When I joined Robert and his friends, I withheld the confession that my heart was no longer with them, that my departure was now irrevocably fixed. Saint-Loup appeared to believe me, but I learned afterwards that he had from the first moment realised that my uncertainty was feigned and that he would not see me again next day. While he and his friends, letting their plates grow cold, searched through the time-table for a train which would take me to Paris, and while the whistling of the locomotives in the cold, starry night could be heard on the line, I certainly no longer felt the same peace of mind as on so many evenings I had derived from the friendship of the former and the latter’s distant passage. And yet they did not fail, this evening, to perform the same office in a different form. My departure oppressed me less when I was no longer obliged to think of it alone, when I felt that the more normal and healthy exertions of my energetic friends, Robert’s brothers-in-arms, were being applied to what was to be done, and of those other strong creatures, the trains, whose comings and goings, morning and night, between Doncières and Paris, broke up in retrospect what had been too compact and unendurable in my long isolation from my grandmother into daily possibilities of return.
“I don’t doubt the truth of what you say, and that you aren’t thinking of leaving us just yet,” said Saint-Loup, smiling, “but pretend you are going, and come and say good-bye to me tomorrow morning early, otherwise there’s a risk of my not seeing you. I’m going out to lunch, I’ve got leave from the Captain, but I shall have to be back in barracks by two, as we are to be on the march all afternoon. I suppose the man to whose house I’m going, a couple of miles out, will manage to get me back in time.”
Scarcely had he uttered these words than a messenger came for me from my hotel: the post office had asked for me on the telephone. I ran there, for it was nearly closing time. The word “trunks” recurred incessantly in the answers given me by the clerks. I was in a fever of anxiety, for it was my grandmother who had asked for me. The post office was closing for the night. Finally I got my connexion. “Is that you, Granny?” A woman’s voice, with a strong English accent, answered: “Yes, but I don’t recognise your voice.” Neither did I recognise the voice that was speaking to me; besides, my grandmother called me tu, and not vous. And then all was explained. The young man for whom his grandmother had called on the telephone had a name almost identical with mine, and was staying in an annex of my hotel. This call coming on the very day on which I had been telephoning to my grandmother, I had never for a moment doubted that it was she who was asking for me. Whereas it was by pure coincidence that the post office and the hotel had combined to make a twofold error.
The following morning I was late, and failed to catch Saint-Loup, who had already left for the country house where he was invited to lunch. About half past one, having decided to go to the barracks so as to be there as soon as he returned, I was crossing one of the avenues on the way there when I noticed, coming behind me in the same direction as myself, a tilbury which, as it overtook me, obliged me to jump out of its way. An NCO was driving it, wearing a monocle; it was Saint-Loup. By his side was the friend whose guest he had been at lunch, and whom I had met once before at the hotel where we dined. I did not dare shout to Robert since he was not alone, but, in the hope that he would stop and pick me up, I attracted his attention with a sweep of my hat which was by way of being motivated by the presence of a stranger. I knew that Robert was short-sighted, but I should have supposed that if he saw me at all he could not fail to recognise me. He did indeed see my salute, and returned it, but without stopping; driving on at full speed, without a smile, without moving a muscle of his face, he confined himself to keeping his hand raised for a minute to the peak of his cap, as though he were acknowledging the salute of a trooper whom he did not know. I ran to the barracks, but it was a long way; when I arrived, the regiment was forming up on the square, where I was not allowed to remain, and I was heart-broken at not having been able to say good-bye to Saint-Loup. I went up to his room, but there was no sign of him. I inquired after him from a group of sick troopers—recruits who had been excused route marches, the young graduate, one of the “old soldiers,” who were watching the regiment form up.
“You haven’t seen Sergeant Saint-Loup, by any chance?” I asked.
“He’s already gone down, sir,” said the old soldier.
“I never saw him,” said the graduate.
“You never saw him,” exclaimed the old soldier, losing all interest in me, “you never saw our famous Saint-Loup, the figure he’s cutting with his new breeches! When the Cap’n sees that, officer’s cloth, my word!”
“Oh, that’s a good one, officer’s cloth,” replied the young graduate, who, having reported sick, was excused marching and ventured, not without some trepidation, to make bold with the veterans. “It isn’t officer’s cloth, it’s just ordinary cloth.”
“Monsieur?” inquired the old soldier angrily.
He was indignant that the young graduate should question his assertion that the breeches were made of officer’s cloth, but, being a Breton, born in a village that went by the name of Penguern-Stereden, and having learned French with as much difficulty as if it had been English or German, whenever he felt himself overcome by emotion he would go on saying “Monsieur?” to give himself time to find words, then, after this preparation, let loose his eloquence, confining himself to the repetition of certain words which he knew better than others, but without haste, taking every precaution to gloss over his unfamiliarity with the pronunciation.
“Ah! so it’s just ordinary cloth?” he broke out eventually with a fury whose intensity increased in direct proportion to the sluggishness of his speech. “Ah! so it’s just ordinary cloth! When I tell you that it is officer’s cloth, when-I-tell-you, since-I-tell-you, it’s because I know, I would think. You’d better not spin your cock-and-bull yarns here.”
“Oh, well, if you say so,” replied the young graduate, overcome by the force of this argument.
“There, look, there’s the Cap’n coming along. No, but just look at Saint-Loup, the way he throws his leg out, and his head. Would you call that a non-com? And his eyeglass—it’s all over the shop.”
I asked these troopers, who did not seem at all embarrassed by my presence, whether I too might look out of the window. They neither objected to my doing so nor moved to make room for me. I saw Captain de Borodino go majestically by, putting his horse into a trot, and seemingly under the illusion that he was taking part in the Battle of Austerlitz. A few loiterers had stopped by the gate to see the regiment file out. Erect on his charger, his face rather plump, his cheeks of an Imperial fullness, his eye clear-sighted, the Prince must have been the victim of some hallucination, as I was myself whenever, after the tram-car had passed, the silence that followed its rumble seemed to me crossed and striated by a vaguely musical palpitation.
I was wretched at having failed to say good-bye to Saint-Loup, but I went nevertheless, for my only concern was to return to my grandmother; always until then, in this little country town, when I thought of what my grandmother must be doing by herself, I had pictured her as she was when with me, but eliminating myself without taking into account the effects on her of such an elimination; now, I had to free myself at the first possible moment, in her arms, from the phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly called into being by her voice, of a grandmother really separated from me, resigned, having (something I had never yet thought of her as having) a definite age, who had just received a letter from me in the empty house in which I had already imagined Mamma when I had left her to go to Balbec.
Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of needlework which she will hurriedly put aside if anyone comes in, she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by m
e. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence—there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, instead of our eyes, it should happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to hail a cab, will be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. So it is when some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness. And—like a sick man who, not having looked at his own reflexion for a long time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink protuberance of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt—I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories, suddenly, in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of Time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, an overburdened old woman whom I did not know.
My request to be allowed to inspect the Elstirs in Mme de Guermantes’s collection had been met by Saint-Loup with: “I’ll answer for her.” And indeed, unfortunately, it was he and he alone who did answer. We answer readily enough for other people when, setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate these to suit our fancy. No doubt even then we take into account the difficulties due to another person’s nature being different from our own, and we do not fail to appeal to motives with the power to influence that nature—self-interest, persuasion, emotion—which will neutralise any contrary tendencies. But it is still our own nature which imagines these divergences from our nature; it is we who remove these difficulties; it is we who measure these compelling motives. And when we wish to see the other person perform in real life the actions which in our mind’s eye we have made him rehearse, the case is altered, we come up against unseen resistances which may prove insuperable. One of the strongest is doubtless that which may be developed in a woman who does not love, by the rank and unconquerable repulsion she feels for the man who loves her: during the long weeks in which Saint-Loup still did not come to Paris, his aunt, to whom I had no doubt of his having written begging her to do so, never once asked me to call at her house to see the Elstirs.
I perceived signs of coldness on the part of another occupant of the building. This was Jupien. Did he consider that I ought to have gone in and said good-day to him, on my return from Doncières, before even going upstairs to our own flat? My mother said that it was nothing to be surprised about. Françoise had told her that he was like that, subject to sudden fits of ill-humour, without any cause. These invariably passed off after a while.
Meanwhile the winter was drawing to an end. One morning, after several weeks of showers and storms, I heard in my chimney—instead of the formless, elastic, sombre wind which stirred in me a longing to go to the sea—the cooing of the pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day. That morning, I caught myself humming a music-hall tune which had never entered my head since the year when I had been due to go to Florence and Venice—so profoundly, and so unpredictably, does the atmosphere act on our organism and draw from dim reserves where we had forgotten them the melodies written there which our memory has failed to decipher. Presently a more conscious dreamer accompanied this musician to whom I was listening inside myself, without even having recognised at first what he was playing.
I realised that it was not for any reason peculiar to Balbec that on my arrival there I had failed to find in its church the charm which it had had for me before I knew it; that in Florence or Parma or Venice my imagination could no more take the place of my eyes when I looked at the sights there. I realised this; similarly, one New Year’s evening at nightfall, standing before a column of playbills, I had discovered the illusion that lies in our thinking that certain feast-days differ essentially from the other days in the calendar. And yet I could not prevent my memory of the time during which I had looked forward to spending Easter in Florence from continuing to make that festival the atmosphere, so to speak, of the City of Flowers, to give at once to Easter Day something Florentine and to Florence something paschal. Easter was still a long way off; but in the range of days that stretched out before me the days of Holy Week stood out more clearly at the end of those that came between. Touched by a ray, like certain houses in a village which one sees from a distance when the rest are in shadow, they had caught and kept all the sun.
The weather had now become milder. And my parents themselves, by urging me to take more exercise, gave me an excuse for continuing my morning walks. I had wanted to give them up, since they meant my meeting Mme de Guermantes. But it was for that very reason that I kept thinking all the time of those walks, and this induced me to go on finding fresh reasons for taking them, reasons which had no connexion with Mme de Guermantes and which easily convinced me that, had she never existed, I should still have gone for a walk at that hour every morning.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 140