Sometimes I had heard nothing, being in one of those slumbers into which we fall as into a pit from which we are heartily glad to be drawn up a little later, heavy, overfed, digesting all that has been brought to us (as by the nymphs who fed the infant Hercules) by those agile vegetative powers whose activity is doubled while we sleep.
We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as though, even for a few moments after such a sleep is ended, one has oneself become a simple figure of lead. One is no longer a person. How then, searching for one’s thoughts, one’s personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one’s own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not a personality other than the previous one that becomes incarnate in one? One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one’s hand. What is it that guides us, when there has been a real interruption—whether it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourselves? There has indeed been death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical traction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to which other, older memories cling, or perhaps some were dormant in us, of which we now become conscious. The resurrection at our awakening—after that beneficent attack of mental alienation which is sleep—must after all be similar to what occurs when we recall a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.
When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky but held back by the chill of those last autumn mornings, so luminous and so cold, which herald winter, in order to look at the trees on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few strokes of gold or pink which seemed to have been left in the air, on an invisible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like a chrysalis in the process of metamorphosis, I was a dual creature whose different parts were not adapted to the same environment; for my eyes colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on the other hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour. I got up only after my fire had been lighted, and studied the picture, so delicate and transparent, of the pink and golden morning, to which I had now added by artificial means the element of warmth that it lacked, poking my fire which burned and smoked like a good pipe and gave me, as a pipe would have given me, a pleasure at once coarse because it was based upon a material comfort and delicate because behind it were the soft outlines of a pure vision. The walls of my dressing-room were papered in a violent red, sprinkled with black and white flowers to which it seemed that I should have some difficulty in growing accustomed. But they succeeded only in striking me as novel, in forcing me to enter not into conflict but into contact with them, in modulating the gaiety and the songs of my morning ablutions; they succeeded only in imprisoning me in the heart of a sort of poppy, out of which to look at a world which I saw quite otherwise than in Paris, from the gay screen which was this new dwelling-place, of a different aspect from the house of my parents, and into which flowed a purer air.
On certain days, I was agitated by the desire to see my grandmother again or by the fear that she might be ill, or else by the memory of some business left half-finished in Paris, which seemed to have made no progress, or sometimes, again, by some difficulty in which, even here, I had managed to become involved. One or other of these anxieties would have prevented me from sleeping, and I would be powerless to face up to my depression, which in an instant would fill the whole of my existence. Then I would send a messenger from the hotel to the barracks with a note for Saint-Loup, telling him that if it was physically possible—I knew that it was extremely difficult for him—I should be most grateful if he would look in for a minute. An hour later he would arrive; and on hearing his ring at the door I felt myself liberated from my obsessions. I knew that, if they were stronger than I, he was stronger than they, and my attention was diverted from them and turned towards him, who would know how to settle them. On entering the room he would at once envelop me in the fresh air in which from early morning he had been active and busy, a vital atmosphere very different from that of my room, to which I at once adapted myself by appropriate reactions.
“I hope you weren’t angry with me for bothering you. There is something that’s worrying me, as you probably guessed.”
“Not at all. I just supposed you wanted to see me, and I thought it very nice of you. I was delighted that you sent for me. But what’s the trouble? Things not going well? What can I do to help?”
He would listen to my explanations, and give precise answers; but before he uttered a word he would have transformed me to his own likeness; compared with the important occupations which kept him so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries which a moment ago I had been unable to endure for another instant seemed to me as negligible as they did to him. I was like a man who, having been unable to open his eyes for some days, sends for a doctor, who neatly and gently raises his eyelid, removes from beneath it a grain of sand, and shows it to him; the sufferer is healed and comforted. All my cares resolved themselves in a telegram which Saint-Loup undertook to dispatch. Life seemed to me so different, so delightful, I was flooded with such a surfeit of strength, that I longed for action.
“What are you doing now?” I asked him.
“I must leave you, I’m afraid. We’re going on a route march in three quarters of an hour, and I have to be on parade.”
“Then it’s been a great bother to you, coming here?”
“No, no bother at all, the Captain was very good about it. He told me that if it was for you I must go at once. But I don’t like to seem to be abusing the privilege.”
“But if I got up and dressed quickly and went by myself to the place where you’ll be training, it would interest me immensely, and I could perhaps talk to you during the breaks.”
“I shouldn’t advise you to do that. You’ve been lying awake, fretting about something that I assure you is not of the slightest importance, but now that it has ceased to worry you, you should turn over and go to sleep—you’ll find it an excellent antidote to the demineralisation of your nerve-cells. Only you mustn’t go to sleep too soon, because our band-boys will be coming along under your windows. But as soon as they’ve passed I think you’ll be left in peace, and we shall meet again this evening at dinner.”
But soon I was constantly going to see the regiment doing field manoeuvres, when I began to take an interest in the military theories which Saint-Loup’s friends used to expound over the dinner-table, and when it had become the chief desire of my life to see at close quarters their various leaders, just as a person who makes music his principal study and spends his life in the concert halls finds pleasure in frequenting the cafés in which one can share the life of the members of the orchestra. To reach the training ground I used to have to make long journeys on foot. In the evening after dinner the longing for sleep made my head droop every now and then as in a fit of vertigo. Next morning I realised that I had not heard the band any more than, at Balbec, after the evenings on which Saint-Loup had taken me to dinner at Rivebelle, I used to hear the concert on the beach. And when I wanted to get up I had a delicious sensation of being incapable of doing so; I felt myself fastened to a deep, invisible soil by the articulations (of which my tiredness made me conscious) of muscular and nutritious roots. I felt myself full of strength; life seemed to extend more amply before me; for I had reverted to the healthy tiredness of my childhood at Combray on mornings after the days when we had taken the Guermantes walk. Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with d
ifferent years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue—if the latter does not itself cease—fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.
Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still. I had followed the manoeuvres for several days on end without being able to go to bed. How blissful then was my return to the hotel! As I got into bed I seemed to have escaped at last from the hands of enchanters and sorcerers like those who people the “romances” beloved of our forebears in the seventeenth century. My sleep that night and the lazy morning that followed it were no more than a charming fairy tale. Charming; beneficent perhaps also. I reminded myself that the worst sufferings have their place of sanctuary, that one can always, when all else fails, find rest. These thoughts carried me far.
On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-Loup had to stay in barracks, I used often to go and visit him there. It was a long way; I had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either side of which I had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost always over this high ground, and swept round the buildings erected on three sides of the barrack-square, which howled incessantly like a cave of the winds. While I waited for Robert—he being engaged on some duty or other—outside the door of his room or in the mess, talking to some of his friends to whom he had introduced me (and whom later I came to see from time to time, even when he was not going to be there), looking down from the window at the countryside three hundred feet below me, bare now except where recently sown fields, often still soaked with rain and glittering in the sun, showed a few strips of green, of the brilliance and translucent limpidity of enamel, I often heard him discussed by the others, and I soon learned what a popular favourite he was. Among many of the volunteers, belonging to other squadrons, sons of rich business or professional men who looked at aristocratic high society only from outside and without penetrating its enclosure, the attraction which they naturally felt towards what they knew of Saint-Loup’s character was reinforced by the glamour that attached in their eyes to the young man whom, on Saturday evenings, when they went on pass to Paris, they had seen supping in the Café de la Paix with the Duc d’Uzès and the Prince d’Orléans. And on that account they associated his handsome face, his casual way of walking and saluting, the perpetual dance of his monocle, the jaunty eccentricity of his service dress—the caps always too high, the breeches of too fine a cloth and too pink a shade—with a notion of elegance and “tone” which, they averred, was lacking in the best turned-out officers in the regiment, even the majestic Captain to whom I had been indebted for the privilege of sleeping in barracks, who seemed, in comparison, too pompous and almost common.
One of them mentioned that the Captain had bought a new horse. “He can buy as many horses as he likes. I passed Saint-Loup on Sunday morning in the Allée des Acacias. He’s got altogether more style on a horse!” replied his companion with the knowledge of experience, for these young men belonged to a class which, if it does not frequent the same houses and know the same people, yet, thanks to money and leisure, does not differ from the nobility in its experience of all those refinements of life which money can procure. At most their elegance, in the matter of clothes, for instance, had something more studied, more impeccable about it than that relaxed and careless elegance which had so delighted my grandmother in Saint-Loup. It gave quite a thrill to these sons of big stockbrokers or bankers, as they sat eating oysters after the theatre, to see Sergeant Saint-Loup at an adjoining table. And what a tale there was to tell in barracks on Monday night, after a week-end leave, by one of them who was in Robert’s squadron, and to whom he had said how d’ye do “most civilly,” while another, who was not in the same squadron, was quite positive that in spite of this Saint-Loup had recognised him, for two or three times he had put up his monocle and stared in the speaker’s direction.
“Yes, my brother saw him at the Paix,” said another, who had been spending the day with his mistress. “Apparently his dress coat was cut too loose and didn’t fit him.”
“What was the waistcoat like?”
“He wasn’t wearing a white waistcoat; it was purple, with sort of palms on it—smashing!”
To the “old soldiers” (sons of the soil who had never heard of the Jockey Club and simply put Saint-Loup in the category of ultra-rich non-commissioned officers, in which they included all those who, whether bankrupt or not, lived in a certain style, whose income or debts ran into several figures, and who were generous towards their men), the gait, the monocle, the breeches, the caps of Saint-Loup, even if they saw in them nothing particularly aristocratic, furnished nevertheless just as much interest and meaning. They recognised in these peculiarities the character, the style which they had assigned once and for all to this most popular of the “stripes” in the regiment, manners like no one else’s, scornful indifference to what his superior officers might think, which seemed to them the natural corollary of his kindness to his subordinates. The morning cup of coffee in the canteen, the afternoon rest in the barrack-room, seemed pleasanter when some old soldier fed the greedy and idle squad with some savoury tit-bit about a cap of Saint-Loup’s.
“It was the height of my pack.”
“Come off it, old chap, you’re having us on, it couldn’t have been the height of your pack,” interrupted a young college graduate who hoped by using these slang terms not to appear a greenhorn, and by venturing on this contradiction to obtain confirmation of a fact which enchanted him.
“Oh, so it wasn’t the height of my pack, wasn’t it? You measured it, I suppose! I tell you this much, the CO glared at him as if he’d have liked to put him in clink. But you needn’t think the great Saint-Loup was rattled, oh no, he came and he went, and down with his head and up with his head, and always that trick with the monocle. We’ll see what the Cap’n has to say when he hears. Oh, very likely he’ll say nothing, but you may be sure he won’t be pleased. But there’s nothing so wonderful about that cap. I hear he’s got thirty of ’em and more at home in town.”
“How come you heard about it, old man? From our blasted Corp?” asked the young graduate, pedantically displaying the new grammatical forms which he had only recently acquired and with which he took a pride in garnishing his conversation.
“How come I heard it? From his batman of course!”
“Ah, there’s a bloke who knows when he’s well off!”
“I should think so! He’s got more brass than I have, that’s for sure! And besides he gives him all his own belongings and everything. He wasn’t getting enough grub in the canteen, he says. So along comes de Saint-Loup and gives cooky hell: ‘I want him to be properly fed, d’you hear,’ he says, ‘and I don’t care what it costs.’ ”
The old soldier made up for the triviality of the words quoted by the emphasis of his tone, in a feeble imitation of the speaker which had an immense success.
On leaving the barracks I would take a stroll, and then, to fill up the time before I went, as I did every evening, to dine with Saint-Loup at the hotel in which he and his friends had established their mess, I walked back to my own, as soon as the sun went down, so as to have a couple of hours in which to rest and read. In the square, the
evening sky bedecked the pepper-pot turrets of the castle with little pink clouds which matched the colour of the bricks, and completed the harmony by softening the tone of the latter with a sunset glow. So strong a current of vitality coursed through my veins that no movement on my part could exhaust it; each step I took, after touching a paving-stone of the square, rebounded off it. I seemed to have the wings of Mercury growing on my heels. One of the fountains was filled with a ruddy glow, while in the other the moonlight had already begun to turn the water opalescent. Between them were children at play, uttering shrill cries, wheeling in circles, obeying some necessity of the hour, like swifts or bats. Next door to the hotel, the old law-courts and the Louis XVI orangery, in which were now installed the savings bank and the Army Corps headquarters, were lit from within by the palely gilded globes of their gas-jets which, already aglow though it was still daylight outside, suited those vast, tall, eighteenth-century windows from which the last gleams of the setting sun had not yet departed, as a head-dress of yellow tortoise-shell might suit a complexion heightened with rouge, and persuaded me to seek out my fireside and the lamp which, alone in the shadowy façade of my hotel, was striving to resist the gathering darkness, and for the sake of which I went indoors before it was quite dark, for pleasure, as to an appetising meal. I retained, in my lodgings, the same fullness of sensation that I had felt outside. It gave such an apparent convexity of surface to things which as a rule seem flat and insipid—to the yellow flame of the fire, the coarse blue paper of the sky on which the setting sun had scribbled corkscrews and whirligigs like a schoolboy with a piece of red chalk, the curiously patterned cloth on the round table on which a ream of essay paper and an inkpot lay in readiness for me together with one of Bergotte’s novels—that ever since then these things have continued to seem to me to abound in a richly particular form of existence which I feel that I should be able to extract from them if it were granted me to set eyes on them again. I thought with joy of the barracks I had just left and of its weather-cock turning with every wind that blew. Like a diver breathing through a pipe which rises above the surface of the water, I felt that I was in some sense linked to a healthy, open-air life through my connexion with those barracks, that towering observatory dominating a countryside furrowed with strips of green enamel, into whose various buildings I esteemed it a priceless privilege, which I hoped would last, to be free to go whenever I chose, always certain of a welcome.
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