The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  And, preoccupied by the thought of my having to spend this first night alone, for he knew better than anyone my bed-time agonies, which he had often noticed and soothed at Balbec, he broke off his lamentation to turn and look at me, coax me with little smiles, with tender though unsymmetrical glances, half of them coming directly from his eye, the other half through his monocle, but both sorts alike testifying to the emotion that he felt on seeing me again, testifying also to that important matter which I still did not understand but which now vitally concerned me, our friendship.

  “I say, where are you going to sleep? Really, I can’t recommend the hotel where we mess; it’s next to the Exhibition ground, where there’s a show just starting; you’ll find it beastly crowded. No, you’d better go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it’s a little eighteenth-century palace with old tapestries. It’s quite the (ça fait assez) ‘old historical dwelling.’ ”

  Saint-Loup employed in every connexion the verb faire for “have the air of,” because the spoken language, like the written, feels from time to time the need of these alterations in the meanings of words, these refinements of expression. And just as journalists often have not the least idea what school of literature the “turns of phrase” they use originate from, so the vocabulary, the very diction of Saint-Loup were formed in imitation of three different aesthetes none of whom he knew but whose modes of speech had been indirectly inculcated into him. “Besides,” he concluded, “the hotel I mean is more or less adapted to your auditory hyperaesthesia. You will have no neighbours. I quite see that it’s a slender advantage, and as, after all, another guest may arrive tomorrow, it would not be worth your while to choose that particular hotel on such precarious grounds. No, it’s for its appearance that I recommend it. The rooms are rather attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there’s something reassuring about it.” But to me, less of an artist than Saint-Loup, the pleasure that an attractive house might give one was superficial, almost non-existent, and could not calm my incipient anguish, as painful as that which I used to feel long ago at Combray when my mother did not come upstairs to say good night, or that which I felt on the evening of my arrival at Balbec in the room with the unnaturally high ceiling, which smelt of vetiver. Saint-Loup read all this in my fixed stare.

  “A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor fellow; you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking to you about tapestries which you won’t even have the heart to look at. I know the room they’ll put you in; personally I find it most cheerful, but I can quite understand that it won’t have the same effect on you with your sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t understand you. I don’t feel the same myself, but I can put myself in your place.”

  At that moment a sergeant who was exercising a horse on the square, entirely absorbed in making the animal jump, disregarding the salutes of passing troopers, but hurling volleys of oaths at such as got in his way, turned with a smile to Saint-Loup and, seeing that he had a friend with him, saluted us. But his horse, frothing, at once reared. Saint-Loup flung himself at its head, caught it by the bridle, succeeded in quieting it and returned to my side.

  “Yes,” he resumed, “I assure you that I fully understand and sympathise with what you are going through. I feel wretched,” he went on, laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder, “when I think that if I could have stayed with you tonight, I might have been able, by chatting to you till morning, to relieve you of a little of your unhappiness. I could lend you some books, but you won’t want to read if you’re feeling like that. And I shan’t be able to get anyone else to stand in for me here: I’ve done it twice running because my girl came down to see me.”

  And he knitted his brows with vexation and also in the effort to decide, like a doctor, what remedy he might best apply to my disease.

  “Run along and light the fire in my quarters,” he called to a trooper who passed by. “Hurry up; get a move on!”

  Then, once more, he turned towards me, and once more his monocle and his peering, myopic gaze testified to our great friendship.

  “No, really, you here, in these barracks where I’ve thought so much about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes, I feel I must be dreaming! But how is your health on the whole? A little better, I hope. You must tell me all about yourself presently. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang about too long on the square, there’s the devil of a wind. I don’t feel it now myself, but you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your catching cold. And what about your work? Have you settled down to it yet? No? You are an odd fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing. What a pity it is that it’s the second-raters like me who are always ready to work, while the ones who could, don’t want to! There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is. Her Proudhon never leaves me.”

  A tall, handsome, majestic officer emerged with slow and solemn steps from the foot of a staircase. Saint-Loup saluted him and arrested the perpetual mobility of his body for the time it took him to hold his hand against the peak of his cap. But he had flung himself into the action with such force, straightening himself with so sharp a movement, and, the salute ended, brought his hand down with so abrupt a release, altering all the positions of shoulder, leg and monocle, that this moment was one not so much of immobility as of a vibrant tension in which the excessive movements which he had just made and those on which he was about to embark were neutralised. Meanwhile the officer, without coming any nearer, calm, benevolent, dignified, imperial, representing, in short, the direct opposite of Saint-Loup, also raised his hand, but unhurriedly, to the peak of his cap.

  “I must just say a word to the Captain,” whispered Saint-Loup. “Be a good fellow, and go and wait for me in my room. It’s the second on the right, on the third floor. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  And setting off at the double, preceded by his monocle which fluttered in every direction, he made straight for the slow and stately captain whose horse had just been brought round and who, before preparing to mount, was giving orders with a studied nobility of gesture as in some historical painting, and as though he were setting forth to take part in some battle of the First Empire, whereas he was simply going to ride home, to the house which he had taken for the period of his service at Doncières, and which stood in a square that was named, as though in an ironical anticipation of the arrival of this Napoleonid, Place de la République. I started to climb the staircase, nearly slipping on each of its nail-studded steps, catching glimpses of barrack-rooms, their bare walls bordered with a double line of beds and kits. I was shown Saint-Loup’s room. I stood for a moment outside its closed door, for I could hear movement—something stirring, something being dropped. I felt the room was not empty, that there was somebody there. But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning to burn. It could not keep quiet; it kept shifting its logs about, and very clumsily. As I entered the room, it let one roll into the fender and set another smoking. And even when it was not moving, like an ill-bred person it made noises all the time, which, from the moment I saw the flames rising, revealed themselves to me as noises made by a fire, although if I had been on the other side of a wall I should have thought that they came from someone who was blowing his nose and walking about. I sat down in the room and waited. Liberty hangings and old German stuffs of the eighteenth century preserved it from the smell exuded by the rest of the building, a coarse, stale, mouldy smell like that of wholemeal bread. It was here, in this charming room, that I could have dined and slept with a calm and happy mind. Saint-Loup seemed almost to be present in it by reason of the text-books which littered his table, between his photographs, among which I recognised my own and that of the Duchesse de Guermantes, by reason of the fire which had at length grown accustomed to the grate, and, like an animal crouching in an ardent, noiseless, faithful watchfulness, merely let fall now and then a smouldering log which crumbled into sparks, or licked with a t
ongue of flame the sides of the chimney. I heard the tick of Saint-Loup’s watch, which could not be far away. This tick changed place every moment, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to come from behind, from in front of me, from my right, from my left, sometimes to die away as though it were a long way off. Suddenly I caught sight of the watch on the table. Then I heard the tick in a fixed place from which it did not move again. That is to say, I thought I heard it at this place; I did not hear it there, I saw it there, for sounds have no position in space. At least we associate them with movements, and in that way they serve the purpose of warning us of those movements, of appearing to make them necessary and natural. True, it sometimes happens that a sick man whose ears have been stopped with cotton-wool ceases to hear the noise of a fire such as was crackling at that moment in Saint-Loup’s fireplace, labouring at the formation of brands and cinders, which it then dropped into the fender, nor would he hear the passage of the tram-cars whose music rose at regular intervals over the main square of Doncières. Then, if the sick man reads, the pages will turn silently as though fingered by a god. The ponderous rumble of a bath being filled becomes thin, faint and distant, like a celestial twittering. The withdrawal of sound, its dilution, rob it of all its aggressive power; alarmed a moment ago by hammer-blows which seemed to be shattering the ceiling above our head, we take pleasure now in receiving them, light, caressing, distant, like the murmur of leaves playing by the roadside with the passing breeze. We play games of patience with cards which we do not hear, so much so that we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them, have begun to play with us. And in this connexion we may wonder whether, in the case of love (to which we may even add the love of life and the love of fame, since there are, it appears, persons who are acquainted with these latter sentiments), we shouldn’t act like those who, when a noise disturbs them, instead of praying that it may cease, stop their ears; and, in emulation of them, bring our attention, our defences, to bear on ourselves, give them as an object to subdue not the external being whom we love, but our capacity for suffering through that being.

  To return to the problem of sound, we have only to thicken the wads which close the aural passages, and they confine to a pianissimo the girl who has been playing a boisterous tune overhead; if we go further, and steep one of these wads in grease, at once the whole household must obey its despotic rule; its laws extend even beyond our portals. Pianissimo is no longer enough; the wad instantly closes the piano and the music lesson is abruptly ended; the gentleman who was walking up and down in the room above breaks off in the middle of his beat; the movement of carriages and trams is interrupted as though a sovereign were expected to pass. And indeed this attenuation of sounds sometimes disturbs our sleep instead of protecting it. Only yesterday the incessant noise in our ears, by describing to us in a continuous narrative all that was happening in the street and in the house, succeeded at length in sending us to sleep like a boring book; today, on the surface of silence spread over our sleep, a shock louder than the rest manages to make itself heard, gentle as a sigh, unrelated to any other sound, mysterious; and the demand for an explanation which it exhales is sufficient to awaken us. On the other hand, take away for a moment from the sick man the cotton-wool that has been stopping his ears and in a flash the broad daylight, the dazzling sun of sound dawns afresh, blinding him, is born again in the universe; the multitude of exiled sounds comes hastening back; we are present, as though it were the chanting of choirs of angels, at the resurrection of the voice. The empty streets are filled for a moment with the whirr of the swift and recurrent wings of the singing tram-cars. In the bedroom itself the sick man has created, not, like Prometheus, fire, but the sound of fire. And when we increase or reduce the wads of cotton-wool, it is as though we were pressing alternately one and then the other of the two pedals which we have added to the sonority of the outer world.

  Only there are also suppressions of sound which are not temporary. The man who has become completely deaf cannot even heat a pan of milk by his bedside without having to keep an eye open to watch, on the tilted lid, for the white hyperborean reflexion, like that of a coming snowstorm, which is the premonitory sign it is wise to obey by cutting off (as the Lord stilled the waves) the electric current; for already the fitfully swelling egg of the boiling milk is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong undulations, puffs out and fills a few drooping sails that had been puckered by the cream, sending a nacreous spinnaker bellying out in the hurricane, until the cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is exorcised in time, will make them all twirl round on themselves and scatter like magnolia petals. But should the sick man not have been quick enough in taking the necessary precautions, presently, his drowned books and watch scarcely emerging from the milky tidal wave, he will be obliged to call the old nurse, who, for all that he is an eminent statesman or a famous writer, will tell him that he has no more sense than a child of five. At other times in the magic chamber, standing inside the closed door, a person who was not there a moment ago will have made his appearance; it is a visitor who has entered unheard, and who merely gesticulates, like a figure in one of those little puppet theatres, so restful for those who have taken a dislike to the spoken tongue. And for this stone-deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he walks now upon an earth become almost an Eden, in which sound has not yet been created. The highest waterfalls unfold for his eyes alone their sheets of crystal, stiller than the glassy sea, pure as the cascades of Paradise. Since sound was for him, before his deafness, the perceptible form which the cause of a movement assumed, objects moved soundlessly now seem to be moved without cause; deprived of the quality of sound, they show a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt, become alight of their own accord. Of their own accord they vanish in the air like the winged monsters of prehistory. In the solitary and neighbourless house of the deaf man, the service which, before his infirmity was complete, was already showing more reserve, was being executed silently, is now carried out, with a sort of surreptitious deftness, by mutes, as at the court of a fairy-tale king. And again as on the stage, the building which the deaf man looks out on from his window—whether barracks, church, or town hall—is only so much scenery. If one day it should fall to the ground, it may emit a cloud of dust and leave visible ruins; but, less substantial even than a palace on the stage, though it has not the same exiguity, it will subside in the magic universe without letting the fall of its heavy blocks of stone tarnish the chastity of the prevailing silence with the vulgarity of noise.

  The silence, altogether more relative, which reigned in the little barrack-room where I sat waiting was now broken. The door opened and Saint-Loup rushed in, dropping his monocle.

  “Ah, Robert, how comfortable it is here,” I said to him. “How good it would be if one were allowed to dine and sleep here.”

  And indeed, had it not been against the regulations, what repose untinged by sadness I could have enjoyed there, guarded by that atmosphere of tranquillity, vigilance and gaiety which was maintained by a thousand ordered and untroubled wills, a thousand carefree minds, in that great community called a barracks where, time having taken the form of action, the sad bell that tolled the hours outside was replaced by the same joyous clarion of those martial calls, the ringing memory of which was kept perpetually alive in the paved streets of the town, like the dust that floats in a sunbeam—a voice sure of being heard, and musical because it was the command not only of authority to obedience but of wisdom to happiness.

  “So you’d rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.

  “Oh, Robert, it’s cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I answered. “You know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched I shall be over there.”

  “Well, you flatter me!” he replied. “Because it actually occu
rred to me that you’d rather stay here tonight. And that is precisely what I went to ask the Captain.”

  “And he has given you leave?” I cried.

  “He hadn’t the slightest objection.”

  “Oh! I adore him!”

  “No, that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold of my batman and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on, while I turned away to hide my tears.

  We were several times interrupted by the entry of one or other of Saint-Loup’s comrades. He drove them all out again.

  “Get out of here. Buzz off!”

  I begged him to let them stay.

  “No, really, they would bore you stiff. They’re absolutely uncouth people who can talk of nothing but racing or stable shop. Besides, I don’t want them here either; they would spoil these precious moments I’ve been looking forward to. Mind you, when I tell you that these fellows are brainless, it isn’t that everything military is devoid of intellectuality. Far from it. We have a major here who’s an admirable man. He’s given us a course in which military history is treated like a demonstration, like a problem in algebra. Even from the aesthetic point of view there’s a curious beauty, alternately inductive and deductive, about it which you couldn’t fail to appreciate.”

  “That’s not the officer who’s given me leave to stay here tonight?”

  “No, thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a service is the biggest fool that ever walked the face of the earth. He’s perfect at looking after messing, and at kit inspections; he spends hours with the senior sergeant and the master tailor. There you have his mentality. Besides, he has a vast contempt, like everyone here, for the excellent major in question, whom no one speaks to because he’s a freemason and doesn’t go to confession. The Prince de Borodino would never have an outsider like that in his house. Which is pretty fair cheek, when all’s said and done, from a man whose great-grandfather was a small farmer, and who would probably be a small farmer himself if it hadn’t been for the Napoleonic wars. Not that he isn’t a little aware of his own rather ambiguous position in society, neither flesh nor fowl. He hardly ever shows his face at the Jockey, it makes him feel so deuced awkward, this so-called Prince,” added Robert, who, having been led by the same spirit of imitation to adopt the social theories of his teachers and the worldly prejudices of his relatives, unconsciously combined a democratic love of humanity with a contempt for the nobility of the Empire.