The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  No doubt in the past, long before I received Saint-Loup’s letter and when there was as yet no question of Mme de Stermaria, the island in the Bois had seemed to me to be specially designed for pleasure, because I had found myself going there to taste the bitterness of having no pleasure to enjoy there. It is to the shores of the lake from which one goes to that island, and along which, in the last weeks of summer, those ladies of Paris who have not yet left for the country take the air, that, not knowing where to look for her, or whether indeed she has not already left Paris, one wanders in the hope of seeing the girl go by with whom one fell in love at the last ball of the season, whom one will not have a chance of meeting again on any evening until the following spring. Sensing it to be at least the eve, if not the morrow, of the beloved’s departure, one follows along the brink of the shimmering water those pleasant paths by which already a first red leaf is blooming like a last rose, one scans that horizon where, by a contrivance the opposite of that employed in those panoramas beneath whose rotundas the wax figures in the foreground impart to the painted canvas beyond them the illusory appearance of depth and mass, our eyes, travelling without transition from the cultivated park to the natural heights of Meudon and the Mont Valérien, do not know where to set the boundary, and make the natural country trespass upon the handiwork of the gardener, the artificial charm of which they project far beyond its own limits; like those rare birds reared in liberty in a botanical garden which every day, wherever their winged excursions may chance to take them, sound an exotic note here or there in the surrounding woods. Between the last festivity of summer and one’s winter exile, one anxiously ranges that romantic world of chance encounters and lover’s melancholy, and one would be no more surprised to learn that it was situated outside the mapped universe than if, at Versailles, looking down from the terrace, an observatory round which the clouds gather against the blue sky in the manner of Van der Meulen, after having thus risen above the bounds of nature, one were informed that, there where nature begins again at the end of the great canal, the villages which one cannot make out, on a horizon as dazzling as the sea, are called Fleurus or Nijmegen.

  And then, the last carriage having rolled by, when one feels with pain that she will not now come, one goes to dine on the island; above the quivering poplars which endlessly recall the mysteries of evening more than they respond to them, a pink cloud puts a last touch of living colour into the tranquil sky. A few drops of rain fall soundlessly on the ancient water which, in its divine infancy, remains always the colour of the weather and continually forgets the reflexions of clouds and flowers. And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering twilight, a mist rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist darkness along the water’s edge, where at the most the silent passage of a swan startles one like the momentarily wide-open eyes and the swift smile of a child in bed at night whom one did not suppose to be awake. Then one longs all the more to have a lover by one’s side because one feels alone and can believe oneself to be far away.

  But to this island, where even in summer there was often a mist, how much more gladly would I have brought Mme de Stermaria now that the cold season, the end of autumn had come! If the weather that had prevailed since Sunday had not in itself rendered grey and maritime the scenes in which my imagination was living—as other seasons made them balmy, luminous, Italian—the hope of making Mme de Stermaria mine in a few days’ time would have been quite enough to raise, twenty times in an hour, a curtain of mist in my monotonously yearning imagination. In any event the fog which since yesterday had risen even in Paris not only made me think incessantly of the native province of the young woman whom I had invited, but since it was probable that it must after sunset invade the Bois, and especially the shores of the lake, far more thickly than the streets of the town, I felt that for me it would give the Isle of Swans a hint of that Breton island whose marine and misty atmosphere had always enveloped in my mind like a garment the pale silhouette of Mme de Stermaria. Of course when we are young, at the age I had reached at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, our desires, our beliefs confer on a woman’s clothing an individual personality, an irreducible essence. We pursue the reality. But by dint of allowing it to escape we end by noticing that, after all those vain endeavours which have led to nothing, something solid subsists, which is what we have been seeking. We begin to isolate, to identify what we love, we try to procure it for ourselves, if only by a stratagem. Then, in the absence of our vanished faith, costume fills the gap, by means of a deliberate illusion. I knew quite well that within half an hour of home I should not find myself in Brittany. But in walking arm in arm with Mme de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water’s edge, I should be acting like other men who, unable to penetrate the walls of a convent, do at least, before enjoying a woman, clothe her in the habit of a nun.

  I could even look forward to hearing with her a lapping of waves, for, on the day before our dinner, a storm broke over Paris. I was beginning to shave before going to the island to engage the room (although at this time of year the island was empty and the restaurant deserted) and order the food for our dinner next day when Françoise came in to announce the arrival of Albertine. I had her shown in at once, indifferent to her finding me disfigured by a bristling chin, although at Balbec I had never felt smart enough for her and she had cost me as much agitation and distress as Mme de Stermaria did now. The latter, I was determined, must go away with the best possible impression from our evening together. Accordingly I asked Albertine to come with me there and then to the island to choose the menu. She to whom one gives everything is so quickly replaced by another that one is surprised to find oneself giving all that one has afresh at every moment, without any hope of future reward. At my suggestion the smiling rosy face beneath Albertine’s flat toque, which came down very low, over her eyebrows, seemed to hesitate. She had probably other plans; if so she sacrificed them willingly, to my great satisfaction, for I attached the utmost importance to having with me a young housewife who would know a great deal more than me about ordering dinner.

  It is certain that she had represented something utterly different for me at Balbec. But our intimacy with a woman with whom we are in love, even when we do not consider it close enough at the time, creates between her and us, in spite of the shortcomings that pain us while our love lasts, social ties which outlast our love and even the memory of our love. Then, in the woman who is now no more to us than a means of approach, an avenue towards others, we are just as astonished and amused to learn from our memory what her name meant originally to that other person we formerly were as if, after giving a cabman an address in the Boulevard des Capucines or the Rue du Bac, thinking only of the person we are going to see there, we remind ourselves that these names were once those of the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood on the site and of the ferry across the Seine.

  At the same time, my Balbec desires had so generously ripened Albertine’s body, had gathered and stored in it savours so fresh and sweet that, during our expedition to the Bois, while the wind like a careful gardener shook the trees, brought down the fruit, swept up the fallen leaves, I told myself that had there been any risk of Saint-Loup’s being mistaken, or of my having misunderstood his letter, so that my dinner with Mme de Stermaria might lead to no satisfactory result, I should have made an appointment for later the same evening with Albertine, in order to forget, during an hour of purely sensual pleasure, holding in my arms a body of which my curiosity had once computed, weighed up all the possible charms in which it now abounded, the emotions and perhaps the regrets of this burgeoning love for Mme de Stermaria. And certainly, if I could have supposed that Mme de Stermaria would grant me none of her favours at our first meeting, I should have formed a slightly depressing picture of my evening with her. I knew only too well from experience how bizarrely the two stages which succeed one another in the first phase of our love for a woman
whom we have desired without knowing her, loving in her rather the particular kind of existence in which she is steeped than her still unfamiliar self—how bizarrely those two stages are reflected in the domain of reality, that is to say no longer in ourselves but in our meetings with her. Without ever having talked to her, we have hesitated, tempted as we were by the poetic charm which she represented for us. Shall it be this woman or another? And suddenly our dreams become focused on her, are indistinguishable from her. The first meeting with her which will shortly follow should reflect this dawning love. Nothing of the sort. As if it were necessary for material reality to have its first phase also, loving her already we talk to her in the most trivial fashion: “I asked you to come and dine on this island because I thought the surroundings would amuse you. Mind you, I’ve nothing particular to say to you. But it’s rather damp, I’m afraid, and you may find it cold—” “Oh, no, not at all!” “You just say that out of politeness. Very well, Madame, I shall allow you to battle against the cold for another quarter of an hour, as I don’t want to pester you, but in fifteen minutes I shall take you away by force. I don’t want to have you catching a chill.” And without having said anything to her we take her home, remembering nothing about her, at the most a certain look in her eyes, but thinking only of seeing her again. Then at the second meeting (when we do not even find that look, our sole memory of her, but nevertheless still only thinking—indeed even more so—of seeing her again), the first stage is transcended. Nothing has happened in the interval. And yet, instead of talking about the comfort or want of comfort of the restaurant, we say, without apparently surprising the new person, who seems to us positively plain but to whom we should like to think that people were talking about us at every moment in her life: “We’re going to have our work cut out to overcome all the obstacles in our way. Do you think we shall be successful? Do you think we’ll get the better of our enemies, live happily ever after?” But these contrasting conversations, trivial to begin with, then hinting at love, would not be required; Saint-Loup’s letter was a guarantee of that. Mme de Stermaria would give herself on the very first evening, so that I should have no need to engage Albertine to come to me as a substitute later in the evening. It would be unnecessary; Robert never exaggerated, and his letter was quite clear.

  Albertine spoke hardly at all, sensing that my thoughts were elsewhere. We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense grove on the dome of which we heard the wind howl and the rain splash. I trod underfoot dead leaves which sank into the soil like sea-shells, and poked with my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.

  On the boughs of the trees, the last clinging leaves, shaken by the wind, followed it only as far as their stems would allow, but sometimes these broke and they fell to the ground, along which they coursed to overtake it. I thought joyfully how much more remote still, if this weather lasted, the island would be the next day, and in any case quite deserted. We returned to our carriage and, as the squall had subsided, Albertine asked me to take her on to Saint-Cloud. As on the ground the drifting leaves, so up above the clouds were chasing the wind. And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic section cut into the sky made visible the successive layers, pink, blue and green, were gathered in readiness for departure to warmer climes. To obtain a closer view of a marble goddess who had been carved in the act of springing from her pedestal and, alone in a great wood which seemed to be consecrated to her, filled it with the mythological terror, half animal, half divine, of her frenzied leaps, Albertine climbed a knoll while I waited for her in the road. She herself, seen thus from below, no longer coarse and plump as a few days earlier on my bed when the grain of her neck appeared under the magnifying-glass of my eyes, but delicately chiselled, seemed like a little statue on which our happy hours together at Balbec had left their patina. When I found myself alone again at home, remembering that I had been for an expedition that afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with Mme de Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, I said to myself that our social existence, like an artist’s studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we had originally planned.

  The next day was cold and fine; winter was in the air—indeed the season was so far advanced that it was a miracle that we should have found in the already ravaged Bois a few domes of gilded green. When I awoke I saw, as from the window of the barracks at Doncières, a uniform, dead white mist which hung gaily in the sunlight, thick and soft as a web of spun sugar. Then the sun withdrew, and the mist thickened still further in the afternoon. Night fell early, and I washed and changed, but it was still too soon to start. I decided to send a carriage for Mme de Stermaria. I did not like to go for her in it myself, not wishing to force my company on her, but I gave the driver a note for her in which I asked whether she would mind my coming to call for her. Meanwhile I lay down on my bed, shut my eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Over the top of the curtains there was now only a thin strip of daylight which grew steadily dimmer. I recognised that vacant hour, the vast ante-room of pleasure, the dark, delicious emptiness of which I had learned at Balbec to know and to enjoy when, alone in my room as I was now, while everyone else was at dinner, I saw without regret the daylight fade from above my curtains, knowing that presently, after a night of polar brevity, it was to be resuscitated in a more dazzling brightness in the lighted rooms at Rivebelle. I sprang from my bed, tied my black tie, brushed my hair, final gestures of a belated tidying-up, carried out at Balbec with my mind not on myself but on the women whom I should see at Rivebelle, while I smiled at them in anticipation in the mirror that stood across a corner of my room, gestures which for that reason had remained the harbingers of an entertainment in which music and lights would be mingled. Like magic signs they conjured it up, indeed already brought it into being; thanks to them I had as positive a notion of its reality, as complete an enjoyment of its intoxicating frivolous charm, as I had had at Combray, in the month of July, when I heard the hammer-blows ring on the packing cases and enjoyed the warmth and the sunshine in the coolness of my darkened room.

  Thus it was no longer entirely Mme de Stermaria that I should have wished to see. Forced now to spend my evening with her, I should have preferred, as it was almost the last before the return of my parents, that it should remain free and that I should be able to seek out some of the women I had seen at Rivebelle. I gave my hands one more final wash and, my sense of pleasure keeping me on the move, dried them as I walked through the shuttered dining-room. It appeared to be open on to the lighted hall, but what I had taken for the bright crevice of the door, which in fact was closed, was only the gleaming reflexion of my towel in a mirror that had been laid against the wall in readiness to be fixed in its place before Mamma’s return. I thought again of all the other illusions of the sort which I had discovered in different parts of the house, and which were not optical only, for when we first came there I had thought that our nextdoor neighbour kept a dog on account of the prolonged, almost human, yapping which came from a kitchen pipe whenever the tap was turned on. And the door on to the outer landing never closed by itself, very gently, against the draughts of the staircase, without rendering those broken, voluptuous, plaintive phrases that overlap the chant of the pilgrims towards the end of the Overture to Tannhäuser. I had in fact, just as I had put my towel back on its rail, an opportunity of hearing a fresh rendering of this dazzling symphonic fragment, for at a peal of the bell I hurried out to open the door to the driver who had come with Mme de Stermaria’s answer. I thought that his message would be: “The lady is downstairs,” or “The lady is waiting.” But he had a letter in his hand. I hesitated for a moment before lo
oking to see what Mme de Stermaria had written, which as long as she held the pen in her hand might have been different, but was now, detached from her, an engine of fate pursuing its course alone, which she was utterly powerless to alter. I asked the driver to wait downstairs for a moment, although he grumbled about the fog. As soon as he had gone I opened the envelope. On her card, inscribed Vicomtesse Alix de Stermaria, my guest had written: “Am so sorry—am unfortunately prevented from dining with you this evening on the island in the Bois. Had been so looking forward to it. Will write you a proper letter from Stermaria. Very sorry. Kindest regards.” I stood motionless, stunned by the shock that I had received. At my feet lay the card and envelope, fallen like the spent cartridge from a gun when the shot has been fired. I picked them up, and tried to analyse her message. “She says that she cannot dine with me on the island in the Bois. One might conclude from that that she might be able to dine with me somewhere else. I shall not be so indiscreet as to go and fetch her, but, after all, that is quite a reasonable interpretation.” And from the island in the Bois, since for the last few days my thoughts had been installed there in advance with Mme de Stermaria, I could not succeed in bringing them back to where I was. My desire continued to respond automatically to the gravitational force which had been impelling it now for so many hours, and in spite of this message, too recent to counteract that force, I went on instinctively getting ready to set out, just as a student, although ploughed by the examiners, tries to answer one question more. At last I decided to tell Françoise to go down and pay the driver. I went along the passage, and failing to find her, passed through the dining-room, where suddenly my feet ceased to ring out on the bare boards as they had been doing until then and were hushed to a silence which, even before I had realised the explanation of it, gave me a feeling of suffocation and confinement. It was the carpets which, with a view to my parents’ return, the servants had begun to put down again, those carpets which look so well on bright mornings when amid their disorder the sun awaits you like a friend come to take you out to lunch in the country, and casts over them the dappled light and shade of the forest, but which now on the contrary were the first installations of the wintry prison from which, obliged as I should be to live and take my meals at home, I should no longer be free to escape when I chose.