My father would in addition have been glad to know whether the Ambassador’s support would be worth many votes to him at the Institut, for which he had thoughts of standing as an independent candidate. To tell the truth, while he did not venture to doubt that he would have M. de Norpois’s support, he was by no means certain of it. He had thought it merely malicious gossip when he was told at the Ministry that M. de Norpois, wishing to be himself the only representative there of the Institut, would put every possible obstacle in the way of my father’s candidature, which would moreover embarrass him at the moment since he was supporting another candidate. And yet, when M. Leroy-Beaulieu had first advised him to stand, and had calculated his chances, my father had been struck by the fact that, among the colleagues upon whom he could count for support, the eminent economist had not mentioned M. de Norpois. He dared not ask the Ambassador point-blank, but hoped that I would return from my visit to Mme de Villeparisis with his election as good as secured. This visit was now imminent. M. de Norpois’s endorsement, capable of ensuring my father the votes of at least two thirds of the Academy,8 seemed to him all the more probable since the Ambassador’s willingness to oblige was proverbial, those who liked him least admitting that no one else took such pleasure in being of service. And besides, at the Ministry, his patronage was extended to my father far more markedly than to any other official.
My father had another encounter about this time, which caused him extreme indignation as well as astonishment. One day he ran into Mme Sazerat, whose life in Paris was restricted by her comparative poverty to occasional visits to a friend. There was no one who bored my father quite so intensely as did Mme Sazerat, so much so that Mamma was obliged, once a year, to intercede with him in sweet and suppliant tones: “My dear, I really must invite Mme Sazerat to the house, just once; she won’t stay long”; and even: “Listen, dear, I’m going to ask you to make a great sacrifice; do go and call on Mme Sazerat. You know I hate bothering you, but it would be so nice of you.” He would laugh, raise various objections, and go to pay the call. And so, for all that Mme Sazerat did not appeal to him, on catching sight of her in the street my father went towards her, doffing his hat; but to his profound astonishment Mme Sazerat confined her greeting to the frigid bow enforced by politeness towards a person who is guilty of some disgraceful action or has been condemned to live henceforth in another hemisphere. My father had come home speechless with rage. Next day my mother met Mme Sazerat in someone’s house. She did not offer my mother her hand, but merely smiled at her with a vague and melancholy air as one smiles at a person with whom one used to play as a child, but with whom one has since severed all connexions because she has led an abandoned life, has married a jailbird or (what is worse still) a divorced man. Now, from time immemorial my parents had accorded to Mme Sazerat, and inspired in her, the most profound respect. But (and of this my mother was ignorant) Mme Sazerat, alone of her kind at Combray, was a Dreyfusard. My father, a friend of M. Méline,9 was convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. He had sharply sent about their business those colleagues who had asked him to sign a petition for a retrial. He refused to speak to me for a week after learning that I had chosen to take a different line. His opinions were well known. He came near to being looked upon as a Nationalist. As for my grandmother, who alone of the family seemed likely to be stirred by a generous doubt, whenever anyone spoke to her of the possible innocence of Dreyfus, she gave a shake of her head the meaning of which we did not at the time understand, but which was like the gesture of a person who has been interrupted while thinking of more serious things. My mother, torn between her love for my father and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an impartiality which she expressed by silence. Finally my grandfather, who adored the Army (albeit his duties with the National Guard had been the bugbear of his riper years), could never see a regiment march past the garden railings at Combray without baring his head as the colonel and the colours passed. All this was quite enough to make Mme Sazerat, who was thoroughly aware of the disinterestedness and integrity of my father and grandfather, regard them as pillars of Injustice. We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime. As soon as she knew my father to be an anti-Dreyfusard she put continents and centuries between herself and him. Which explains why, across such an interval of time and space, her greeting had been imperceptible to my father, and why it had not occurred to her to shake hands or to say a few words which would never have carried across the worlds that lay between.
Saint-Loup, who was due to come to Paris, had promised to take me to Mme de Villeparisis’s, where I hoped, though I had not said so to him, that we might meet Mme de Guermantes. He invited me to lunch in a restaurant with his mistress, whom we were afterwards to accompany to a rehearsal. We were to go out in the morning and call for her at her home on the outskirts of Paris.
I had asked Saint-Loup if the restaurant to which we went for lunch (in the lives of young noblemen with money to spend the restaurant plays as important a part as do bales of merchandise in Arabian tales) could for preference be the one to which Aimé had told me that he would be going as head waiter until the Balbec season opened. It was a great attraction to me who dreamed of so many journeys and made so few to see again someone who formed part not merely of my memories of Balbec but of Balbec itself, who went there year after year and, when ill health or my studies compelled me to stay in Paris, would be watching just the same, during the long July afternoons while he waited for the guests to come in to dinner, the sun creep down the sky and set in the sea, through the glass panels of the great dining-room behind which, at the hour when the light died, the motionless wings of vessels, smoky blue in the distance, looked like exotic and nocturnal butterflies in a show-case. Himself magnetised by his contact with the powerful lodestone of Balbec, this head waiter became in turn a magnet for me. I hoped by talking to him to enter in advance into communication with Balbec, to have realised here in Paris something of the delights of travel.
I set out first thing, leaving Françoise at home to moan over the affianced footman who had once again been prevented, the evening before, from going to see his betrothed. Françoise had found him in tears; he had been itching to go and strike the porter, but had restrained himself, for he valued his place.
Before reaching Saint-Loup’s, where he was to be waiting for me at the door, I ran into Legrandin, of whom we had lost sight since our Combray days, and who, though now quite grey, had preserved his air of youthful candour. Seeing me, he stopped.
“Ah! so it’s you,” he exclaimed, “a man of fashion, and in a frock-coat too! That is a livery in which my independent spirit would be ill at ease. It is true that you are a man of the world, I suppose, and go out paying calls! In order to go and meditate, as I do, beside some half-ruined tomb, my bow-tie and jacket are not out of place. You know how I admire the charming quality of your soul; that is why I tell you how deeply I regret that you should go forth and betray it among the Gentiles. By being capable of remaining for a moment in the nauseating atmosphere of the salons—for me, unbreathable—you pronounce on your own future the condemnation, the damnation of the Prophet. I can see it all: you frequent the frivolous-minded, the gracious livers—that is the vice of our contemporary bourgeoisie. Ah, those aristocrats! The Terror was greatly to blame for not cutting the heads off every one of them. They are all disreputable scum, when they are not simply dreary idiots. Still, my poor boy, if that sort of thing amuses you! While you are on your way to some tea-party your old friend will be more fortunate than you, for alone in an outlying suburb he will be watching the pink moon rise in a violet sky. The truth is that I scarcely belong to this earth upon which I feel myself such an exile; it takes all the force of the law of gravity to hold me here, to keep me from escaping into another sphere. I belong to a different planet. Good-bye; do not take amiss the old-time frankness of the peasant of the Vivonne, who has also remained a peasant of the Danube. To prove my sincere regard for you
, I shall send you my latest novel. But you will not care for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not fin de siècle enough for you; it is too frank, too honest. What you want is Bergotte, you have confessed it, gamy stuff for the jaded palates of refined voluptuaries. I suppose I am looked upon, in your set, as an old stick-in-the-mud; I make the mistake of putting my heart into what I write: that is no longer done; besides, the life of the people is not distinguished enough to interest your little snobbicules. Go, get you gone, try to recall at times the words of Christ: ‘This do, and thou shalt live.’ Farewell, friend.”
It was not with any particular ill-humour against Legrandin that I parted from him. Certain memories are like friends in common, they can bring about reconciliations; set down amid fields of buttercups strewn with the ruins of feudal battlements, the little wooden bridge still joined us, Legrandin and me, as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne.
After coming out of a Paris in which, although spring had begun, the trees on the boulevards had hardly put on their first leaves, it was a marvel to Saint-Loup and myself, when the circle train had set us down at the suburban village in which his mistress was living, to see each little garden decked with the huge festal altars of the fruit-trees in blossom. It was like one of those peculiar, poetic, ephemeral, local festivals which people travel long distances to attend on certain fixed occasions, but this one was given by Nature. The blossom of the cherry-tree is stuck so close to its branches, like a white sheath, that from a distance, among the other trees that showed as yet scarcely a flower or leaf, one might on this day of sunshine that was still so cold have taken it for snow that had remained clinging there, having melted everywhere else. But the tall pear-trees enveloped each house, each modest courtyard, in a more spacious, more uniform, more dazzling whiteness, as if all the dwellings, all the enclosed spaces in the village, were on their way to make their first communion on the same solemn day.
These villages in the environs of Paris still have at their gates parks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were the “follies” of the stewards and mistresses of the great. A market gardener had utilised one of these, which was situated on low ground beside the road, for his fruit-trees (or had simply, perhaps, preserved the plan of an immense orchard of former days). Laid out in quincunxes, these pear-trees, more spaced-out and less advanced than those that I had seen, formed great quadrilaterals—separated by low walls—of white blossom, on each side of which the light fell differently, so that all these airy roofless chambers seemed to belong to a Palace of the Sun, such as one might find in Crete; and they reminded one also of the different ponds of a reservoir, or of those parts of the sea which man has subdivided for some fishery, or to plant oyster-beds, when one saw, according to their orientation, the light play upon the espaliers as upon springtime waters, and coax into unfolding here and there, gleaming amid the open-work, azure-panelled trellis of the branches, the foaming whiteness of a creamy, sunlit flower.
It had been a country village, and still had its old mairie, sunburned and mellow, in front of which, in the place of maypoles and streamers, three tall pear-trees were elegantly beflagged with white satin as though for some local civic festival.
Never had Robert spoken to me more tenderly of his mistress than he did during this journey. She alone had taken root in his heart; to his future career in the Army, his position in society, his family, he was not, of course, indifferent, but they counted for nothing beside the smallest thing that concerned his mistress. That alone had any importance in his eyes, infinitely more importance than the Guermantes and all the kings of the earth put together. I do not know whether he formulated to himself the notion that she was of a superior essence to the rest of the world, but he was exclusively preoccupied and concerned with what affected her. Through her and for her he was capable of suffering, of being happy, perhaps of killing. There was really nothing that interested, that could excite him except what his mistress wanted, what she was going to do, what was going on, discernible at most in fleeting changes of expression, in the narrow expanse of her face and behind her privileged brow. So nice-minded in all else, he looked forward to the prospect of a brilliant marriage, solely in order to be able to continue to maintain and keep her. If one had asked oneself what was the value that he set on her, I doubt whether one could ever have imagined a figure high enough. If he did not marry her, it was because a practical instinct warned him that as soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would leave him, or would at least live as she pleased, and that he must retain his hold on her by keeping her in expectation. For he admitted the possibility that she did not love him. No doubt the general malady called love must have forced him—as it forces all men—to believe at times that she did. But in his heart of hearts he felt that her love for him was not inconsistent with her remaining with him only on account of his money, and that as soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would make haste (the dupe of her literary friends and their theories, and yet still loving him, he thought) to leave him.
“Today, if she’s nice,” he confided to me, “I’m going to give her a present that will make her very happy. It’s a necklace she saw at Boucheron’s. It’s rather too much for me just at present—thirty thousand francs. But, poor puss, she doesn’t have much pleasure in her life. She will be jolly pleased with it, I know. She mentioned it to me and told me she knew somebody who would perhaps give it to her. I don’t believe it’s true, but just in case, I arranged with Boucheron, who is our family jeweller, to reserve it for me. I’m so happy to think that you’re going to meet her. She’s nothing so very wonderful to look at, you know” (I could see that he thought just the opposite and had said this only to make my admiration the greater). “What she has above all is marvellous judgment: she’ll perhaps be afraid to talk much in front of you, but I rejoice in advance over what she’ll say to me about you afterwards. You know she says things one can go on thinking about for hours; there’s really something about her that’s quite Pythian.”
On our way to her house we passed a row of little gardens, and I was obliged to stop, for they were all dazzlingly aflower with pear and cherry blossom; as empty, no doubt, and lifeless only yesterday as a house that is still to let, they were suddenly peopled and adorned by these newcomers, arrived overnight, whose beautiful white garments could be seen through the railings along the garden paths.
“I’ll tell you what—I can see you’d rather stop and look at all that and be poetical,” said Robert, “so don’t budge from here, will you—my friend’s house is quite close, and I’ll go and fetch her.”
While I waited I strolled up and down the road, past these modest gardens. If I raised my head I could see now and then girls sitting at the windows, but outside, in the open air, at the height of a half-landing, dangling here and there among the foliage, light and pliant in their fresh mauve frocks, clusters of young lilacs swayed in the breeze without heeding the passer-by who raised his eyes towards their green arbour. I recognised in them the purple-clad platoons posted at the entrance to M. Swann’s park in the warm spring afternoons, like an enchanting rustic tapestry. I took a path which led me into a meadow. A cold wind swept through it, as at Combray, but in the middle of this rich, moist, rural land, which might have been on the banks of the Vivonne, there had nevertheless arisen, punctual at the trysting place like all its band of brothers, a great white pear-tree which waved smilingly in the sun’s face, like a curtain of light materialised and made palpable, its flowers shaken by the breeze but polished and glazed with silver by the sun’s rays.
Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and then, in this woman who was for him the epitome of love, of all the sweet things of life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined as in a tabernacle, was the object that occupied incessantly his toiling imagination, whom he felt that he would never really know, as to whom he asked himself what could be her secret self, behind the veil of eyes and flesh—in this woman I recognised instantaneousl
y “Rachel when from the Lord,” she who, but a few years since (women change their situation so rapidly in that world, when they do change) used to say to the procuress: “Tomorrow evening, then, if you want me for someone, you’ll send round for me, won’t you?”
And when they had “come round” for her, and she found herself alone in the room with the “someone,” she knew so well what was required of her that after locking the door, as a womanly precaution or a ritual gesture, she would quickly remove all her clothes, as one does before the doctor who is going to examine one, and did not pause in the process unless the “someone,” not caring for nudity, told her that she might keep on her shift, as specialists do sometimes, who, having an extremely fine ear and being afraid of their patient’s catching a chill, are satisfied with listening to his breathing and the beating of his heart through his shirt. I sensed that on this woman—whose whole life, whose every thought, whose entire past and all the men by whom at one time or another she had been had, were to me so utterly unimportant that if she had told me about them I should have listened only out of politeness and scarcely have heard—the anxiety, the torment, the love of Saint-Loup had been concentrated in such a way as to make, out of what was for me a mechanical toy, the cause of endless suffering, the very object and reward of existence. Seeing these two elements separately (because I had known “Rachel when from the Lord” in a house of ill fame), I realised that many women for the sake of whom men live, suffer, take their own lives, may be in themselves or for other people what Rachel was for me. The idea that anyone could be tormented by curiosity with regard to her life amazed me. I could have told Robert of any number of her unchastities, which seemed to me the most uninteresting things in the world. And how they would have pained him! And what had he not given to learn them, without avail!
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