The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  That afternoon, alas, at Doncières, the miracle did not occur. When I reached the post office, my grandmother’s call had already been received. I stepped into the booth; the line was engaged; someone was talking who probably did not realise that there was nobody to answer him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless piece of wood began to squeak like Punchinello; I silenced it, as one silences a puppet, by putting it back on its hook, but, like Punchinello, as soon as I picked it up again it resumed its gabblings. At length, giving up in despair and hanging up the receiver once and for all, I stifled the convulsions of this vociferous stump which kept up its chatter until the last moment, and went in search of the telephonist, who told me to wait a while; then I spoke, and after a few seconds of silence, suddenly I heard that voice which I mistakenly thought I knew so well; for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the first time. And because that voice appeared to me to have altered in its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me thus alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps indeed it had never been so sweet as it was now, for my grandmother, thinking of me as being far away and unhappy, felt that she might abandon herself to an outpouring of tenderness which, in accordance with her principles of upbringing, she usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but also how sad it was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness drained almost—more than any but a few human voices can ever have been—of every element of hardness, of resistance to others, of selfishness! Fragile by reason of its delicacy, it seemed constantly on the verge of breaking, of expiring in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone beside me, seen without the mask of her face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime.

  Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, for the first time separated from me. The commands or prohibitions which she constantly addressed to me in the ordinary course of life, the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion which neutralised the affection that I felt for her, were at this moment eliminated and indeed might be eliminated for ever (since my grandmother, no longer insisting on having me with her under her control, was in the act of expressing her hope that I would stay at Doncières altogether, or would at any rate extend my visit for as long as possible, since both my health and my work might benefit by the change); and so, what I held compressed in this little bell at my ear was our mutual affection, freed from the conflicting pressures which had daily counteracted it, and henceforth irresistible, uplifting me entirely. My grandmother, by telling me to stay, filled me with an anxious, an insensate longing to return. This freedom she was granting me henceforward, and to which I had never dreamed that she would consent, appeared to me suddenly as sad as my freedom of action might be after her death (when I should still love her and she would for ever have abandoned me). “Granny!” I cried to her, “Granny!” and I longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead. “Speak to me!” But then, suddenly, I ceased to hear the voice, and was left even more alone. My grandmother could no longer hear me; she was no longer in communication with me; we had ceased to be close to each other, to be audible to each other; I continued to call her, groping in the empty darkness, feeling that calls from her must also be going astray. I quivered with the same anguish which I had felt once before in the distant past, when, as a little child, I had lost her in a crowd, an anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought that she must be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I was searching for her, an anguish not unlike that which I was later to feel, on the day when we speak to those who can no longer reply and when we long for them at least to hear all the things we never said to them, and our assurance that we are not unhappy. It seemed to me as though it was already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone before the instrument, I went on vainly repeating: “Granny! Granny!” as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife. I decided to leave the post office, and go and find Robert at his restaurant in order to tell him that, as I was half expecting a telegram which would oblige me to return to Paris, I wanted, just in case, to know the times of the trains. And yet, before reaching this decision, I felt I must make one more attempt to invoke the Daughters of the Night, the Messengers of the Word, the faceless divinities; but the capricious Guardians had not deigned once again to open the miraculous portals, or, more probably, had been unable to do so; untiringly though they invoked, as was their custom, the venerable inventor of printing and the young prince, collector of Impressionist paintings and driver of motor-cars (who was Captain de Borodino’s nephew), Gutenberg and Wagram, those telephone exchanges, left their supplications unanswered, and I came away, feeling that the Invisible would continue to turn a deaf ear.

  When I joined Robert and his friends, I withheld the confession that my heart was no longer with them, that my departure was now irrevocably fixed. Saint-Loup appeared to believe me, but I learned afterwards that he had from the first moment realised that my uncertainty was feigned and that he would not see me again next day. While he and his friends, letting their plates grow cold, searched through the time-table for a train which would take me to Paris, and while the whistling of the locomotives in the cold, starry night could be heard on the line, I certainly no longer felt the same peace of mind as on so many evenings I had derived from the friendship of the former and the latter’s distant passage. And yet they did not fail, this evening, to perform the same office in a different form. My departure oppressed me less when I was no longer obliged to think of it alone, when I felt that the more normal and healthy exertions of my energetic friends, Robert’s brothers-in-arms, were being applied to what was to be done, and of those other strong creatures, the trains, whose comings and goings, morning and night, between Doncières and Paris, broke up in retrospect what had been too compact and unendurable in my long isolation from my grandmother into daily possibilities of return.

  “I don’t doubt the truth of what you say, and that you aren’t thinking of leaving us just yet,” said Saint-Loup, smiling, “but pretend you are going, and come and say good-bye to me tomorrow morning early, otherwise there’s a risk of my not seeing you. I’m going out to lunch, I’ve got leave from the Captain, but I shall have to be back in barracks by two, as we are to be on the march all afternoon. I suppose the man to whose house I’m going, a couple of miles out, will manage to get me back in time.”

  Scarcely had he uttered these words than a messenger came for me from my hotel: the post office had asked for me on the telephone. I ran there, for it was nearly closing time. The word “trunks” recurred incessantly in the answers given me by the clerks. I was in a fever of anxiety, for it was my grandmother who had asked for me. The post office was closing for the night. Finally I got my connexion. “Is that you, Granny?” A woman’s voice, with a strong English accent, answered: “Yes, but I don’t recognise your voice.” Neither did I recognise the voice that was speaking to me; besides, my grandmother called me tu, and not vous. And then all was explained. The young man for whom his grandmother had called on the telephone had a name almost identical with mine, and was staying in an annex of my hotel. This call coming on the very day on which I had been telephoning to my grandmother, I had never for a moment doubted that it was she who was asking for me. Whereas it was by pure coincidence that the post office and the hotel had combined to make a twofold error.

  The following morning
I was late, and failed to catch Saint-Loup, who had already left for the country house where he was invited to lunch. About half past one, having decided to go to the barracks so as to be there as soon as he returned, I was crossing one of the avenues on the way there when I noticed, coming behind me in the same direction as myself, a tilbury which, as it overtook me, obliged me to jump out of its way. An NCO was driving it, wearing a monocle; it was Saint-Loup. By his side was the friend whose guest he had been at lunch, and whom I had met once before at the hotel where we dined. I did not dare shout to Robert since he was not alone, but, in the hope that he would stop and pick me up, I attracted his attention with a sweep of my hat which was by way of being motivated by the presence of a stranger. I knew that Robert was short-sighted, but I should have supposed that if he saw me at all he could not fail to recognise me. He did indeed see my salute, and returned it, but without stopping; driving on at full speed, without a smile, without moving a muscle of his face, he confined himself to keeping his hand raised for a minute to the peak of his cap, as though he were acknowledging the salute of a trooper whom he did not know. I ran to the barracks, but it was a long way; when I arrived, the regiment was forming up on the square, where I was not allowed to remain, and I was heart-broken at not having been able to say good-bye to Saint-Loup. I went up to his room, but there was no sign of him. I inquired after him from a group of sick troopers—recruits who had been excused route marches, the young graduate, one of the “old soldiers,” who were watching the regiment form up.

  “You haven’t seen Sergeant Saint-Loup, by any chance?” I asked.

  “He’s already gone down, sir,” said the old soldier.

  “I never saw him,” said the graduate.

  “You never saw him,” exclaimed the old soldier, losing all interest in me, “you never saw our famous Saint-Loup, the figure he’s cutting with his new breeches! When the Cap’n sees that, officer’s cloth, my word!”

  “Oh, that’s a good one, officer’s cloth,” replied the young graduate, who, having reported sick, was excused marching and ventured, not without some trepidation, to make bold with the veterans. “It isn’t officer’s cloth, it’s just ordinary cloth.”

  “Monsieur?” inquired the old soldier angrily.

  He was indignant that the young graduate should question his assertion that the breeches were made of officer’s cloth, but, being a Breton, born in a village that went by the name of Penguern-Stereden, and having learned French with as much difficulty as if it had been English or German, whenever he felt himself overcome by emotion he would go on saying “Monsieur?” to give himself time to find words, then, after this preparation, let loose his eloquence, confining himself to the repetition of certain words which he knew better than others, but without haste, taking every precaution to gloss over his unfamiliarity with the pronunciation.

  “Ah! so it’s just ordinary cloth?” he broke out eventually with a fury whose intensity increased in direct proportion to the sluggishness of his speech. “Ah! so it’s just ordinary cloth! When I tell you that it is officer’s cloth, when-I-tell-you, since-I-tell-you, it’s because I know, I would think. You’d better not spin your cock-and-bull yarns here.”

  “Oh, well, if you say so,” replied the young graduate, overcome by the force of this argument.

  “There, look, there’s the Cap’n coming along. No, but just look at Saint-Loup, the way he throws his leg out, and his head. Would you call that a non-com? And his eyeglass—it’s all over the shop.”

  I asked these troopers, who did not seem at all embarrassed by my presence, whether I too might look out of the window. They neither objected to my doing so nor moved to make room for me. I saw Captain de Borodino go majestically by, putting his horse into a trot, and seemingly under the illusion that he was taking part in the Battle of Austerlitz. A few loiterers had stopped by the gate to see the regiment file out. Erect on his charger, his face rather plump, his cheeks of an Imperial fullness, his eye clear-sighted, the Prince must have been the victim of some hallucination, as I was myself whenever, after the tram-car had passed, the silence that followed its rumble seemed to me crossed and striated by a vaguely musical palpitation.

  I was wretched at having failed to say good-bye to Saint-Loup, but I went nevertheless, for my only concern was to return to my grandmother; always until then, in this little country town, when I thought of what my grandmother must be doing by herself, I had pictured her as she was when with me, but eliminating myself without taking into account the effects on her of such an elimination; now, I had to free myself at the first possible moment, in her arms, from the phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly called into being by her voice, of a grandmother really separated from me, resigned, having (something I had never yet thought of her as having) a definite age, who had just received a letter from me in the empty house in which I had already imagined Mamma when I had left her to go to Balbec.

  Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of needlework which she will hurriedly put aside if anyone comes in, she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by me. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence—there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to hail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. So it is when some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness. And—like a sick man who, not having looked at his own reflexion for a long time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink protuberance of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt—I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping m
emories, suddenly, in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of Time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, an overburdened old woman whom I did not know.

  My request to be allowed to inspect the Elstirs in Mme de Guermantes’s collection had been met by Saint-Loup with: “I’ll answer for her.” And indeed, unfortunately, it was he and he alone who did answer. We answer readily enough for other people when, setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate these to suit our fancy. No doubt even then we take into account the difficulties due to another person’s nature being different from our own, and we do not fail to appeal to motives with the power to influence that nature—self-interest, persuasion, emotion—which will neutralise any contrary tendencies. But it is still our own nature which imagines these divergences from our nature; it is we who remove these difficulties; it is we who measure these compelling motives. And when we wish to see the other person perform in real life the actions which in our mind’s eye we have made him rehearse, the case is altered, we come up against unseen resistances which may prove insuperable. One of the strongest is doubtless that which may be developed in a woman who does not love, by the rank and unconquerable repulsion she feels for the man who loves her: during the long weeks in which Saint-Loup still did not come to Paris, his aunt, to whom I had no doubt of his having written begging her to do so, never once asked me to call at her house to see the Elstirs.