One day, after the postman had called, my mother laid a letter upon my bed. I opened it carelessly, since it could not bear the one signature that would have made me happy, the name of Gilberte, with whom I had no relations outside the Champs-Elysées. But there, at the foot of the page, which was embossed with a silver seal representing a helmeted head above a scroll with the device Per viam rectam, beneath a letter written in a large and flowing hand in which almost every phrase appeared to be underlined, simply because the crosses of the “t”s ran not across but over them, and so drew a line beneath the corresponding letters of the word above, it was precisely Gilberte’s signature that I saw. But because I knew this to be impossible in a letter addressed to me, the sight of it unaccompanied by any belief in it gave me no pleasure. For a moment it merely gave an impression of unreality to everything around me. With dizzy speed the improbable signature danced about my bed, the fireplace, the four walls. I saw everything reel, as one does when one falls from a horse, and I asked myself whether there was not an existence altogether different from the one I knew, in direct contradiction to it, but itself the real one, which, being suddenly revealed to me, filled me with that hesitation which sculptors, in representing the Last Judgment, have given to the awakening dead who find themselves at the gates of the next world. “My dear friend,” said the letter, “I hear that you have been very ill and have given up going to the Champs-Elysées. I hardly ever go there either because there has been such an enormous lot of illness. But my friends come to tea here every Monday and Friday. Mamma asks me to tell you that it will be a great pleasure to us all if you will come too as soon as you are well again, and we can have some more nice talks here as we did in the Champs-Elysées. Good-bye, my dear friend; I hope that your parents will allow you to come to tea very often. With all my kindest regards. GILBERTE.”
While I was reading these words, my nervous system received, with admirable promptitude, the news that a great happiness had befallen me. But my mind, that is to say myself, in other words the party principally concerned, was still unaware of it. Happiness, happiness through Gilberte, was a thing I had never ceased to think of, a thing wholly in my mind—as Leonardo said of painting, cosa mentale. Now, a sheet of paper covered with writing is not a thing that the mind assimilates at once. But as soon as I had finished reading the letter, I thought of it, it became an object of reverie, it too became cosa mentale, and I loved it so much now that every few minutes I had to re-read it and kiss it. Then at last I was conscious of my happiness.
Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I first went sea-bathing, in order to make me enjoy diving which I hated because it took away my breath, she used secretly to hand to my bathing instructor marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed that I myself discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However, with every occurrence in life and its contrasting situations that relates to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand, since in so far as these are as inexorable as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. When a multi-millionaire—who for all his millions is a charming man—sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his despair, all the resources of wealth and brings every worldly influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him and to make him die of an affection of the heart rather than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles against which lovers have to contend and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are to be found, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot win back—in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her and the fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind of pleasures which at that moment she demands of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover’s wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is not in the best position to discover the nature of these obstacles which the woman’s guile conceals from him and his own judgment, distorted by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as the latter is not a disinterested passion, the lover who no longer loves does not seek to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her.
Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte’s letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.
As regards this letter, at the foot of which Françoise refused to recognise Gilberte’s name because the elaborate capital “G” leaning against the undotted “i” looked more like an “A,” while the final syllable was indefinitely prolonged by a waving flourish, if we persist in looking for a rational explanation of the sudden change of feeling towards me which it reflected, and which made me so radiantly happy, we may perhaps find that I was to some extent indebted for it to an incident which I should have supposed, on the contrary, to be calculated to ruin me for ever in the eyes of the Swann family. A short while back, Bloch had come to see me at a time when Professor Cottard, who, now that I was following his prescriptions, had again been called in, happened to be in my room. As his examination was over and he was sitting with me simply as a visitor because my parents had invited him to stay to dinner, Bloch was allowed to come in. While we were all talking, Bloch having mentioned that he had been told by a lady with whom he had been dining the day before, and who was a great friend of Mme Swann’s, that the latter was very fond of me, I should have liked to reply that he was most certainly mistaken, and to establish the fact (from the same scruple of conscience that had made me proclaim it to M. de Norpois, and for fear that Mme Swann might take me for a liar) that I did not know her and had never spoken to her. But I did not have the heart to correct Bloch’s mistake, because I realised that it was deliberate, and that, if he had made up something that Mme Swann could not possibly have said, it was simply to let us know (what he considered flattering to himself, and was not true either) that he had been dining with one of that lady’s friends. And thus it came about that whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know but would very much like to know Mme Swann, had taken good care to avoid speaking to her about me, Cottard, who was her doctor, having gathered from what he had heard Bloch say that she knew me quite well and thought highly of me, concluded that to remark, when next he saw her, that I was a charming young fellow and a great friend of his could not be of the smallest use to me and would be advantageous to himself, two reasons which induced him to speak of me to Odette whenever an opportunity arose.
Thus at length I came to know that house from which was wafted even on to the staircase the scent that Mme Swann used, but which was more redolent still of the peculiar, disturbing charm that emanated from the life of Gilberte. The implacable concierge, transformed into a benevolent Eumenid, adopted the habit, when I asked him if I might go upstairs, of indicating to me, by raising his cap with a propitious hand, that he granted my prayer. Those windows which, seen from outside, used to interpose between me and the treasures within, which were not destined for me, a polished, dista
nt and superficial stare, which seemed to me the very stare of the Swanns themselves, it fell to my lot, when in the warm weather I had spent a whole afternoon with Gilberte in her room, to open myself so as to let in a little air and even to lean out of beside her, if it was her mother’s “at home” day, to watch the visitors arrive who would often look up as they stepped out of their carriages and greet me with a wave of the hand, taking me for some nephew of their hostess. At such moments Gilberte’s plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their skilfully woven tracery, a matchless work of art in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, however infinitesimal, what celestial herbarium would I not have given as a reliquary? But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have a photograph of them, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers drawn by Leonardo! To acquire one, I stooped to servilities, with friends of the Swanns and even with photographers, which not only failed to procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely boring people.
Gilberte’s parents, who for so long had prevented me from seeing her, now—when I entered the dark hall in which hovered perpetually, more formidable and more to be desired than, at Versailles, the apparition of the King, the possibility of my encountering them, in which too, invariably, after bumping into an enormous seven-branched hat-stand, like the Candlestick in Holy Writ, I would begin bowing profusely to a footman, seated among the skirts of his long grey coat upon the wood chest, whom in the dim light I had mistaken for Mme Swann—Gilberte’s parents, if one of them happened to be passing at the moment of my arrival, so far from seeming annoyed would come and shake hands with me with a smile, and say: “How d’ye do?” (which they both pronounced in the same clipped way, which, as may be imagined, I made it my incessant and delightful task to imitate when I was back at home). “Does Gilberte know you’re here? She does? Then I’ll leave you to her.”
Better still, the tea-parties themselves to which Gilberte invited her friends, parties which for so long had seemed to me the most insurmountable of the barriers heaped up between her and myself, became now an opportunity for bringing us together of which she would inform me in a few lines written (because I was still a comparative stranger) on writing-paper that was always different. Once it was adorned with a poodle embossed in blue, above a humorous inscription in English with an exclamation mark after it; another time it would be engraved with an anchor, or with the initials G. S. preposterously elongated in a rectangle which ran from top to bottom of the page, or else with the name Gilberte, now traced across one corner in letters of gold which imitated her signature and ended with a flourish, beneath an open umbrella printed in black, now enclosed in a monogram in the shape of a Chinaman’s hat which contained all the letters of the name in capitals without its being possible to make out a single one of them. Finally, as the series of different writing-papers which Gilberte possessed, numerous though it was, was not unlimited, after a certain number of weeks I saw reappear the sheet that bore (like the first letter she had written me) the motto Per viam rectam, and over it the helmeted head set in a medallion of tarnished silver. And each of them was chosen for one day rather than another by virtue of a certain ritual, as I then supposed, but more probably, I now think, because she tried to remember which of them she had already used, so as never to send the same one twice to any of her correspondents, of those at least whom she took special pains to please, save at the longest possible intervals. As, on account of the different times of their lessons, some of the friends whom Gilberte used to invite to her parties were obliged to leave just as the rest were arriving, while I was still on the stairs I could hear emanating from the hall a murmur of voices which, such was the emotion aroused in me by the imposing ceremony in which I was to take part, suddenly broke the bonds that connected me with my previous life long before I had reached the landing, so that I did not even remember that I was to take off my muffler as soon as I felt too hot and to keep an eye on the clock so as not to be late in getting home. That staircase, too, all of wood as they were built about that time in certain apartment houses in that Henri II style which had for so long been Odette’s ideal though she was shortly to abandon it, and furnished with a placard, to which there was no equivalent at home, on which one read the words: “ NOTICE. Do not use the lift when going down,” seemed to me a thing so marvellous that I told my parents that it was an antique staircase brought from ever so far away by M. Swann. My regard for the truth was so great that I should not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it to be false, for it alone could enable them to feel for the dignity of the Swanns’ staircase the same respect that I felt myself—just as when one is talking to some ignorant person who cannot understand what constitutes the genius of a great doctor, it is well not to admit that he does not know how to cure a cold in the head. But since I was extremely unobservant, and since, as a general rule, I never knew either the name or the nature of the things I came across and could understand only that when they were connected with the Swanns they must be extraordinary, it did not seem absolutely certain to me that in notifying my parents of the artistic value and remote origin of the staircase I was guilty of a falsehood. It did not seem certain; but it must have seemed probable, for I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me with: “I know those houses. I’ve been in one of them. They’re all alike; Swann just has several floors in one; it was Berlier built them all.” He added that he had thought of taking a flat in one of them, but that he had changed his mind, finding that they were not conveniently arranged, and that the landings were too dark. So he said; but I felt instinctively that I must make the sacrifices necessary to the glory of the Swanns and to my own happiness, and by an internal decree, in spite of what I had just heard, I banished for ever from my mind, as a good Catholic banishes Renan’s Vie de Jésus, the corrupting thought that their house was just an ordinary flat in which we ourselves might have been living.
Meanwhile, on those tea-party days, pulling myself up the staircase step by step, reason and memory already cast off like outer garments, and myself no more now than the sport of the basest reflexes, I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme Swann greeted my nostrils. I could already visualise the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled by plates heaped with biscuits, and by tiny napkins of patterned grey damask, as required by convention but peculiar to the Swanns. But this ordered and unalterable design seemed, like Kant’s necessary universe, to depend on a supreme act of free will. For when we were all together in Gilberte’s little sitting-room, suddenly she would look at the clock and exclaim:
“I say! It’s getting a long time since luncheon, and we aren’t having dinner till eight. I feel as if I could eat something. What do you say?”
And she would usher us into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior of an Asiatic temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural cake, as urbane and familiar as it was imposing, seemed to be enthroned there on the off-chance as on any other day, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the palace of Darius. Better still, in proceeding to the demolition of that Ninevite pastry, Gilberte did not consider only her own hunger; she inquired also after mine, while she extracted for me from the crumbling monument a whole glazed slab jewelled with scarlet fruits, in the oriental style. She would even ask me what time my parents dined, as if I still knew, as if the agitation which overwhelmed me had allowed the sensation of satiety or of hunger, the notion of dinner or the image of my family, to persist in my empty memory and paralysed stomach. Alas, its paralysis was but momentary. A time would come when I should have to digest the cakes that I took without noticing them. But that time was still remote. Meanwhile Gilberte was making “my” tea. I
would go on drinking it indefinitely, although a single cup would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. As a consequence of which my mother used always to say: “What a nuisance it is; this child can never go to the Swanns’ without coming home ill.” But was I aware even, when I was at the Swanns’, that it was tea that I was drinking? Had I known, I should have drunk it just the same, for even supposing that I had recovered for a moment the sense of the present, that would not have restored to me the memory of the past or the apprehension of the future. My imagination was incapable of reaching to the distant time in which I might have the idea of going to bed and the need to sleep.
Gilberte’s girl friends were not all plunged in that state of intoxication in which it is impossible to make any decisions. Some of them even refused tea! Then Gilberte would say, using a phrase that was very popular that year: “I can see I’m not having much of a success with my tea!” And to eradicate even more completely any notion of ceremony, she would disarrange the chairs that were drawn up round the table, saying: “It’s just like a wedding breakfast. Goodness, how stupid servants are!”
She would nibble away, perched sideways upon a cross-legged seat placed at an angle to the table. And then, just as though she could have had all those cakes at her disposal without having asked her mother’s permission, when Mme Swann, whose “day” coincided as a rule with Gilberte’s tea-parties, having shown one of her visitors to the door, came sweeping in a moment later, dressed sometimes in blue velvet, more often in a black satin gown draped with white lace, she would say with an air of astonishment: “I say, that looks good, what you’ve got there. It makes me quite hungry to see you all eating cake.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II Page 10