“Oh, now I know who you mean,” exclaimed my mother, while I felt myself blushing with shame. “On guard! on guard!—as your poor grandfather would have said. So she’s the one you find so beautiful! Why, she’s perfectly horrible, and always has been. She’s the widow of a bailiff. Don’t you remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to go to in order to avoid her at your gym lessons, where she was always trying to get hold of me—I didn’t know the woman, of course—to tell me that you were ‘too beautiful for a boy.’ She has always had a mania for getting to know people, and she really must be a sort of maniac, as I’ve always thought, if she does in fact know Mme Swann. For even if she does come from a very common background, I’ve never heard anything against her. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She really is a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and affected as well.”
As for Swann, in order to try to resemble him, I spent all my time at table pulling my nose and rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: “The child’s an idiot, he’ll make himself quite hideous.” More than anything else I should have liked to be as bald as Swann. He seemed to me a being so extraordinary that I found it miraculous that people of my acquaintance knew him too and in the course of the day might run into him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that afternoon, merely by the words: “By the way, guess whom I saw in the Trois Quartiers—at the umbrella counter—Swann!” brought forth in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom. What a melancholy pleasure to learn that Swann, that very afternoon, his supernatural form silhouetted against the crowd, had gone to buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but all equally insignificant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was perpetually stirred. My father complained that I took no interest in anything because I did not listen while he was speaking of the political consequences that might follow the visit of King Theodosius, at the moment in France as the nation’s guest and (it was claimed) ally. But how I longed, on the other hand, to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!
“Did you speak to him?” I asked.
“Why, of course I did,” answered my mother, who always seemed afraid lest, were she to admit that we were not on the best of terms with Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in view of Mme Swann, whom she did not wish to know. “It was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn’t seen him.”
“Then you haven’t quarrelled?”
“Quarrelled? What on earth makes you think we’ve quarrelled?” she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her friendly relations with Swann, and tried to bring about a reconciliation.
“He might be cross with you for never asking him here.”
“One isn’t obliged to ask everyone to one’s house, you know. Has he ever asked me to his? I don’t know his wife.”
“But he often used to come at Combray.”
“Yes, I know he used to come at Combray, and now, in Paris, he has other things to do, and so have I. But I can promise you, we didn’t look in the least like people who had quarrelled. We were kept waiting there for some time, while they brought him his parcel. He asked after you; he told me you played with his daughter,” my mother went on, dazzling me with the stupendous revelation that I existed in Swann’s mind; even more, that I existed in so complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my mother was, and had been able to bring together around my capacity as his daughter’s playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their connexions, the place where we lived, and certain details of our past life which were perhaps unknown even to me. But my mother did not seem to have discovered a particular charm in that counter at the Trois Quartiers where she had represented to Swann, at the moment when he caught sight of her, a definite person with whom he had sufficient memories in common to impel him to go up to her and greet her.
Nor did either she or my father seem to find, in speaking of Swann’s family, or the title of honorary stockbroker, a pleasure that surpassed all others. My imagination had isolated and hallowed in social Paris a certain family, just as it had set apart in structural Paris a certain house, whose entrance it had sculpted and its windows bejewelled. But these ornaments I alone had eyes to see. Just as my father and mother regarded the house in which Swann lived as identical with the other houses built at the same period in the neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann’s family seemed to them to be in the same category as many other families of stockbrokers. They judged it more or less favourably according to the degree to which it shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe and saw nothing unique in it. On the contrary, what they appreciated in it they found in equal if not superior degree elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house that was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of financiers who were a cut above her grandfather; and if they had appeared for a moment to be of my opinion, that was through a misunderstanding which was very soon dispelled. For in order to distinguish in everything that surrounded Gilberte an indefinable quality analogous in the world of the emotions to what in the world of colours is called infra-red, my parents would have needed that supplementary sense with which love had temporarily endowed me.
On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to the Champs-Elysées, I tried to arrange my walks so that I should be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would take Françoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns lived, making her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess with regard to Mme Swann. “It seems she’s got great faith in medals. She wouldn’t think of starting on a journey if she’d heard an owl hoot, or a sort of tick-tock in the wall, or if she’d seen a cat at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she’s a most religious lady, she is!” I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if, on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out, my emotion would bring me to a standstill and I would gaze at his white whiskers with eyes filled with passion. Françoise would say: “What’s wrong with you now?”
Then we would continue on our way until we reached their gateway, where a porter, different from every other porter in the world and saturated, down to the very braid on his livery, with the same melancholy charm that I sensed in the name of Gilberte, looked as though he knew that I was one of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prohibit from penetrating into the mysteries of the life which it was his duty to guard and upon which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the world than to Gilberte’s glancing eyes. On other days we would go along the boulevards, and I would take up a position at the corner of the Rue Duphot, along which I had heard that Swann was often to be seen passing on his way to his dentist; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte’s father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of the real world introduced into it such an element of wonder, that even before we reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.
But most often of all—on days when I was not to see Gilberte—as I had heard that Mme Swann went for a walk or a drive almost every day in the Allée des Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I would lead Françoise to the Bois de Boulogne. It was to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled together a variety of flora and contrasted landscapes, where from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a pit, another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable the hippopotamus, zebra,
crocodile, albino rabbit, bear and heron to disport themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting; it, the Bois, equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and separate—alternating a plantation of redwood trees and American oaks, like an experimental forest in Virginia, with a fir-wood by the edge of the lake, or a grove from which would suddenly emerge, in her raiment of soft fur, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb animal, a hastening walker—was the Garden of Woman; and like the myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one kind only, the Allée des Acacias was thronged with the famous beauties of the day. As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know that they are going to see the seal, so, long before I reached the acacias, their fragrance which, radiating all around, made one aware of the approach and the singularity of a vegetable personality at once powerful and soft, then, as I drew near, the glimpsed summit of their lightly tossing foliage, in its easy grace, its coquettish outline, its delicate fabric, on which hundreds of flowers had swooped, like winged and throbbing colonies of precious insects, and finally their name itself, feminine, indolent, dulcet, made my heart beat, but with a social longing, like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of the fair dancers, called aloud as they enter the ballroom. I had been told that I should see in the alley certain women of fashion, who, in spite of their not all having husbands, were habitually mentioned in conjunction with Mme Swann, but most often by their professional names—their new names, when they had any, being but a sort of incognito, a veil which those who wished to speak of them were careful to draw aside in order to make themselves understood. Thinking that Beauty—in the order of feminine elegance—was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated, and that they had the power to realise it, I accepted in advance like a revelation the appearance of their clothes, of their carriages and horses, of countless details in which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral and shifting pageant. But it was Mme Swann whom I wished to see, and I waited for her to go past, as thrilled as though she were Gilberte, whose parents, impregnated, like everything that surrounded her, with her own special charm, excited in me as keen a passion as she did herself, indeed a still more painful agitation (since their point of contact with her was that intimate, that internal part of her life from which I was excluded), and furthermore (for I very soon learned, as we shall see in due course, that they did not like my playing with her) that feeling of veneration which we always have for those who hold, and exercise without restraint, the power to do us harm.
I assigned the first place in the order of aesthetic merit and of social grandeur to simplicity, when I saw Mme Swann on foot, in a polonaise of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant’s wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the Allée des Acacias as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her house, and acknowledging with a wink the greetings of the gentlemen in carriages who, recognising her figure at a distance, raised their hats to her and said to one another that there was never anyone so well turned out as she. But instead of simplicity it was to ostentation that I must assign the first place if, after I had compelled Françoise, who was worn out and complained that her feet were “killing” her, to stroll up and down with me for another hour, I saw at length emerging from the Porte Dauphine—figuring for me a royal dignity, the passage of a sovereign, an impression such as no real queen has ever since been able to give me, because my notion of their power has been less vague, more founded upon experience—borne along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses, slender and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys, carrying on its box an enormous coachman furred like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive groom like “the late Beaudenord’s tiger,” I saw—or rather I felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and poignant wound—a matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the extreme modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, in the depths of which Mme Swann negligently reclined, her hair, now blonde with one grey lock, encircled with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from which floated down long veils, a lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign condescension of Majesty, though it was pre-eminently the provocative smile of the courtesan, which she graciously bestowed upon the men who greeted her. This smile was in reality saying, to one: “Oh yes, I remember very well; it was wonderful!” to another: “How I should have loved to! It was bad luck!” to a third: “Yes, if you like! I must just follow in the procession for a moment, then as soon as I can I’ll break away.” When strangers passed a lazy smile still played about her lips, as though in expectation or remembrance of some friend, which made people say: “What a lovely woman!” And for certain men only she had a sour, strained, shy, cold smile which meant: “Yes, you old goat, I know that you’ve got a tongue like a viper, that you can’t keep quiet for a moment. But do you suppose that I care what you say?” Coquelin passed, holding forth among a group of listening friends, and with a sweeping wave of his hand bade a theatrical good day to the people in the carriages. But I thought only of Mme Swann, and pretended not to have seen her yet, for I knew that when she reached the pigeon-shooting ground she would tell her coachmen to “break away” and to stop the carriage, so that she might come back on foot. And on days when I felt that I had the courage to pass close by her I would drag Françoise off in that direction; until the moment came when I saw Mme Swann, trailing behind her the long train of her lilac skirt, dressed, as the populace imagine queens to be dressed, in rich finery such as no other woman wore, occasionally looking down at the handle of her parasol, and paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though her sole object was to take exercise, without thinking that she was being observed and that every head was turned towards her. Sometimes, however, when she had looked back to call her dog, she would cast, almost imperceptibly, a sweeping glance round about her.
Even those who did not know her were warned by something singular, something exorbitant about her—or perhaps by a telepathic suggestion such as would move an ignorant audience to a frenzy of applause at moments when Berma was being sublime—that she must be someone well known. They would ask one another, “Who is she?”, or sometimes would interrogate a passing stranger, or would make a mental note of how she was dressed as an indication for some better-informed friend who would at once enlighten them. Another pair of strollers, half-stopping in their walk, would say to each other:
“You know who that is? Mme Swann! That conveys nothing to you? Odette de Crécy, then?”
“Odette de Crécy! Why, I thought as much. Those sad eyes … But I say, you know, she can’t be as young as she was once, eh? I remember I slept with her on the day MacMahon resigned.”
“I shouldn’t remind her of it, if I were you. She’s now Mme Swann, the wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club, a friend of the Prince of Wales. But she still looks superb.”
“Oh, but you should have known her then. How pretty she was! She lived in a very odd little house with a lot of Chinese stuff. I remember we were bothered all the time by the newsboys shouting outside; in the end she made me get up and go.”
Without hearing these reflections, I could feel all about her the indistinct murmur of fame. My heart throbbed with impatience when I thought that a few seconds must still elapse before all these people, among whom I was dismayed not to find a certain mulatto banker by whom I felt I was despised, would see the unknown youth, to whom they had not as yet paid the slightest attention, salute (without knowing her, it was true, but I felt that I was authorised to do so because my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter’s playmate) this woman whose reputation for beauty, misconduct and elegance was universal. But I was now close to Mme Swann, and I doffed my hat to her with so lavish, so prolonged a gesture that she could not repress a smile. People laughe
d. As for her, she had never seen me with Gilberte, she did not know my name, but I was for her—like one of the keepers in the Bois, or the boatman, or the ducks on the lake to which she threw scraps of bread—one of the minor personages, familiar, nameless, as devoid of individual character as a stage-hand in a theatre, of her daily walks in the Bois.
On certain days when I had missed her in the Allée des Acacias I would sometimes meet her in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, where women went who wanted to be alone, or to appear to want to be alone; she would not be alone for long, being soon overtaken by some friend, often in a grey “topper,” whom I did not know, and who would talk to her for some time, while their two carriages crawled behind.
That complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which makes it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden, came to me again this year as I crossed it on my way to Trianon, on one of those mornings early in November when, in Paris, if we stay indoors, being so near and yet excluded from the transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our witnessing it, we feel a veritable fever of yearning for the fallen leaves that can go so far as to keep us awake at night. Into my closed room they had been drifting already for a month, summoned there by my desire to see them, slipping between my thoughts and the object, whatever it might be, upon which I was trying to concentrate them, whirling in front of me like those brown spots that sometimes, whatever we may be looking at, will seem to be dancing or swimming before our eyes. And on that morning, no longer hearing the splash of the rain as on the preceding days, seeing the smile of fine weather at the corners of my drawn curtains, as at the corners of closed lips betraying the secret of their happiness, I had felt that I might be able to look at those yellow leaves with the light shining through them, in their supreme beauty; and being no more able to restrain myself from going to see the trees than, in my childhood days, when the wind howled in the chimney, I had been able to resist the longing to visit the sea, I had risen and left the house to go to Trianon via the Bois de Boulogne. It was the hour and the season in which the Bois seems, perhaps, most multiform, not only because it is the most subdivided, but because it is subdivided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the horizon is large, here and there against the background of a dark and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted so far by an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering their cloister, in full daylight, for the casual exercise of the human figures that would be added to the picture later on.
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