He may well have been the Prince of Saxony; it was perhaps the Duchesse de Guermantes (whom, in that event, I should be able to watch in the process of living one of the moments of her unimaginable life in her cousin’s box) that he saw in his mind’s eye when he referred to “my cousin who told me I had only to ask for her box,” so much so that that distinctive smiling gaze and those so simple words caressed my heart (far more than any abstract reverie would have done) with the alternative antennae of a possible happiness and a vague glamour. At least, in uttering this sentence to the attendant, he grafted on to a commonplace evening in my everyday life a potential entry into a new world; the passage to which he was directed after having spoken the word “box” and along which he now proceeded was moist and fissured and seemed to lead to subaqueous grottoes, to the mythological kingdom of the water-nymphs. I had before me a gentleman in evening dress who was walking away from me, but I kept playing upon and around him, as with a badly fitting projector, without ever succeeding in focusing it on him exactly, the idea that he was the Prince of Saxony and was on his way to join the Duchesse de Guermantes. And for all that he was alone, that idea, external to himself, impalpable, immense, unsteady as a searchlight beam, seemed to precede and guide him like that deity, invisible to the rest of mankind, who stands beside the Greek warrior in the hour of battle.
I took my seat, trying to recapture a line from Phèdre which I could not quite remember. In the form in which I repeated it to myself it did not have the right number of feet, but as I made no attempt to count them, between its unwieldiness and a classical line of poetry it seemed as though no common measure could exist. It would not have surprised me to learn that I must subtract at least half a dozen syllables from that portentous phrase to reduce it to alexandrine dimensions. But suddenly I remembered it, the irremediable asperities of an inhuman world vanished as if by magic; the syllables of the line at once filled up the requisite measure, and what there was in excess floated off with the ease, the dexterity of a bubble of air that rises to burst on the surface of the water. And, after all, this excrescence with which I had been struggling consisted of only a single foot.
A certain number of orchestra stalls had been offered for sale at the box office and bought, out of snobbishness or curiosity, by such as wished to study the appearance of people whom they might not have another opportunity of seeing at close quarters. And it was indeed a fragment of their true social life, ordinarily concealed, that one could examine here in public, for, the Princesse de Parme having herself distributed among her friends the seats in stalls, balconies and boxes, the house was like a drawing-room in which everyone changed places, went to sit here or there, next to friends.
Next to me were some vulgar people who, not knowing the regular seat-holders, were anxious to show that they were capable of identifying them and named them aloud. They went on to remark that these “regulars” behaved there as though they were in their own drawing-rooms, meaning that they paid no attention to what was being played. In fact it was the opposite that took place. A budding genius who has taken a stall in order to see Berma thinks only of not soiling his gloves, of not disturbing, of conciliating the neighbour whom chance has put beside him, of pursuing with an intermittent smile the fleeting glance, and avoiding with apparent want of politeness the intercepted glance, of a person of his acquaintance whom he has discovered in the audience and to whom, after endless indecisions, he makes up his mind to go and talk just as the three knocks from the stage, resounding before he has had time to reach his friend, force him to take flight, like the Hebrews in the Red Sea, through a heaving tide of spectators and spectatresses whom he has forced to rise to their feet and whose dresses he tears and boots he crushes as he passes. On the other hand, it was because the society people sat in their boxes (behind the tiered circle) as in so many little suspended drawing-rooms, the fourth walls of which had been removed, or in so many little cafés to which one might go for refreshment without letting oneself be intimidated by the mirrors in gilt frames or the red plush seats, in the Neapolitan style, of the establishment—it was because they rested an indifferent hand on the gilded shafts of the columns which upheld this temple of the lyric art—it was because they remained unmoved by the extravagant honours which seemed to be being paid them by a pair of carved figures which held out towards the boxes branches of palm and laurel, that they alone would have had the equanimity of mind to listen to the play, if only they had had minds.
At first there were only vague shadows, in which one suddenly caught—like the gleam of a precious stone which one cannot see—the phosphorescence of a pair of famous eyes, or, like a medallion of Henri IV on a dark background, the bent profile of the Duc d’Aumale, to whom an invisible lady was exclaiming “Your Royal Highness must allow me to take his coat,” to which the prince replied, “Oh, come, come! Really, Madame d’Ambresac.” She took it, in spite of this vague demurral, and was envied by one and all for being thus honoured.
But in the other boxes, almost everywhere, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had taken refuge against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they embroidered, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves. Beyond began the orchestra stalls, abode of mortals for ever separated from the sombre and transparent realm to which here and there, in their smooth liquid surface, the limpid, reflecting eyes of the water-goddesses served as frontier. For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced. Within the boundaries of their domain, however, the radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile up at the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or towards some aquatic demi-god whose skull was a polished stone on to which the tide had washed a smooth covering of seaweed, and his gaze a disc of rock crystal. They leaned towards these creatures, offering them sweetmeats; from time to time the flood parted to admit a new nereid who, belated, smiling, apologetic, had just floated into blossom out of the shadowy depths; then, the act ended, having no further hope of hearing the melodious sounds of earth which had drawn them to the surface, plunging back all at once, the several sisters vanished into the night. But of all these retreats to the thresholds of which their frivolous desire to behold the works of man brought the curious goddesses who let none approach them, the most famous was the cube of semi-darkness known to the world as the stage box of the Princesse de Guermantes.
Like a tall goddess presiding from afar over the frolics of the lesser deities, the Princess had deliberately remained somewhat in the background on a sofa placed sideways in the box, red as a coral reef, beside a large vitreous expanse which was probably a mirror and suggested a section, perpendicular, opaque and liquid, cut by a ray of sunlight in the dazzling crystal of the sea. At once plume and corolla, like certain subaqueous growths, a great white flower, downy as the wing of a bird, hung down from the Princess’s forehead along one of her cheeks, the curve of which it followed with coquettish, amorous, vibrant suppleness, as if half enclosing it like a pink egg in the softness of a halcyon’s nest. Over her hair, reaching in front to her eyebrows and caught back lower down at the level of her throat, was spread a net composed of those little white shells which are fished up in certain southern seas and
which were intermingled with pearls, a marine mosaic barely emerging from the waves and at moments plunged back again into a darkness in the depths of which even then a human presence was revealed by the glittering motility of the Princess’s eyes. The beauty which set her far above all the other fabulous daughters of the twilight was not altogether materially and comprehensively inscribed in the nape of her neck, in her shoulders, her arms, her waist. But the exquisite, unfinished line of the last was the exact starting-point, the inevitable focus of invisible lines into which the eye could not help prolonging them—lines marvellously engendered round the woman like the spectre of an ideal figure projected against the darkness.
“That’s the Princesse de Guermantes,” said my neighbour to the gentleman beside her, taking care to begin the word “Princesse” with a string of ‘P’s, to show that the designation was absurd. “She hasn’t been sparing with her pearls. I’m sure if I had as many as that I wouldn’t make such a display of them; it doesn’t look at all genteel to my mind.”
And yet, when they caught sight of the Princess, all those who were looking round to see who was in the audience felt the rightful throne of beauty rise up in their hearts. The fact was that, with the Duchesse de Luxembourg, with Mme de Morienval, with Mme de Saint-Euverte, with any number of others, what enabled one to identify their faces would be the juxtaposition of a big red nose and a hare-lip, or of a pair of wrinkled cheeks and a faint moustache. These features were moreover sufficient in themselves to charm the eye, since, having merely the conventional value of a specimen of handwriting, they gave one to read a famous and impressive name; but also, in the long run, they gave one the idea that ugliness had something aristocratic about it, and that it was immaterial whether the face of a great lady, provided it possessed distinction, was beautiful as well. But like certain artists who, instead of the letters of their names, set at the foot of their canvases a figure that is beautiful in itself, a butterfly, a lizard, a flower, so it was the figure of a delicious face and body that the Princess affixed at the corner of her box, thereby showing that beauty can be the noblest of signatures; for the presence there of Mme de Guermantes-Bavière, who brought to the theatre only such persons as at other times formed part of her intimate circle, was in the eyes of connoisseurs of the aristocracy the best possible certificate of the authenticity of the picture which her box presented, a sort of evocation of a scene from the intimate and exclusive life of the Princess in her palaces in Munich and in Paris.
Our imagination being like a barrel-organ out of order, which always plays some other tune than that shown on its card, every time I had heard any mention of the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, a recollection of certain sixteenth-century masterpieces had begun singing in my brain. I was obliged to rid myself of this association now that I saw her engaged in offering crystallised fruit to a stout gentleman in tails. Certainly I was very far from concluding that she and her guests were mere human beings like the rest of the audience. I understood that what they were doing there was only a game, and that as a prelude to the acts of their real life (of which, presumably, this was not where they lived the important part) they had arranged, in obedience to a ritual unknown to me, to pretend to offer and decline sweets, a gesture robbed of its ordinary significance and regulated beforehand like the steps of a dancer who alternately raises herself on her toes and circles around a scarf. For all I knew, perhaps at the moment of offering him her sweets, the goddess was saying, with that note of irony in her voice (for I saw her smile): “Will you have a sweet?” What did it matter to me? I should have found a delicious refinement in the deliberate dryness, in the style of Mérimée or Meilhac, of these words addressed by a goddess to a demi-god who knew what sublime thoughts they both had in their minds, in reserve, doubtless, for the moment when they would begin again to live their real life, and, joining in the game, answered with the same mysterious playfulness: “Thanks, I should like a cherry.” And I should have listened to this dialogue with the same avidity as to a scene from Le Mari de la Débutante, where the absence of poetry, of lofty thoughts, things which were so familiar to me and which, I suppose, Meilhac would have been eminently capable of putting into it, seemed to me in itself a refinement, a conventional refinement and therefore all the more mysterious and instructive.
“That fat fellow is the Marquis de Ganançay,” came in a knowing tone from the man next to me, who had not quite caught the name whispered in the row behind.
The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, moved slowly around in the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, venerable, wheezing, moss-grown, and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath. No one aroused in me so much envy as he, on account of his apparent familiarity with this box and the indifference with which he allowed the Princess to hold out to him her box of sweets, throwing him as she did so a glance from her fine eyes, cut from a diamond which at such moments intelligence and friendliness seemed to liquefy, whereas, when they were in repose, reduced to their purely material beauty, to their mineral brilliance alone, if the least reflected light displaced them ever so slightly, they set the depths of the pit ablaze with their inhuman, horizontal and resplendent fires. But now, because the act of Phèdre in which Berma was playing was due to start, the Princess came to the front of the box; whereupon, as if she herself were a theatrical apparition, in the different zone of light which she traversed, I saw not only the colour but the material of her adornments change. And in the box, now drained dry, emergent, no longer a part of the watery realm, the Princess, ceasing to be a nereid, appeared turbaned in white and blue like some marvellous tragic actress dressed for the part of Zaïre, or perhaps of Orosmane; then, when she had taken her place in the front row, I saw that the halcyon’s nest which tenderly shielded the pearly pink of her cheeks was an immense bird of paradise, soft, glittering and velvety.
But now my gaze was diverted from the Princesse de Guermantes’s box by an ill-dressed, plain little woman who came in, her eyes ablaze with indignation, followed by two young men, and sat down a few seats away from me. Then the curtain rose. I could not help being saddened by the reflexion that there remained now no trace of my former predispositions in regard to Berma and the dramatic art, at the time when, in order to miss nothing of the extraordinary phenomenon which I would have gone to the ends of the earth to see, I kept my mind prepared like the sensitive plates which astronomers take out to Africa or the West Indies with a view to the scrupulous observation of a comet or an eclipse; when I trembled for fear lest some cloud (a fit of ill-humour on the artist’s part or an incident in the audience) should prevent the spectacle from taking place with the maximum of intensity; when I should not have believed that I was watching it in the best conditions had I not gone to the very theatre which was consecrated to her like an altar, in which I then felt to be an inseparable if accessory part of her appearance from behind the little red curtain, the officials with their white carnations appointed by her, the vaulted balcony over a pit filled with a shabbily dressed crowd, the women selling programmes bearing her photograph, the chestnut-trees in the square outside, all those companions, those confidants of my impressions of those days which seemed to me to be inseparable from them. Phèdre, the “Declaration Scene,” Berma, had had then for me a sort of absolute existence. Standing aloof from the world of current experience, they existed by themselves, I must go out to meet them, I would penetrate what I could of them, and if I opened my eyes and my soul to their fullest extent I would still absorb only too little of them. But how pleasant life seemed to me! The insignificance of the form of it that I myself was leading mattered nothing, no more than the time we spend on dressing, on getting ready to go out, since beyond it there existe
d in an absolute form, difficult to approach, impossible to possess in their entirety, those more solid realities, Phèdre and the way in which Berma spoke her lines. Steeped in these dreams of perfection in the dramatic art (a strong dose of which anyone who had at that time subjected my mind to analysis at any moment of the day or even the night would have been able to extract from it), I was like a battery that accumulates and stores up electricity. And a time had come when, ill as I was, even if I had believed that I should die of it, I should still have been compelled to go and hear Berma. But now, like a hill which from a distance seems azure-clad but as we draw nearer returns to its place in our commonplace vision of things, all this had left the world of the absolute and was no more than a thing like other things, of which I took cognisance because I was there; the actors were people of the same substance as the people I knew, trying to declaim as well as possible these lines of Phèdre which themselves no longer formed a sublime and individual essence, distinct from everything else, but were simply more or less effective lines ready to slip back into the vast corpus of French poetry, of which they were merely a part. I felt a despondency that was all the more profound in that, if the object of my headstrong and active desire no longer existed, on the other hand the same tendency to indulge in an obsessional day-dream, which varied from year to year but led me always to sudden impulses, regardless of danger, still persisted. The evening on which I rose from my bed of sickness and set out to see a picture by Elstir or a mediaeval tapestry in some country house or other was so like the day on which I ought to have set out for Venice, or that on which I had gone to see Berma or left for Balbec, that I felt in advance that the immediate object of my sacrifice would leave me cold after a very short while, that then I might pass close by the place without stopping even to look at that picture or those tapestries for which I would at this moment risk so many sleepless nights, so many hours of pain. I discerned in the instability of its object the vanity of my effort, and at the same time its immensity, which I had not noticed before, like one of those neurasthenics whose exhaustion is doubled when it is pointed out to them that they are exhausted. In the meantime my musings gave a certain glamour to anything that might be related to them. And even in my most carnal desires, orientated always in a particular direction, concentrated round a single dream, I might have recognised as their primary motive an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the innermost core of which, as in my day-dreams while I sat reading all afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the notion of perfection.
The Guermantes Way Page 5