In a voice so gentle that it seemed to be afraid of hurting me, my mother asked whether it would tire me too much to get up, and, stroking my hands, went on:
“My poor child, you have only your Papa and Mamma to rely on now.”
We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semi-circle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes, lay panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions. The eyelids were closed, and it was because they did not shut properly rather than because they opened that they disclosed a chink of eyeball, blurred, rheumy, reflecting the dimness of an organic vision and of an inward pain. All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom she neither saw nor knew. But if it was only a beast that was stirring there, where was my grandmother? Yes, I could recognise the shape of her nose, which bore no relation now to the rest of her face, but to the corner of which a beauty spot still adhered, and the hand that kept thrusting the blankets aside with a gesture which formerly would have meant that those blankets were oppressing her, but now meant nothing.
Mamma asked me to go for a little vinegar and water with which to sponge my grandmother’s forehead. It was the only thing that refreshed her, thought Mamma, who saw that she was trying to push back her hair. But now one of the servants was signalling to me from the doorway. The news that my grandmother was in extremis had spread like wildfire through the house. One of those “extra helps” whom people engage at exceptional times to relieve the strain on their servants (a practice which gives deathbeds something of the air of social functions) had just opened the front door to the Duc de Guermantes, who was now waiting in the hall and had asked for me: I could not escape him.
“I have just, my dear sir, heard your macabre news. I should like, as a mark of sympathy, to shake your father by the hand.”
I pleaded the difficulty of disturbing him for the moment. M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to set out on a journey. But he was so intensely aware of the importance of the courtesy he was showing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing-room. As a rule, he made a point of carrying out to the last letter the formalities with which he had decided to honour anyone, and took little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin ready.
“Have you sent for Dieulafoy? No? That was a grave error. And if you had only asked me, I would have got him to come—he never refuses me anything, although he has refused the Duchesse de Chartres before now. You see, I set myself above a Princess of the Blood. However, in the presence of death we are all equal,” he added, not in order to assure me that my grandmother was becoming his equal, but perhaps because he felt that a prolonged discussion of his power over Dieulafoy and his pre-eminence over the Duchesse de Chartres would not be in very good taste.
His advice did not in the least surprise me. I knew that, in the Guermantes family, the name of Dieulafoy was regularly quoted (only with slightly more respect) among those of other tradesmen who were “quite the best” in their respective lines. And the old Duchesse de Mortemart, née Guermantes (I never could understand, by the way, why the moment one speaks of a Duchess, one almost invariably says: “The old Duchess of So-and-so,” or, alternatively, in a delicate Watteau tone, if she is still young, “The little Duchess of So-and-so”) would prescribe almost automatically, with a droop of the eyelid, in serious cases: “Dieulafoy, Dieulafoy!” as, if one wanted a place for ices, she would advise “Poiré Blanche,” or for cakes “Rebattet, Rebattet.” But I was not aware that my father had, as a matter of fact, just sent for Dieulafoy.
At this point my mother, who was waiting impatiently for some cylinders of oxygen which would help my grandmother to breathe more easily, came out herself to the hall where she little expected to find M. de Guermantes. I should have liked to conceal him, no matter where. But convinced in his own mind that nothing was more essential, could be more gratifying to her or more indispensable to the maintenance of his reputation as a perfect gentleman, he seized me violently by the arm and, although I defended myself as though against an assault with repeated protestations of “Sir, Sir, Sir,” dragged me across to Mamma, saying: “Will you do me the great honour of presenting me to your lady mother?”, going slightly off pitch on the word “mother.” And it was so plain to him that the honour was hers that he could not help smiling at her even while he was composing a grave face. I had no alternative but to effect the introduction, which triggered off a series of bowings and scrapings: he was about to begin the complete ritual of salutation, and even proposed to enter into conversation, but my mother, beside herself with grief, told me to come at once and did not reply to the speeches of M. de Guermantes who, expecting to be received as a visitor and finding himself instead left alone in the hall, would have been obliged to leave had he not at that moment caught sight of Saint-Loup who had arrived in Paris that morning and had come to us in haste to ask for news. “I say, this is a piece of luck!” cried the Duke joyfully, grabbing his nephew by a button which he nearly tore off, regardless of the presence of my mother who was again crossing the hall. Saint-Loup was not, I think, despite his genuine sympathy, altogether sorry to avoid seeing me, considering his attitude towards me. He left, dragged off by his uncle who, having had something very important to say to him and having very nearly gone down to Doncières on purpose to say it, was beside himself with joy at being able to save himself the trouble. “Upon my soul, if anybody had told me I had only to cross the courtyard to find you here, I should have thought they were pulling my leg. As your friend M. Bloch would say, it’s rather droll.” And as he disappeared down the stairs with his arm round Robert’s shoulder: “All the same,” he went on, “it’s quite clear I must have touched the hangman’s rope or something; I do have the devil’s own luck.” It was not that the Duc de Guermantes was bad-mannered; far from it. But he was one of those men who are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others, who resemble in that respect undertakers and the majority of doctors, and who, after having composed their faces and said “This is a very painful occasion,” having embraced you at a pinch and advised you to rest, cease to regard a deathbed or a funeral as anything but a social gathering of a more or less restricted kind at which, with a joviality that has been checked for a moment only, they scan the room in search of the person whom they can talk to about their own little affairs, or ask to introduce them to someone else, or offer a lift in their carriage when it is time to go home. The Duc de Guermantes, while congratulating himself on the “good wind” that had blown him into the arms of his nephew, was still so surprised at the reception—natural as it was—that he had had from my mother that he declared later on that she was as disagreeable as my father was civil, that she had “aberrations” during which she seemed literally not to hear a word you said to her, and that in his opinion she was out of sorts and perhaps even not quite “all there.” At the same time he was prepared (according to what I was told) to put it down partly at least to the “circumstances” and to aver that my mother had seemed to him greatly “affected” by the sad event. But his limbs were still twitching with all the residue of bows and heel-clickings and backings-out which he had been prevented from using up, and he had so little idea of the real nature of Mamma’s grief that he asked me, the day before the funeral, if I was doing anything to distract her.
A brother-in-law of my grandmother’s, who was a monk, and whom I had never seen, had telegraphed to Austria, where the head of his order was, and having as a special dispensation received permission, arrived that day. Bowed down with grief, he sat by the bedside reading prayers and meditations without, however, taking his gimlet eyes from the invalid’s face. At one point when my grandmother was unconscious, the sight of the priest’s grief began to upset me, and I looked at him tenderly. He appeared surprised by my pity, and then an odd thing happened. He joined his hands in front of his face like a man absorbed in sorrowful meditation, but, on th
e assumption that I would then cease to watch him, left, as I observed, a tiny chink between his fingers. And just as I was looking away, I saw his sharp eye, which had been taking advantage of the shelter of his hands to observe whether my sympathy was sincere. He was crouched there as in the shadow of a confessional. He saw that I had noticed him and at once shut tight the lattice which he had left ajar. I met him again later, but never was any reference made by either of us to that minute. It was tacitly agreed that I had not noticed that he was spying on me. With priests as with alienists, there is always an element of the examining magistrate. Besides, what friend is there, however dear to us, in whose past as in ours there has not been some such episode which we find it more convenient to believe that he must have forgotten?
The doctor gave my grandmother an injection of morphine, and to make her breathing less painful ordered cylinders of oxygen. My mother, the doctor, the nursing sister held these in their hands; as soon as one was exhausted another was put in its place. I had left the room for a few minutes. When I returned I found myself in the presence of a sort of miracle. Accompanied by an incessant low murmur, my grandmother seemed to be singing us a long, joyous song which filled the room, rapid and musical. I soon realised that it was scarcely less unconscious than, as purely mechanical as, the hoarse rattle that I had heard before leaving the room. Perhaps to a slight extent it reflected some improvement brought about by the morphine. Principally it was the result (the air not passing quite in the same way through the bronchial tubes) of a change in the register of her breathing. Released by the twofold action of the oxygen and the morphine, my grandmother’s breath no longer laboured, no longer whined, but, swift and light, glided like a skater towards the delicious fluid. Perhaps the breath, imperceptible as that of the wind in the hollow stem of a reed, was mingled in this song with some of those more human sighs which, released at the approach of death, suggest intimations of pain or happiness in those who have already ceased to feel, and came now to add a more melodious accent, but without changing its rhythm, to that long phrase which rose, soared still higher, then subsided, to spring up once more, from the alleviated chest, in pursuit of the oxygen. Then, having risen to so high a pitch, having been sustained with so much vigour, the chant, mingled with a murmur of supplication in the midst of ecstasy, seemed at times to stop altogether like a spring that has ceased to flow.
Françoise, in any great sorrow, felt the need, however futile—but did not possess the art, however simple—to give it expression. Realising that my grandmother was doomed, it was her own personal impressions that she felt impelled to communicate to us. And all that she could do was to repeat: “I feel quite upset,” in the same tone in which she would say, when she had taken too large a plateful of cabbage broth: “I’ve got a sort of weight on my stomach,” sensations both of which were more natural than she seemed to think. Though so feebly expressed, her grief was nevertheless very great, and was aggravated moreover by the fact that her daughter, detained at Combray (to which this young Parisian now disdainfully referred as “the back of beyond” and where she felt herself becoming a “country bumpkin”), would probably not be able to return in time for the funeral ceremony, which was certain, Françoise felt, to be a superb spectacle. Knowing that we were not inclined to be expansive, she had taken the precaution of bespeaking Jupien in advance for every evening that week. She knew that he would not be free at the time of the funeral. She was determined at least to “go over it all” with him on his return.
For several nights now my father, my grandfather and one of our cousins had been keeping vigil and no longer left the house. Their continuous devotion ended by assuming a mask of indifference, and their interminable enforced idleness around this deathbed made them indulge in the sort of small talk that is an inseparable accompaniment of prolonged confinement in a railway carriage. Besides, this cousin (a nephew of my great-aunt) aroused in me an antipathy as strong as the esteem which he deserved and generally enjoyed. He was always in the offing on such occasions, and was so assiduous in his attentions to the dying that their mourning families, on the pretext that he was delicate, despite his robust appearance, his bass voice and bristling beard, invariably besought him, with the customary euphemisms, not to come to the cemetery. I could tell already that Mamma, who thought of others in the midst of the most crushing grief, would soon be saying to him in different terms what he was in the habit of hearing said on all such occasions:
“Promise me that you won’t come ‘tomorrow.’ Please, for ‘her sake.’ At any rate, you won’t go ‘all the way.’ It’s what she would have wished.”
But it was no use; he was always the first to arrive “at the house,” by reason of which he had been given, in another circle, the nickname (unknown to us) of “No flowers by request.” And before attending “everything” he had always “attended to everything,” which entitled him to the formula: “You, we don’t even thank you.”
“What’s that?” came in a loud voice from my grandfather, who had grown rather deaf and had failed to catch something which our cousin had just said to my father.
“Nothing,” answered the cousin. “I was just saying that I’d heard from Combray this morning. The weather is appalling down there, and here we’ve got almost too much sun.”
“And yet the barometer is very low,” put in my father.
“Where did you say the weather was bad?” asked my grandfather.
“At Combray.”
“Ah! I’m not surprised; whenever the weather’s bad here it’s fine at Combray, and vice versa. Good gracious! Talking of Combray, has anyone remembered to tell Legrandin?”
“Yes, don’t worry about that, it’s been done,” said my cousin, whose cheeks, bronzed by an irrepressible growth of beard, dimpled slightly with the satisfaction of having thought of it.
At this point my father hurried from the room. I supposed that a sudden change, for better or worse, had occurred. It was simply that Dr Dieulafoy had just arrived. My father went to receive him in the drawing-room, like the actor who is next to appear on the stage. He had been sent for not to cure but to certify, almost in a legal capacity. Dr Dieulafoy may indeed have been a great physician, a marvellous teacher; to the several roles in which he excelled, he added another, in which he remained for forty years without a rival, a role as original as that of the confidant, the clown or the noble father, which consisted in coming to certify that a patient was in extremis. His name alone presaged the dignity with which he would sustain the part, and when the servant announced: “M. Dieulafoy,” one thought one was in a Molière play. To the dignity of his bearing was added, without being conspicuous, the litheness of a perfect figure. His exaggerated good looks were tempered by a decorum suited to distressing circumstances. In the sable majesty of his frock-coat the Professor would enter the room, melancholy without affectation, uttering not one word of condolence that could have been construed as insincere, nor being guilty of the slightest infringement of the rules of tact. At the foot of a deathbed it was he and not the Duc de Guermantes who was the great nobleman. Having examined my grandmother without tiring her, and with an excess of reserve which was an act of courtesy to the doctor in charge of the case, he murmured a few words to my father, and bowed respectfully to my mother, to whom I felt that my father had positively to restrain himself from saying: “Professor Dieulafoy.” But already the latter had turned away, not wishing to seem intrusive, and made a perfect exit, simply accepting the sealed envelope that was slipped into his hand. He did not appear to have seen it, and we ourselves were left wondering for a moment whether we had really given it to him, with such a conjurer’s dexterity had he made it vanish without sacrificing one iota of the gravity—which was if anything accentuated—of the eminent consultant in his long frock-coat with its silk lapels, his noble features engraved with the most dignified commiseration. His deliberation and his vivacity combined to show that, even if he had a hundred other calls to make, he did not wish to appear to be in a hurry
. For he was the embodiment of tact, intelligence and kindness. The eminent man is no longer with us. Other physicians, other professors, may have rivalled, may indeed have surpassed him. But the “capacity” in which his knowledge, his physical endowments, his distinguished manners made him supreme exists no longer, for want of any successor capable of taking his place.
Mamma had not even noticed M. Dieulafoy: everything that was not my grandmother no longer existed. I remember (and here I anticipate) that at the cemetery, where we saw her, like a supernatural apparition, tremulously approach the grave, her eyes seeming to gaze after a being that had taken wing and was already far away, my father having remarked to her: “Old Norpois came to the house and to the church and on here; he gave up a most important committee meeting to come; you ought really to say a word to him, he’d be very touched,” my mother, when the Ambassador bowed to her, could do no more than gently lower her face, which showed no sign of tears. A couple of days earlier—to anticipate still before returning to the bedside of the dying woman—while we were watching over her dead body, Françoise, who, not disbelieving entirely in ghosts, was terrified by the least sound, had said: “I believe that’s her.” But instead of fear, it was an ineffable sweetness that her words aroused in my mother, who would have dearly wished that the dead could return, so as to have her mother with her sometimes still.
To return now to those last hours, “You heard about the telegram her sisters sent us?” my grandfather asked the cousin.
“Yes, Beethoven, I’ve been told. It’s worth framing. Still, I’m not surprised.”
“And my poor wife was so fond of them, too,” said my grandfather, wiping away a tear. “We mustn’t blame them. They’re stark mad, both of them, as I’ve always said. What’s the matter now? Aren’t you going on with the oxygen?”
The Guermantes Way Page 42