The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  Then for the first time my mother’s eyes gazed passionately into those of my grandmother, not wishing to see the rest of her face, and she replied, beginning the list of those false promises which we swear but are unable to keep:

  “Mamma, you’ll soon be quite well again, your daughter will see to that.”

  And gathering up all her most ardent love, all her determination that her mother should recover, she entrusted them to a kiss which she accompanied with her whole mind, with her whole being until it flowered upon her lips, and bent down to lay it humbly, reverently, on the beloved forehead.

  My grandmother complained of a sort of alluvial deposit of bedclothes which kept gathering all the time in the same place, over her left leg, and which she could never manage to lift off. But she did not realise that she was herself the cause of this (so that day after day she accused Françoise unjustly of not “doing” her bed properly). By a convulsive movement she kept flinging to that side the whole flood of those billowing blankets of fine wool, which gathered there like the sand in a bay which is very soon transformed into a beach (unless a breakwater is built) by the successive deposits of the tide.

  My mother and I (whose mendacity was exposed before we spoke by the obnoxious perspicaciousness of Françoise) would not even admit that my grandmother was seriously ill, as though such an admission might give pleasure to her enemies (not that she had any) and it was more loving to feel that she was not so bad as all that, in short from the same instinctive sentiment which had led me to suppose that Andrée pitied Albertine too much to be really fond of her. The same individual phenomena are reproduced in the mass, in great crises. In a war, the man who does not love his country says nothing against it, but regards it as doomed, pities it, sees everything in the blackest colours.

  Françoise was infinitely helpful to us owing to her faculty of doing without sleep, of performing the most arduous tasks. And if, when she had gone to bed after several nights spent in the sickroom, we were obliged to call her a quarter of an hour after she had fallen asleep, she was so happy to be able to perform painful duties as if they had been the simplest things in the world that, far from baulking, she would show signs of satisfaction tinged with modesty. Only when the time came for mass, or for breakfast, even if my grandmother had been in her death throes, Françoise would have slipped away in order not to be late. She neither could nor would let her place be taken by her young footman. It was true that she had brought from Combray an extremely exalted idea of everyone’s duty towards ourselves; she would not have tolerated that any of our servants should “fail” us. This doctrine had made her so noble, so imperious, so efficient an instructor that we had never had in our house any servants, however corrupt, who had not speedily modified and purified their conception of life so far as to refuse to touch the usual commissions from tradesmen and to come rushing—however little they might previously have sought to oblige—to take from my hands and not let me tire myself by carrying the smallest parcel. But at Combray Françoise had contracted also—and had brought with her to Paris—the habit of not being able to put up with any assistance in her work. The sight of anyone coming to help her seemed to her like a deadly insult, and servants had remained for weeks without receiving from her any response to their morning greeting, had even gone off on their holidays without her bidding them good-bye or their guessing her reason, which was simply and solely that they had offered to do a share of her work on some day when she had not been well. And at this moment when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise’s duties seemed to her peculiarly her own. She would not allow herself, as the official incumbent, to be done out of her role in the ritual of these gala days. And so her young footman, discarded by her, did not know what to do with himself, and not content with having copied the butler’s example and supplied himself with note-paper from my desk, had begun as well to borrow volumes of poetry from my bookshelves. He sat reading them for a good half of the day, out of admiration for the poets who had written them, but also in order, during the rest of his time, to sprinkle with quotations the letters which he wrote to his friends in his native village. True, his intention was to dazzle them. But since he was somewhat lacking in logic he had formed the notion that these poems, picked out at random from my shelves, were things of common currency to which it was customary to refer. So much so that in writing to these peasants whom he expected to impress, he interspersed his own reflexions with lines from Lamartine, just as he might have said “Who laughs last, laughs longest!” or merely “How are you keeping?”

  Because of her acute pain my grandmother was given morphine. Unfortunately, if this relieved the pain it also increased the quantity of albumin. The blows which we aimed at the evil which had settled inside her were always wide of the mark, and it was she, it was her poor interposed body that had to bear them, without her ever uttering more than a faint groan by way of complaint. And the pain that we caused her found no compensation in any benefit that we were able to give her. The ferocious beast we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded in grazing; we merely enraged it even more, hastening perhaps the moment when the captive would be devoured. On certain days when the discharge of albumin had been excessive Cottard, after some hesitation, stopped the morphine. During these brief moments in which he deliberated, in which the relative dangers of one and another course of treatment fought it out between them in his mind until he arrived at a decision, this man who was so insignificant and so commonplace had something of the greatness of a general who, vulgar in all things else, moves us by his decisiveness when the fate of the country is at stake and, after a moment’s reflexion, he decides upon what is from the military point of view the wisest course, and gives the order: “Advance eastwards.” Medically, however little hope there might be of bringing this attack of uraemia to an end, it was important not to put a strain on the kidneys. But, on the other hand, when my grandmother was given no morphine, her pain became unbearable; she would perpetually attempt a certain movement which it was difficult for her to perform without groaning: to a great extent, pain is a sort of need on the part of the organism to take cognisance of a new state which is troubling it, to adapt its sensibility to that state. We can discern this origin of pain in the case of certain discomforts which are not such for everyone. Into a room filled with pungent smoke two men of coarse fibre will come and attend to their business; a third, more sensitively constituted, will betray an incessant discomfort. His nostrils will continue to sniff anxiously the odour which he ought, one would think, to try not to notice but which he will keep on attempting to accommodate, by a more exact apprehension of it, to his troubled sense of smell. Hence the fact that an intense preoccupation will prevent one from complaining of a toothache. When my grandmother was suffering thus the sweat trickled over the mauve expanse of her forehead, glueing her white locks to it, and if she thought that none of us was in the room she would cry out: “Oh, it’s dreadful!”—but if she caught sight of my mother, at once she devoted all her energy to banishing from her face every sign of pain, or alternatively repeated the same plaints accompanying them with explanations which gave a different sense retrospectively to those which my mother might have overheard:

  “Ah! my dear, it’s dreadful to have to stay in bed on a beautiful sunny day like this when one wants to be out in the fresh air—I’ve been weeping with rage against your instructions.”

  But she could not get rid of the anguish in her eyes, the sweat on her forehead, the convulsive start, checked at once, of her limbs.

  “I’m not in pain, I’m complaining because I’m not lying very comfortably, I feel my hair is untidy, I feel sick, I knocked my head against the wall.”

  And my mother, at the foot of the bed, riveted to that suffering as though, by dint of piercing with her gaze that pain-racked forehead, that body which contained the evil thing, she must ultimately succeed in reaching and removing it, my mother said:

  “No, no, Mamma dear, we won’t let you suffer like that, we’ll f
ind something to take it away, have patience just for a moment; let me give you a kiss, darling—no, you’re not to move.”

  And stooping over the bed, with her knees bent, almost kneeling on the ground, as though by an exercise of humility she would have a better chance of making acceptable the impassioned gift of herself, she lowered towards my grandmother her whole life contained in her face as in a ciborium which she was holding out to her, adorned with dimples and folds so passionate, so sorrowful, so sweet that one could not have said whether they had been engraved on it by a kiss, a sob or a smile. My grandmother too tried to lift up her face to Mamma’s. It was so altered that probably, had she been strong enough to go out, she would have been recognised only by the feather in her hat. Her features, as though during a modelling session, seemed to be straining, with an effort which distracted her from everything else, to conform to some particular model which we failed to identify. The work of the sculptor was nearing its end, and if my grandmother’s face had shrunk in the process, it had at the same time hardened. The veins that traversed it seemed those not of marble, but of some more rugged stone. Permanently thrust forward by the difficulty that she found in breathing, and as permanently withdrawn into itself by exhaustion, her face, worn, diminished, terrifyingly expressive, seemed like the rude, flushed, purplish, desperate face of some wild guardian of a tomb in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture. But the work was not yet completed. Afterwards, the sculpture would have to be broken, and into that tomb—so painfully and tensely guarded—be lowered.

  At one of those moments when, as the saying goes, we did not know which way to turn, since my grandmother was coughing and sneezing a good deal, we took the advice of a relative who assured us that if we sent for the specialist X——the trouble would be over in a couple of days. Society people say that sort of thing about their own doctors, and their friends believe them just as Françoise always believed the advertisements in the newspapers. The specialist came with his bag packed with all the colds and coughs of his other patients, like Aeolus’s goatskin. My grandmother refused point-blank to let herself be examined. And we, out of consideration for this doctor who had been put to trouble for nothing, deferred to the desire that he expressed to inspect each of our noses in turn, although there was nothing the matter with any of them. According to him, however, there was; everything, whether headache or colic, heart-disease or diabetes, was a disease of the nose that had been wrongly diagnosed. To each of us he said: “I should like to have another look at that little nozzle. Don’t put it off too long. I’ll soon clear it for you with a hot needle.” Of course we paid no attention whatsoever. And yet we asked ourselves: “Clear it of what?” In a word, every one of our noses was infected; his mistake lay only in his use of the present tense. For by the following day his examination and provisional treatment had taken effect. Each of us had his or her catarrh. And when in the street he ran into my father doubled up with a cough, he smiled to think that an ignorant layman might suppose the attack to be due to his intervention. He had examined us at a moment when we were already ill.

  My grandmother’s illness gave occasion to various people to manifest an excess or deficiency of sympathy which surprised us quite as much as the sort of chance which led one or another of them to reveal to us connecting links of circumstances, or even of friendships, which we had never suspected. And the signs of interest shown by the people who called incessantly at the house to inquire revealed to us the gravity of an illness which, until then, we had not sufficiently detached from the countless painful impressions that we received by my grandmother’s sickbed. Informed by telegram, her sisters declined to leave Combray. They had discovered a musician there who gave them excellent chamber recitals, in listening to which they felt they could enjoy better than by the invalid’s bedside a contemplative melancholy, a sorrowful exaltation, the form of which was, to say the least of it, unusual. Mme Sazerat wrote to Mamma, but in the tone of a person whom the sudden breaking off of an engagement (the cause of the rupture being Dreyfusism) has separated from one for ever. Bergotte, on the other hand, came every day and spent several hours with me.

  He had always enjoyed going regularly for some time to the same house where he had no need to stand on ceremony. But formerly it had been in order that he might talk without being interrupted; now it was so that he might sit for as long as he chose in silence, without being expected to talk. For he was very ill, some people said with albuminuria, like my grandmother, while according to others he had a tumour. He grew steadily weaker; it was with difficulty that he climbed our staircase, with greater difficulty still that he went down it. Even though he held on to the banisters he often stumbled, and he would, I believe, have stayed at home had he not been afraid of losing altogether the habit and the capacity of going out, he, the “man with the goatee” whom I remembered as being so alert not very long since. He was now quite blind, and often he even had trouble with his speech.

  But at the same time, by a directly opposite process, the corpus of his work, known only to a few literary people at the period when Mme Swann used to patronise their timid efforts to disseminate it, now grown in stature and strength in the eyes of all, had acquired an extraordinary power of expansion among the general public. No doubt it often happens that only after his death does a writer become famous. But it was while he was still alive, and during his own slow progress towards approaching death, that this writer was able to watch the progress of his works towards Renown. A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of his name stops short at his gravestone. In the deafness of eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult. He still moved about, though with difficulty, while his books, cavorting like daughters whom one loves but whose impetuous youthfulness and noisy pleasures tire one, brought day after day to his very bedside a crowd of fresh admirers.

  The visits which he now began to pay us came for me several years too late, for I no longer had the same admiration for him as of old. This was in no sense incompatible with the growth of his reputation. A man’s work seldom becomes completely understood and successful before that of another writer, still obscure, has begun, among a few more exigent spirits, to substitute a fresh cult for the one that has almost ceased to command observance. In Bergotte’s books, which I constantly re-read, his sentences stood out as clearly before my eyes as my own thoughts, the furniture in my room and the carriages in the street. All the details were easily visible, not perhaps precisely as one had always seen them, but at any rate as one was accustomed to see them now. But a new writer had recently begun to publish work in which the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me that I could understand hardly anything of what he wrote. He would say, for instance: “The hose-pipes admired the splendid upkeep of the roads” (and so far it was simple, I followed him smoothly along those roads) “which set out every five minutes from Briand and Claudel.” At that point I ceased to understand, because I had expected the name of a place and was given that of a person instead. Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed but I myself that lacked the strength and agility necessary to reach the end. I would start afresh, striving tooth and nail to reach the point from which I would see the new relationships between things. And each time, after I had got about half-way through the sentence, I would fall back again, as later on, in the Army, in my attempts at the exercises on the horizontal bar. I felt nevertheless for the new writer the admiration which an awkward boy who gets nought for gymnastics feels when he watches another more nimble. And from then onwards I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose limpidity struck me as a deficiency. There was a time when people recognised things quite easily when it was Fromentin who had painted them, and could not recognise them at all when it was Renoir.

  People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painte
r. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the original writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent.

  The writer who had taken Bergotte’s place in my affections wearied me not by the incoherence but by the novelty—perfectly coherent—of associations which I was unaccustomed to following. The point, always the same, at which I felt myself falter indicated the identity of each renewed feat of acrobatics that I must undertake. Moreover, when once in a thousand times I did succeed in following the writer to the end of his sentence, what I saw there always had a humour, a truthfulness and a charm similar to those which I had found long ago in reading Bergotte, only more delightful. I reflected that it was not so many years since a renewal of the world similar to that which I now expected his successor to produce had been wrought for me by Bergotte himself. And I was led to wonder whether there was any truth in the distinction which we are always making between art, which is no more advanced now than in Homer’s day, and science with its continuous progress. Perhaps, on the contrary, art was in this respect like science; each new original writer seemed to me to have advanced beyond the stage of his immediate predecessor; and who was to say whether in twenty years’ time, when I should be able to accompany without strain or effort the newcomer of today, another might not emerge in the face of whom the present one would go the way of Bergotte?