“You don’t happen to have had any news from Paris?”
“Yes,” he replied gloomily, “bad news.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised that it was only he who had cause for unhappiness, and that the news was from his mistress. But I soon saw that one of its consequences would be to prevent Robert for a long time from taking me to see his aunt.
I learned that a quarrel had broken out between him and his mistress, through the post presumably, unless she had come down to pay him a flying visit between trains. And the quarrels, even when relatively slight, which they had previously had, had always seemed as though they must prove insoluble. For she had a violent temper, and would stamp her foot and burst into tears for reasons as incomprehensible as those that make children shut themselves into dark cupboards, not come out for dinner, refuse to give any explanation, and only redouble their sobs when, our patience exhausted, we give them a slap.
To say that Saint-Loup suffered terribly from this estrangement would be an oversimplification, would give a false impression of his grief. When he found himself alone, with nothing else to think about but his mistress parting from him with the respect for him which she had felt on seeing him so full of energy and vigour, the agony he had experienced during the first few hours at first gave way before the irreparable, and the cessation of pain is such a relief that the rupture, once it was certain, assumed for him something of the same kind of charm as a reconciliation. What he began to suffer from a little later was a secondary and accidental grief, the tide of which flowed incessantly from within himself, at the idea that perhaps she would have been glad to make it up, that it was not inconceivable that she was waiting for a word from him, that in the meantime, by way of revenge, she would perhaps on a certain evening, in a certain place, do a certain thing, and that he had only to telegraph to her that he was coming for it not to happen, that others perhaps were taking advantage of the time which he was letting slip, and that in a few days it would be too late to get her back, for she would be already bespoken. Among all these possibilities he was certain of nothing; his mistress preserved a silence which wrought him up to such a frenzy of grief that he began to ask himself whether she might not be in hiding at Doncières, or have set sail for the Indies.
It has been said that silence is strength; in a quite different sense it is a terrible strength in the hands of those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves! Robert said to himself: “What can she be doing, to keep so silent as this? Obviously she’s being unfaithful to me with others.” He also said to himself: “What have I done that she should be so silent? Perhaps she hates me, and will go on hating me for ever.” And he reproached himself. Thus silence indeed drove him mad with jealousy and remorse. Besides, more cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison. It is an intangible enclosure, true, but an impenetrable one, this interposed slice of empty atmosphere through which nevertheless the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible form of illumination than that of silence, which shows us not one absent love but a thousand, and shows us each of them in the act of indulging in some new betrayal? Sometimes, in a sudden slackening of tension, Robert would imagine that this silence was about to cease, that the letter was on its way. He saw it, it had arrived, he started at every sound, his thirst was already quenched, he murmured: “The letter! The letter!” After this glimpse of a phantom oasis of tenderness, he found himself once more toiling across the real desert of a silence without end.
He suffered in anticipation, without missing a single one, all the griefs and pains of a rupture which at other moments he fancied he might somehow contrive to avoid, like people who put all their affairs in order with a view to an expatriation which will never take place, and whose minds, no longer certain where they will find themselves living next day, flutter momentarily, detached from them, like a heart that is taken out of a dying man and continues to beat, though separated from the rest of his body. At all events, this hope that his mistress would return gave him courage to persevere in the rupture, as the belief that one may return alive from the battle helps one to face death. And inasmuch as habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock, perhaps had he begun by thinking of the rupture as a feint he would in the end have become genuinely accustomed to it. But his uncertainty kept him in a state which, linked with the memory of the woman herself, was akin to love. He forced himself, nevertheless, not to write to her, thinking perhaps that it was a less cruel torment to live without his mistress than with her in certain conditions, or else that, after the way in which they had parted, it was essential to wait for her apologies if she was to retain what he believed her to feel for him in the way, if not of love, at any rate of esteem and regard. He contented himself with going to the telephone, which had recently been installed at Doncières, and asking for news from, or giving instructions to, a lady’s-maid whom he had hired for his mistress. These communications were complicated and time-consuming, since, influenced by what her literary friends preached to her about the ugliness of the capital, but principally for the sake of her animals, her dogs, her monkey, her canaries and her parakeet, whose incessant din her Paris landlord had ceased to tolerate, Robert’s mistress had taken a little house in the neighbourhood of Versailles. Meanwhile he, at Doncières, no longer slept a wink all night. Once, in my room, overcome by exhaustion, he dozed off for a while. But suddenly he began to speak, tried to get up and run to stop something from happening, said: “I hear her; you shan’t … you shan’t …” He awoke. He had been dreaming, he told me, that he was in the country with the senior sergeant. His host had tried to keep him away from a certain part of the house. Saint-Loup had discovered that the senior sergeant had staying with him a subaltern, extremely rich and extremely vicious, whom he knew to have a violent passion for his mistress. And suddenly in his dream he had distinctly heard the intermittently regular cries which his mistress was in the habit of uttering at the moment of gratification. He had tried to force the senior sergeant to take him to the room in which she was. And the other had held on to him to keep him from going there, with an air of annoyance at such a want of discretion in a guest which, Robert said, he would never be able to forget.
“It was an idiotic dream,” he concluded, still quite out of breath.
All the same I could see that, during the hour that followed, he was more than once on the point of telephoning to his mistress to beg for a reconciliation. My father now had the telephone, but I doubt whether that would have been of much use to Saint-Loup. Besides, it hardly seemed to me quite proper to make my parents, or even a mechanical instrument installed in their house, play pander between Saint-Loup and his mistress, however ladylike and high-minded the latter might be. His bad dream began to fade from his memory. With a fixed and absent stare, he came to see me on each of those cruel days which traced in my mind as they followed one after the other the splendid sweep of a staircase painfully forged, from the steps of which Robert stood asking himself what decision his beloved was going to take.
At length she wrote to ask whether he would consent to forgive her. As soon as he realised that a definite rupture had been avoided he saw all the disadvantages of a reconciliation. Besides, he had already begun to suffer less acutely, and had almost accepted a grief of which, in a few months perhaps, he would have to suffer the sharp bite again if their liaison were to be resumed. He did not hesitate for long. And perhaps he hesitated only because he was now certain of being able to recover his mistress, of being a
ble to do so and therefore of doing so. However, she asked him, so that she might have time to recover her equanimity, not to come to Paris at the New Year. And he did not have the heart to go to Paris without seeing her. On the other hand, she had declared her willingness to go abroad with him, but for that he would need to make a formal application for leave, which Captain de Borodino was unwilling to grant.
“I’m sorry about it because of our visit to my aunt, which will have to be put off. I dare say I shall be in Paris at Easter.”
“We shan’t be able to call on Mme de Guermantes then, because I shall have gone to Balbec. But, really, it doesn’t matter in the least, I assure you.”
“To Balbec? But you didn’t go there till August.”
“I know, but next year I’m being sent there earlier, for my health.”
His main fear was that I might form a bad impression of his mistress after what he had told me. “She is violent simply because she’s too frank, too headstrong in her feelings. But she’s a sublime creature. You can’t imagine the poetic delicacy there is in her. She goes every year to spend All Souls’ Day at Bruges. Rather good, don’t you think? If you ever meet her you’ll see what I mean: she has a sort of greatness …” And, as he was infected with certain of the linguistic mannerisms current in the literary circles in which the lady moved: “There’s something astral about her, in fact something vatic. You know what I mean, the poet merging into the priest.”
I searched all through dinner for a pretext which would enable Saint-Loup to ask his aunt to see me without my having to wait until he came to Paris. Such a pretext was finally furnished me by the desire I cherished to see some more pictures by Elstir, the famous painter whom Saint-Loup and I had met at Balbec—a pretext behind which there was, moreover, an element of truth, for if, on my visits to Elstir, I had asked of his painting that it should lead me to the understanding and love of things better than itself, a real thaw, an authentic square in a country town, live women on a beach (at most I would have commissioned from him portraits of realities I had not been able to fathom, such as a hedge of hawthorns, not so much that it might perpetuate their beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty to me), now, on the contrary, it was the originality, the seductive attraction of those paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted above all else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.
It seemed to me, moreover, that the least of his pictures were something quite different from the masterpieces even of greater painters than himself. His work was like a realm apart, with impenetrable frontiers, peerless in substance. Eagerly collecting the infrequent periodicals in which articles on him and his work had appeared, I had learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscape and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects (I had seen photographs of two of these in his studio), and had then been for long under the influence of Japanese art.
Several of the works most characteristic of his various manners were scattered about the provinces. A certain house at Les Andelys, in which there was one of his finest landscapes, seemed to me as precious, gave me as keen a desire to go there, as might a village near Chartres among whose millstone walls was enshrined a glorious stained-glass window; and towards the possessor of this treasure, towards the man who, inside his rough-hewn house, on the main street, closeted like an astrologer, sat questioning one of those mirrors of the world which Elstir’s pictures were, and who had perhaps bought it for many thousands of francs, I felt myself borne by that instinctive sympathy which joins the very hearts, the inmost natures of those who think alike upon a vital subject. Now three important works by my favourite painter were described in one of these articles as belonging to Mme de Guermantes. So that it was on the whole quite sincerely that, on the evening on which Saint-Loup told me of his lady’s projected visit to Bruges, I was able, during dinner, in front of his friends, to say to him casually, as though on the spur of the moment:
“I say, if you don’t mind, just one last word on the subject of the lady we were speaking about. You remember Elstir, the painter I met at Balbec?”
“Why, of course I do.”
“You remember how much I admired his work?”
“I do, very well; and the letter we sent him.”
“Well, one of the reasons—not one of the chief reasons, an incidental reason—why I should like to meet the said lady—you do know who I mean, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. All these digressions!”
“Is that she has in her house at least one very fine picture by Elstir.”
“Really, I never knew that.”
“Elstir will probably be at Balbec at Easter; you know he now spends almost the entire year on that coast. I should very much like to have seen this picture before I leave Paris. I don’t know whether you’re on sufficiently intimate terms with your aunt: but couldn’t you manage, somehow, giving her so good an impression of me that she won’t refuse, to ask her to let me come and see the picture without you, since you won’t be there?”
“Certainly. I’ll answer for her; leave it to me.”
“Oh, Robert, I do like you.”
“It’s very nice of you to like me, but it would be equally nice if you were to call me tu, as you promised, and as you began to do.”
“I hope it’s not your departure that you two are plotting together,” one of Robert’s friends said to me. “You know, if Saint-Loup does go on leave, it needn’t make any difference, we shall still be here. It will be less amusing for you, perhaps, but we’ll do all we can to make you forget his absence!”
The fact was that, just when it had been generally assumed that Robert’s mistress would be going to Bruges alone, the news came that Captain de Borodino, hitherto obdurate in his refusal, had given authority for Sergeant Saint-Loup to proceed on long leave to Bruges. What had happened was this. The Prince, extremely proud of his luxuriant head of hair, was an assiduous customer of the principal hairdresser in the town, who had started life as an apprentice to Napoleon III’s barber. Captain de Borodino was on the best of terms with the hairdresser, being, in spite of his majestic airs, extremely simple in his dealings with his inferiors. But the hairdresser, through whose books the Prince’s account had been running without payment for at least five years, swollen no less by bottles of “Portugal” and “Eau des Souverains,” curlingtongs, razors, and strops, than by the ordinary charges for shampooing, haircutting and the like, had a greater respect for Saint-Loup, who always paid on the nail and kept several carriages and saddle-horses. Having learned of Saint-Loup’s vexation at not being able to go with his mistress, he had spoken warmly about it to the Prince at a moment when he was trussed up in a white surplice with his head held firmly over the back of the chair and his throat menaced by a razor. This account of a young man’s amatory adventures won from the princely Captain a smile of Bonapartist indulgence. It is hardly probable that he thought of his unpaid bill, but the barber’s recommendation inclined him to good humour as much as a duke’s would have inclined him to bad. While his chin was still smothered in soap, the leave was promised and the warrant was signed that evening. As for the hairdresser, who was in the habit of boasting incessantly, and in order to be able to do so laid claim, with an astonishing faculty for lying, to exploits that were entirely fictitious, having for once rendered a signal service to Saint-Loup, not only did he refrain from publicly claiming credit for it, but, as if vanity were obliged to lie, and when there is no call to do so gives way to modesty, he never mentioned the matter to Robert again.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 138