And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, as soon as the master’s head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would always begin by asking him whether he had already been to the theatre, and whether he agreed that our greatest actor was Got, our second Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron, or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would acquire in my mind, in order to move up to second place, the miraculous agility, the fecund animation with which the name of Delaunay would suddenly be endowed, to enable it to slip down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of budding and blossoming life.
But if the thought of actors preoccupied me so, if the sight of Maubant coming out of the Théâtre-Français one afternoon had plunged me into the throes and sufferings of love, how much more did the name of a star blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more, seen through the window of a brougham passing by in the street, its horses’ headbands decked with roses, did the face of a woman whom I took to be an actress, leave me in a state of troubled excitement, impotently and painfully trying to form a picture of her private life.
I classified the most distinguished in order of talent: Sarah Bernhardt, Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was interested in them all. Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house. And if we went to see him on certain days only, that was because on the other days ladies might come whom his family could not very well have met—so they at least thought, for my uncle, on the contrary, was only too willing to pay pretty widows (who had perhaps never been married) and countesses (whose high-sounding titles were probably no more than noms de guerre) the compliment of presenting them to my grandmother, or even of presenting to them some of the family jewels, a propensity which had already embroiled him more than once with my grandfather. Often, if the name of some actress were mentioned in conversation, I would hear my father say to my mother with a smile: “One of your uncle’s friends,” and thinking of the weary and fruitless novitiate eminent men would go through, perhaps for years on end, on the doorstep of some such lady who refused to answer their letters and had them sent packing by the hall-porter, it struck me that my uncle could have spared from such torments a youngster like me by introducing him to the actress, unapproachable by all the world, who was for him an intimate friend.
And so—on the pretext that some lesson, the hour of which had been altered, now came at such an awkward time that it had already more than once prevented me, and would continue to prevent me, from seeing my uncle—one day, not one of the days which he set apart for our visits, taking advantage of the fact that my parents had had lunch earlier than usual, I slipped out and, instead of going to read the playbills on their column, for which purpose I was allowed to go out unaccompanied, ran round to his house. I noticed in front of his door a carriage and pair, with red carnations on the horses’ blinkers and in the coachman’s buttonhole. As I climbed the staircase I could hear laughter and a woman’s voice, and, as soon as I had rung, silence and the sound of shutting doors. The manservant seemed embarrassed when he let me in, and said that my uncle was extremely busy and probably could not see me; he went in, however, to announce my arrival, and the same voice I had heard before said: “Oh, yes! Do let him come in, just for a moment; I should so enjoy it. Isn’t that his photograph there on your desk? And his mother (your niece, isn’t she?) beside it? The image of her, isn’t he? I should so like to see the little chap, just for a second.”
I could hear my uncle grumbling angrily; finally the manservant ushered me in.
On the table was the same plate of biscuits that was always there; my uncle wore the same jacket as on other days, but opposite him, in a pink silk dress with a great necklace of pearls about her throat, sat a young woman who was just finishing a tangerine. My uncertainty whether I ought to address her as Madame or Mademoiselle made me blush, and not daring to look too much in her direction, in case I should be obliged to speak to her, I hurried across to embrace my uncle. She looked at me and smiled; my uncle said “My nephew!” without telling her my name or giving me hers, doubtless because, since his difficulties with my grandfather, he had endeavoured as far as possible to avoid any association of his family with this other class of acquaintance.
“How like his mother he is,” said the lady.
“But you’ve never seen my niece except in photographs,” my uncle answered brusquely.
“I beg your pardon, dear friend, I passed her on the staircase last year when you were so ill. It’s true I only saw her for a moment, and your staircase is rather dark; but I could see well enough to admire her. This young gentleman has her beautiful eyes, and also this,” she went on, tracing a line with one finger across the lower part of her forehead. “Tell me,” she asked my uncle, “is your niece’s name the same as yours?”
“He takes most after his father,” muttered my uncle, who was no more anxious to effect an introduction by proxy by mentioning Mamma’s name than to bring the two together in the flesh. “He’s his father all over, and also like my poor mother.”
“I haven’t met his father,” said the lady in pink, bowing her head slightly, “and I never knew your poor mother. You will remember it was just after your great sorrow that we got to know one another.”
I felt somewhat disillusioned, for this young lady was in no way different from other pretty women whom I had seen from time to time at home, in particular the daughter of one of our cousins to whose house I went every New Year’s Day. Apart from being better dressed, my uncle’s friend had the same quick and kindly glance, the same frank and friendly manner. I could find no trace in her of the theatrical appearance which I admired in photographs of actresses, nothing of the diabolical expression which would have been in keeping with the life she must lead. I had difficulty in believing that she was a courtesan, and certainly I should never have believed her to be an ultra-fashionable one, had I not seen the carriage and pair, the pink dress, the pearl necklace, had I not been aware, too, that my uncle knew only those of the top flight. But I asked myself how the millionaire who gave her her carriage and her house and her jewels could find any pleasure in flinging his money away upon a woman of so simple and respectable an appearance. And yet, when I thought of what her life must be like, its immorality disturbed me more, perhaps, than if it had stood before me in some concrete and recognisable form, by being thus invisible, like the secret of some novel or some scandal which had driven out of the home of her genteel parents and dedicated to the service of all mankind, which had brought to a bright bloom of beauty and raised to fame or notoriety, this woman the play of whose features, the intonations of whose voice, reminiscent of so many others I already knew, made me regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good family, when she was no longer of any family at all.
We had moved by this time into the “study,” and my uncle, who seemed a trifle embarrassed by my presence, offered her a cigarette.
“No, thank you, my dear,” she said. “You know I only smoke the ones the grand duke sends me. I told him that they made you jealous.” And she drew from a case cigarettes covered with gilt lettering in a foreign language. “But of course,” she began again suddenly, “I must have met this young man’s father with you. Isn’t he your nephew? How on earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so exquisitely charming to me,” she added, with an air of warmth and modesty. But when I thought to myself, knowing my father’s coldness and reserve, what must actually have been the brusque greeting which she claimed to have found so charming, I was embarrassed, as though at some indelicacy on his part, by the contrast between the excessive recognition bestowed on it and his want of geniality. It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote their generosity, their tale
nt, a disposable dream of sentimental beauty (for, like artists, they never seek to realise the value of their dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and a wealth that counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rough, ill-polished lives of men. And just as this one filled the smoking-room, where my uncle was entertaining her in his jacket, with the aura of her charming person, her dress of pink silk, her pearls, the elegance that derives from the friendship of a grand duke, so in the same way she had taken some casual remark of my father’s, had delicately fashioned it, given it a “turn,” a precious title, and embellishing it with a gem-like glance from her sparkling eyes, tinged with humility and gratitude, had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something “exquisitely charming.”
“Look here, my boy, it’s time you were off,” said my uncle.
I rose. I had an irresistible desire to kiss the hand of the lady in pink, but I felt that to do so would require as much audacity as a forcible abduction. My heart beat loud while I repeated to myself “Shall I do it, shall I not?” and then I ceased to ask myself what I ought to do so as at least to do something. With a blind, insensate gesture, divested of all the reasons in its favour that I had thought of a moment before, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.
“Isn’t he delicious! Quite a ladies’ man already; he takes after his uncle. He’ll be a perfect ‘gentleman,’ ” she added, clenching her teeth so as to give the word a kind of English accentuation. “Couldn’t he come to me some day for ‘a cup of tea,’ as our friends across the Channel say? He need only send me a ‘blue’ in the morning?”
I had not the least idea what a “blue” might be.5 I did not understand half the words which the lady used, but my fear lest there should be concealed in them some question which it would be impolite of me not to answer made me keep on listening to them with close attention, and I was beginning to feel extremely tired.
“No, no, it’s impossible,” said my uncle, shrugging his shoulders. “He’s kept very busy, he works extremely hard. He brings back all the prizes from his school,” he added in a lower voice, so that I should not hear this falsehood and interrupt with a contradiction. “Who knows? he may turn out a little Victor Hugo, a kind of Vaulabelle, don’t you know.”
“Oh, I love artistic people,” replied the lady in pink. “There’s no one like them for understanding women. Apart from a few superior people like yourself. But please forgive my ignorance. Who or what is Vaulabelle? Is it those gilt books in the little glass case in your drawing-room? You know you promised to lend them to me. I’ll take great care of them.”
My uncle, who hated lending people books, said nothing, and ushered me out into the hall. Madly in love with the lady in pink, I covered my old uncle’s tobacco-stained cheeks with passionate kisses, and while with some embarrassment he gave me to understand without actually saying that he would rather I did not tell my parents about this visit, I assured him with tears in my eyes that his kindness had made so strong an impression upon me that some day I would most certainly find a way of expressing my gratitude. So strong an impression, indeed, had it made upon me that two hours later, after a string of mysterious utterances which did not strike me as giving my parents a sufficiently clear idea of the new importance with which I had been invested, I found it simpler to tell them in the minutest detail of the visit I had paid that afternoon. In doing this I had no thought of causing my uncle any unpleasantness. How could I have thought such a thing, since I did not wish it? And I could not suppose that my parents would see any harm in a visit in which I myself saw none. Every day of our lives does not some friend or other ask us to make his apologies, without fail, to some woman to whom he has been prevented from writing, and do not we forget to do so, feeling that this woman cannot attach much importance to a silence that has none for ourselves? I imagined, like everyone else, that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles with no power of specific reaction to anything that might be introduced into them; and I had not the least doubt that when I deposited in the minds of my parents the news of the acquaintance I had made at my uncle’s I should at the same time transmit to them the kindly judgment I myself had based on the introduction. Unfortunately my parents had recourse to principles entirely different from those which I ntended them to adopt when they came to form their estimate of my uncle’s conduct. My father and grandfather had “words” with him of a violent order; as I learned indirectly. A few days later, passing my uncle in the street as he drove by in an open carriage, I felt at once all the grief, the gratitude, the remorse which I should have liked to convey to him. Beside the immensity of these emotions I considered that merely to raise my hat to him would be incongruous and petty, and might make him think that I regarded myself as bound to show him no more than the commonest form of courtesy. I decided to abstain from so inadequate a gesture, and turned my head away. My uncle thought that in doing so I was obeying my parents’ orders; he never forgave them; and though he did not die until many years later, not one of us ever set eyes on him again.
And so I no longer went into the little sitting-room (now kept shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts of the back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and announced: “I’m going to let my kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take up the hot water; it’s time I went off to Mme Octave,” I would then decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of functions assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the succession of transitory human shapes in which it was embodied; for we never had the same girl two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to prepare them was a poor sickly creature, some way “gone” in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands and to do so much work, for she was beginning to find difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious basket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected beneath the folds of her ample smock. This last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of his allegorical figures, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: “Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?” And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even including her face and her squarish, elongated cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins, so sturdy and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she carried before her, without appearing to understand its meaning, with no awareness in her facial expression of its beauty and spiritual significance, as if it were an ordinary, rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena Chapel beneath the label “Caritas,” and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, embodies that virtue, for it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter’s invention she is trampling all the treasures of the earth beneath her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or rather as if she had climbed on to a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say “handing” it to him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her basement kitchen to someone who has called down for it from the ground-floor window. The “Invidia,” again, should have had some look of envy on her face. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a pl
ace and is represented with such realism, the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth, that the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, like those of a child blowing up a balloon, and her attention—and ours too for that matter—is so utterly concentrated on the activity of her lips as to leave little time to spare for envious thoughts.
Despite all the admiration M. Swann professed for these figures of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in contemplating on the walls of our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the glottis or the uvula by a tumour of the tongue or by the introduction of the operator’s instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular features were identical with those which characterised the faces of certain pious, desiccated ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass and many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice. But in later years I came to understand that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes derived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed) but as a reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to the meaning of the work, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it imparted. Similarly, in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not one’s attention incessantly drawn to her belly by the weight which dragged it down; and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards that “seamy side” of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
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