In Search of Lost Time, Volume II

by Marcel Proust

  “I should recommend you, instead,” went on Bergotte, “to consult Dr du Boulbon, who is an extremely intelligent man.” “He’s a great admirer of your books,” I replied.

  I saw that Bergotte knew this, and I concluded that kindred spirits soon come together, that one has few really “unknown friends.” What Bergotte had said to me with respect to Cottard impressed me, while running contrary to everything that I myself believed. I was in no way disturbed at finding my doctor a bore; what I expected of him was that, thanks to an art whose laws escaped me, he should pronounce on the subject of my health an infallible oracle after consultation of my entrails. And I did not at all require that, with the aid of an intelligence in which I could compete with him, he should seek to understand mine, which I pictured to myself merely as a means, of no importance in itself, of trying to attain to certain external verities. I very much doubted whether intelligent people required a different form of hygiene from imbeciles, and I was quite prepared to submit myself to the latter.

  “I’ll tell you who does need a good doctor, and that’s our friend Swann,” said Bergotte. And on my asking whether he was ill, “Well, don’t you see, he’s typical of the man who has married a whore, and has to pocket a dozen insults a day from women who refuse to meet his wife or men who have slept with her. Just look, one day when you’re there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes in, to see who’s in the room.”

  The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had for so long been received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost tender tone he invariably adopted towards them in their presence. Certainly a person like my great-aunt, for instance, would have been incapable of treating any of us to the blandishments which I had heard Bergotte lavishing upon Swann. Even to the people whom she liked, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things. But behind their backs she would never have uttered a word to which they might not have listened. There was nothing less like the social world than our society at Combray. The Swanns’ was already a step on the way to it, towards its inconstant waters. If they had not yet reached the open sea, they were certainly in the estuary. “This is all between ourselves,” said Bergotte as he left me outside my own door. A few years later I should have answered: “I never repeat things.” That is the ritual phrase of society people, from which the slanderer always derives a false reassurance. It is what I would have said then and there to Bergotte—for one does not invent everything one says, especially when one is acting merely as a social being—but I did not yet know the formula. What my great-aunt, on the other hand, would have said on a similar occasion was: “If you don’t wish it to be repeated, why do you say it?” That is the answer of the unsociable, of the dissenter. I was nothing of that sort: I bowed my head in silence.

  Men of letters who were in my eyes persons of considerable importance had to intrigue for years before they succeeded in forming with Bergotte relations which remained always dimly literary and never emerged beyond the four walls of his study, whereas I had now been installed among the friends of the great writer, straight off and without any effort, like someone who, instead of standing in a queue for hours in order to secure a bad seat in a theatre, is shown in at once to the best, having entered by a door that is closed to the public. If Swann had thus opened such a door to me, it was doubtless because, just as a king finds himself naturally inviting his children’s friends into the royal box, or on board the royal yacht, so Gilberte’s parents received their daughter’s friends among all the precious things that they had in their house and the even more precious intimacies that were enshrined there. But at the time I thought, and perhaps was right in thinking, that this friendliness on Swann’s part was aimed indirectly at my parents. I seemed to remember having heard once at Combray that he had suggested to them that, in view of my admiration for Bergotte, he should take me to dine with him, and that my parents had declined, saying that I was too young and too highly strung to “go out.” My parents doubtless represented to certain other people (precisely those who seemed to me the most wonderful) something quite different from what they were to me, so that, just as when the lady in pink had paid my father a tribute of which he had shown himself so unworthy, I should have wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just received and, to show their gratitude to that generous and courteous Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without seeming any more conscious of its value than the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair in Luini’s fresco, to whom, it was said, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance.

  Unfortunately, this favour that Swann had done me, which, on returning home, before I had even taken off my greatcoat, I reported to my parents in the hope that it would awaken in their hearts an emotion equal to my own and would determine them upon some immense and decisive gesture towards the Swanns, did not appear to be greatly appreciated by them. “Swann introduced you to Bergotte? An excellent acquaintance, a charming relationship!” exclaimed my father sarcastically: “That really does crown it all!” Alas, when I went on to say that Bergotte was by no means inclined to admire M. de Norpois:

  “I dare say!” retorted my father. “That simply proves that he’s a false and malevolent fellow. My poor boy, you never had much common sense, but I’m sorry to see that you’ve fallen among people who will send you off the rails altogether.”

  Already the mere fact of my associating with the Swanns had far from delighted my parents. This introduction to Bergotte seemed to them a fatal but natural consequence of an original mistake, namely their own weakness, which my grandfather would have called a “want of circumspection.” I felt that in order to put the finishing touch to their ill humour, it only remained for me to tell them that this perverse fellow who did not appreciate M. de Norpois had found me extremely intelligent. For I had observed that whenever my father decided that anyone, one of my school friends for instance, was going astray—as I was at that moment—if that person had the approval of somebody whom my father did not respect, he would see in this testimony the confirmation of his own stern judgment. The evil merely seemed to him the greater. Already I could hear him exclaiming, “Of course, it all hangs together,” an expression that terrified me by the vagueness and vastness of the reforms the introduction of which into my quiet life it seemed to threaten. But since, even if I did not tell them what Bergotte had said of me, nothing could anyhow efface the impression my parents had already formed, that it should be made slightly worse mattered little. Besides, they seemed to me so unfair, so completely mistaken, that not only had I no hope, I had scarcely any desire to bring them to a more equitable point of view. However, sensing, as the words were passing my lips, how alarmed my parents would be at the thought that I had found favour in the sight of a person who dismissed clever men as fools, who had earned the contempt of all decent people, and praise from whom, since it seemed to me a thing to be desired, would only encourage me in wrongdoing, it was in faltering tones and with a slightly shamefaced air that I reached the coda: “He told the Swanns that he had found me extremely intelligent.” Just as a poisoned dog in a field flings itself without knowing why at the grass which is precisely the antidote to the toxin that it has swallowed, so I, without in the least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best arguments that I could have put forward, all the tributes that I could have paid him, must have proved powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed.

  “Oh! he said that he found you intelligent,” repeated my mother. “I’m glad to hear that, because he’s a man of talent.”

  “What! he said that, did he?” my father joined in . . . “I don’t for a moment deny his literary distinction, before which the whole world bows; only it’s a pity that he should lead that disreputable existence to which old Norpois made a guarded allusion,” he went on, not seeing that against the sovereig
n virtue of the magic words which I had just pronounced, the depravity of Bergotte’s morals was scarcely more capable of holding out any longer than the falsity of his judgment.

  “But, my dear,” Mamma interrupted, “we’ve no proof that it’s true. People say all sorts of things. Besides, M. de Norpois may have the most perfect manners in the world, but he’s not always very good-natured, especially about people who are not exactly his sort.”

  “That’s quite true; I’ve noticed it myself,” my father admitted.

  “And then, too, a great deal ought to be forgiven Bergotte since he thinks well of my little son,” Mamma went on, stroking my hair and fastening upon me a long and pensive gaze.

  My mother had not in fact awaited this verdict from Bergotte before telling me that I might ask Gilberte to tea whenever I had friends coming. But I dared not do so for two reasons. The first was that at Gilberte’s nothing else but tea was ever served. Whereas at home Mamma insisted on there being hot chocolate as well. I was afraid that Gilberte might regard this as common and so conceive a great contempt for us. The other reason was a formal difficulty, a question of procedure which I could never succeed in settling. When I arrived at Mme Swann’s she used to ask me: “And how is your mother?”

  I had made several overtures to Mamma to find out whether she would do the same when Gilberte came to us, a point which seemed to me more serious than, at the Court of Louis XIV, the use of “Monseigneur.” But Mamma would not hear of it for a moment.

  “Certainly not. I do not know Mme Swann.”

  “But neither does she know you.”

  “I never said she did, but we’re not obliged to behave in exactly the same way about everything. I shall find other ways of being nice to Gilberte than Mme Swann does with you.”

  But I remained unconvinced, and preferred not to invite Gilberte.

  Leaving my parents, I went upstairs to change my clothes and on emptying my pockets came suddenly upon the envelope which the Swann’s butler had handed me before showing me into the drawing-room. I was now alone. I opened it; inside was a card on which was indicated the name of the lady whom I ought to have taken in to luncheon.

  It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, as it happened, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by assuring me that, contrary to all that I had believed at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for anything better than to make love. He added to this service a second, the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later: it was he who took me for the first time into a house of assignation. He had indeed told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might enjoy. But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those houses were to enable me to substitute actual human features. So that if I owed to Bloch—for his “good tidings” that happiness and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things that we have made a meaningless sacrifice in renouncing for ever—a debt of gratitude of the same kind as that we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher who has given us reason to hope for longevity in this world and not to be entirely cut off from it when we shall have passed into another, the houses of assignation which I frequented some years later—by furnishing me with samples of happiness, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to invent, which is something more than a mere summary of former beauties, that present indeed divine, the only one that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which all the logical creations of our intellect pale, and which we can seek from reality alone: an individual charm—deserved to be ranked by me with those other benefactors more recent in origin but of comparable utility (before finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the seductive charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, on the basis of our knowledge of other painters, other composers, other cities): namely illustrated editions of the Old Masters, symphony concerts, and guidebooks to historic towns. But the house to which Bloch took me (and which he himself in fact had long ceased to visit) was of too inferior a grade and its personnel too mediocre and too little varied to be able to satisfy my old or to stimulate new curiosities. The mistress of this house knew none of the women with whom one asked her to negotiate, and was always suggesting others whom one did not want. She boasted to me of one in particular, of whom, with a smile full of promise (as though this was a great rarity and a special treat), she would say: “She’s Jewish. How about that?” (It was doubtless for this reason that she called her Rachel.) And with an inane affectation of excitement which she hoped would prove contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of sensual satisfaction: “Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn’t that be thrilling? Rrrr!” This Rachel, of whom I caught a glimpse without her seeing me, was dark, not pretty, but intelligent-looking, and would pass the tip of her tongue over her lips as she smiled with a look of boundless impertinence at the customers who were introduced to her and whom I could hear making conversation. Her thin and narrow face was framed with curly black hair, irregular as though outlined in pen-strokes upon a wash-drawing in Indian ink. Every evening I promised the madame, who offered her to me with a special insistence, boasting of her superior intelligence and her education, that I would not fail to come some day on purpose to make the acquaintance of Rachel, whom I had nicknamed “Rachel when from the Lord.”7 But the first evening I had heard her say to the madame as she was leaving the house: “That’s settled then. I shall be free tomorrow, so if you have anyone you won’t forget to send for me.”

  And these words had prevented me from recognising her as a person because they had made me classify her at once in a general category of women whose habit, common to all of them, was to come there in the evening to see whether there might not be a louis or two to be earned. She would simply vary her formula, saying indifferently: “If you need me” or “If you need anybody.”

  The madame, who was not familiar with Halévy’s opera, did not know why I always called the girl “Rachel when from the Lord.” But failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing, and it was always with a wholehearted laugh that she would say to me:

  “Then there’s nothing doing tonight? When am I going to fix you up with ‘Rachel when from the Lord’? How do you say that: ‘Rachel when from the Lord’? Oh, that’s a nice one, that is. I’m going to make a match of you two. You won’t regret it, you’ll see.”

  Once I nearly made up my mind, but she had “gone to press,” another time she was in the hands of the “hair-dresser,” an old gentleman who never did anything to the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and then comb it. And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the humbler denizens of the place (so-called working girls, though they always seemed to be out of work) had come to make tea for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of my interlocutors gave an attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to this house because, anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her a few pieces—notably a big sofa—which I had inherited from my aunt Léonie. I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I saw them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that pervaded my aunt’s room at Combray at once appeared to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their defencelessness! Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive and to be appealing to me, like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance. Besides, as our memory does not as a rule present things to us in their chronological sequence but as it were by a reflection in which the order of t
he parts is reversed, I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie had left her room.

  A whole lot more of my aunt Léonie’s things, and notably a magnificent set of old silver plate, I sold, against my parents’ advice, so as to have more money to spend, and to be able to send more flowers to Mme Swann who would greet me, after receiving an immense basket of orchids, with: “If I were your father, I should have you up before the magistrate for this.” How could I suppose that one day I might particularly regret the loss of my silver plate, and rank certain other pleasures more highly than that (which might perhaps have shrunk to nothing) of paying courtesies to Gilberte’s parents. Similarly, it was with Gilberte in my mind, and in order not to be separated from her, that I had decided not to enter upon a career of diplomacy abroad. It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions. I could scarcely imagine that that strange substance which was housed in Gilberte, and which radiated from her parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to all things else, could be liberated, could migrate into another person. Unquestionably the same substance, and yet one that would have a wholly different effect on me. For the same sickness evolves; and a delicious poison can no longer be taken with the same impunity when, with the passing of the years, the heart’s resistance has diminished.

  My parents meanwhile would have liked to see the intelligence that Bergotte had discerned in me made manifest in some outstanding piece of work. When I still did not know the Swanns I thought that I was prevented from working by the state of agitation into which I was thrown by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte when I chose. But now that their door stood open to me, scarcely had I sat down at my desk than I would get up and hurry round to them. And after I had left them and was back at home, my isolation was apparent only, my mind was powerless to swim against the stream of words on which I had allowed myself mechanically to be borne for hours on end. Sitting alone, I continued to fashion remarks such as might have pleased or amused the Swanns, and to make this pastime more entertaining I myself took the parts of those absent players, putting to myself fictitious questions so chosen that my brilliant epigrams served simply as apt repartee. Though conducted in silence, this exercise was none the less a conversation and not a meditation, my solitude a mental social round in which it was not I myself but imaginary interlocutors who controlled my choice of words, and in which, as I formulated, instead of the thoughts that I believed to be true, those that came easily to my mind and involved no retrogression from the outside inwards, I experienced the sort of pleasure, entirely passive, which sitting still affords to anyone who is burdened with a sluggish digestion.