays, which, because it then lacks all poetry, is more saddening, coming from a tavern, than “at evening, in the depths of the woods.” At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
I continued to go to the Champs-Elysées on fine days, along streets whose elegant pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of water-colours were then the height of fashion) in a lightly floating atmosphere. It would be untrue to say that in those days the palaces of Gabriel struck me as being of greater beauty than, or even of another period from, the neighbouring houses. I found more style and should have supposed more antiquity if not in the Palais de l’Industrie at any rate in the Trocadéro. Plunged in a restless sleep, my adolescence embraced in one uniform vision the whole of the quarter through which it guided it, and I had never dreamed that there could be an eighteenth-century building in the Rue Royale, just as I should have been astonished to learn that the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte Saint-Denis, those glories of the age of Louis XIV, were not contemporary with the most recently built tenements in the sordid districts that bore their names. Once only one of Gabriel’s palaces made me stop for more than a moment; this was because, night having fallen, its columns, dematerialised by the moonlight, had the appearance of having been cut out in pasteboard, and by reminding me of a set from the operetta Orphée aux Enfers, gave me for the first time an impression of beauty.
Meanwhile Gilberte never came to the Champs-Elysées. And yet it was imperative that I should see her, for I could not so much as remember her face. The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which yet endeavours to discover with the eyes alone what lies beyond them is over-indulgent to the myriad forms, to the different savours, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we immobilise. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of it are always blurred. I no longer really knew how Gilberte’s features were composed, except in the heavenly moments when she unfolded them to me: I could remember nothing but her smile. And being unable to visualise that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture it, I was disgusted to find, etched on my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost a loved one whom they never see again in sleep, are enraged at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable people whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their inability to form an image of the object of their grief they are almost led to accuse themselves of feeling no grief. And I was not far from believing that, since I could not recall Gilberte’s features, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her.
At last she returned to play there almost every day, setting before me fresh pleasures to desire, to demand of her for the morrow, in this sense indeed making my love for her each day a new love. But an incident was to change once again, and abruptly, the manner in which, at about two o’clock every afternoon, the problem of my love confronted me. Had M. Swann intercepted the letter that I had written to his daughter, or was Gilberte merely confessing to me long after the event, and
so that I should be more prudent in future, a state of affairs already long established? As I was telling her how greatly I admired her father and mother, she assumed that vague air, full of reticence and secrecy, which she invariably wore when one spoke to her of what she was going to do, her walks, drives, visits, then suddenly said to me: “You know, they can’t stand you!” and, slipping from me like the watersprite that she was, burst out laughing. Often her laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed, as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane. M. and Mme Swann did not require Gilberte to give up playing with me, but they would have been just as well pleased, she thought, if we had never begun. They did not look upon our relations with a kindly eye, believed me to be a person of low moral standard and imagined that I could only be a bad influence on their daughter. This type of unscrupulous youth whom Swann thought I resembled, I pictured to myself as detesting the parents of the girl he loves, flattering them to their faces but, when he is alone with her, making fun of them, urging her on to disobey them and, when once he has completed his conquest, preventing them even from seeing her. With these characteristics (though they are never those under which the basest of scoundrels recognises himself) how vehemently did my heart contrast the sentiments by which it was animated with regard to Swann, so passionate, on the contrary, that I had no doubt that had he had an inkling of them he would have repented of his judgment of me as of a judicial error. All that I felt towards him I made bold to express to him in a long letter which I entrusted to Gilberte with the request that she deliver it to him. She agreed to do so. Alas! he must have seen in me an even greater impostor than I had feared; he must have suspected the sentiments which I had supposed myself to be portraying, in sixteen pages, with such conviction and truth: in short, the letter that I wrote to him, as ardent and as sincere as the words that I had uttered to M. de Norpois, met with no more success. Gilberte told me next day, after taking me aside behind a clump of laurels, on a little path where we sat down on a couple of chairs, that as he read my letter, which she had now brought back to me, her father had shrugged his shoulders and said: “All this means nothing; it only goes to prove how right I was.” I who knew the purity of my intentions, the goodness of my soul, was furious that my words should not even have impinged upon the surface of Swann’s ridiculous error. For it was an error; of that I had then no doubt. I felt that I had described with such accuracy certain irrefutable characteristics of my generous sentiments that, if Swann had not at once recognised their authenticity, had not come to ask my forgiveness and to admit that he had been mistaken, it must be because he himself had never experienced these noble sentiments, and this would make him incapable of understanding their existence in other people.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II Page 8