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

by Marcel Proust

  “Zézette, would you mind not looking at that young man like that,” said Saint-Loup, on whose face the hesitant flush of a moment ago had gathered now into a scarlet cloud which dilated and darkened his swollen features. “If you must make an exhibition of us I shall go and lunch elsewhere and join you at the theatre afterwards.”

  At this point a messenger came up to tell Aimé that a gentleman wished him to go and speak to him at the door of his carriage. Saint-Loup, ever uneasy, and afraid now that it might be some message of an amorous nature that was to be conveyed to his mistress, looked out of the window and saw there, sitting in the back of his brougham, his hands tightly buttoned in white gloves with black seams and a flower in his buttonhole, M. de Charlus.

  “There, you see!” he said to me in a low voice, “my family hunt me down even here. Will you, please—I can’t very well do it myself—but since you know the head waiter well, ask him not to go to the carriage. He’s certain to give us away. Ask him to send some other waiter who doesn’t know me. I know my uncle; if they tell him I’m not known here, he’ll never come inside to look for me, he loathes this sort of place. Really, it’s pretty disgusting that an old womaniser like him, who’s still at it, too, should be perpetually lecturing me and coming to spy on me!”

  Aimé, on receiving my instructions, sent one of his underlings to explain that he was busy and could not come out at the moment, and (should the gentleman ask for the Marquis de Saint-Loup) that they did not know any such person. Presently the carriage departed. But Saint-Loup’s mistress, who had failed to catch our whispered conversation and thought that it was about the young man whom Robert had been reproaching her for making eyes at, broke out in a torrent of abuse.

  “Ah, so that’s it! So it’s the young man over there, now, is it? Thank you for telling me; it’s a real pleasure to have this sort of thing with one’s meals! Don’t pay any attention to him,” she added, turning to me, “he’s a bit piqued today, and anyway he just says these things because he thinks it’s smart and rather aristocratic to appear to be jealous.”

  And she began to drum her feet and her fingers in nervous irritation.

  “But, Zézette, it’s for me that it’s unpleasant. You’re making us ridiculous in the eyes of that fellow, who will begin to imagine you’re making advances to him, and who looks an impossible bounder, too.”

  “Oh, no, I think he’s charming. For one thing, he’s got the most adorable eyes, and a way of looking at women—you can feel he must love them.”

  “If you’ve lost your senses, you can at least keep quiet until I’ve left the room,” cried Robert. “Waiter, my things.”

  I did not know whether I was expected to follow him.

  “No, I need to be alone,” he told me in the same tone in which he had just been addressing his mistress, and as if he were quite as furious with me. His anger was like a single musical phrase to which in an opera several lines of dialogue are sung which are entirely different from one another in meaning and character in the libretto, but which the music gathers into a common sentiment. When Robert had gone, his mistress called Aimé and asked him various questions. She then wanted to know what I thought of him.

  “He has an amusing expression, hasn’t he? You see, what would amuse me would be to know what he really thinks about things, to have him wait on me often, to take him travelling. But that would be all. If we were expected to love all the people we find attractive, life would be pretty ghastly, wouldn’t it? It’s silly of Robert to imagine things. It all begins and ends in my head: Robert has nothing to worry about.” She was still gazing at Aimé. “Do look what dark eyes he has. I should love to know what goes on behind them.”

  Presently she received a message that Robert was waiting for her in a private room, to which he had gone by another door to finish his lunch without having to pass through the restaurant again. I thus found myself alone, until I too was summoned by Robert. I found his mistress stretched out on a sofa laughing under the kisses and caresses that he was showering on her. They were drinking champagne. “Hallo, you!” she said to him from time to time, having recently picked up this expression which seemed to her the last word in affection and wit. I had had little lunch, I was extremely uncomfortable, and, though Legrandin’s words had no bearing on the matter, I was sorry to think that I was beginning this first afternoon of spring in a back room in a restaurant and would finish it in the wings of a theatre. Looking first at the time to see that she was not making herself late, Rachel offered me a glass of champagne, handed me one of her Turkish cigarettes and unpinned a rose for me from her bodice. Whereupon I said to myself: “I needn’t regret my day too much, after all. These hours spent in this young woman’s company are not wasted, since I have had from her—charming gifts which cannot be bought too dear—a rose, a scented cigarette and a glass of champagne.” I told myself this because I felt that it would endow with an aesthetic character, and thereby justify and rescue, these hours of boredom. I ought perhaps to have reflected that the very need which I felt of a reason that would console me for my boredom was sufficient to prove that I was experiencing no aesthetic sensation. As for Robert and his mistress, they appeared to have no recollection of the quarrel which had been raging between them a few minutes earlier, or of my having been a witness to it. They made no allusion to it, offered no excuse for it, any more than for the contrast with it which their present conduct provided. By dint of drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that had come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which we get from the sun or from travelling to that which is induced by exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication—and each should have a different “reading,” like fathoms on a chart—lays bare in us, at the precise depth which it has reached; a different kind of man. The room which Saint-Loup had taken was small, but the single mirror which decorated it was of such a kind that it seemed to reflect a score of others in an endless vista; and the electric bulb placed at the top of the frame must at night, when it was lit, followed by the procession of twenty or more reflexions similar to its own, give to the drinker, even when alone, the idea that the surrounding space was multiplying itself simultaneously with his sensations, heightened by intoxication, and that, shut up by himself in this little cell, he was reigning nevertheless over something far more extensive in its indefinite luminous curve than a passage in the “Jardin de Paris.” Being then myself at this moment the said drinker, suddenly, looking for him in the glass, I caught sight of him, a hideous stranger, staring at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger than my disgust; from gaiety or bravado, I gave him a smile which he returned. And I felt myself so much under the ephemeral and potent sway of the minute in which our sensations are so strong, that I am not sure whether my sole regret was not at the thought that the hideous self whom I had just caught sight of in the glass was perhaps on his last legs, and that I should never meet that stranger again for the rest of my life.

  Robert was annoyed only because I did not seem to want to shine more in the eyes of his mistress.

  “What about that fellow you met this morning who combines snobbery with astronomy? Do tell her about him, I’ve forgotten the story,” and he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

  “But, my dear boy, there’s nothing more to say than what you’ve just said.”

  “What a bore you are. Then tell her about Françoise in the Champs-Elysées. She’ll enjoy that.”

  “Oh, do! Bobby has told me so much about Françoise.” And taking Saint-Loup by the chin, she said once more, for want of anything more original, drawing the said chin nearer to the light: “Hallo, you!”

  Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in themselves; I was amused, imagining that I was contemplating the characters in some old comic novel, to see the heroine of the play, struck by the new face
of the young man who had just come into the stalls, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love which the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the running fire of his impassioned speech, still kept a gleaming eye fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his fancy; and thus, thanks mainly to the information that Saint-Loup had given me as to the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of little merit, interested me too; for I could feel germinating and blossoming within it for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease-paint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul of the words of a part, those robust if ephemeral, and rather captivating, personalities which are the characters in a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time have already disintegrated into an actor who is no longer in the situation which was his in the play, into a text which no longer shows the actor’s face, into a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned, in short, to elements that contain nothing of them, because of their dissolution, effected as soon as the play is over—a dissolution which, like that of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

  One number in the programme I found extremely painful. A young woman whom Rachel and some of her friends disliked was to make her debut with a recital of old songs—a debut on which she had based all her hopes for the future of herself and her family. This young woman was possessed of an unduly, almost grotesquely prominent rump and a pretty but too slight voice, reduced still further by her nervousness and in marked contrast to her muscular development. Rachel had posted among the audience a certain number of friends, male and female, whose business it was by their sarcastic comments to disconcert the novice, who was known to be timid, and to make her lose her head so that her recital should prove a complete fiasco, after which the manager would refuse to give her a contract. At the first notes uttered by the wretched woman, several of the male spectators, recruited for that purpose, began pointing to her hindquarters with jocular comments, several of the women who were also in the plot laughed out loud, and each fluty note from the stage increased the deliberate hilarity until it verged on the scandalous. The unhappy woman, sweating with anguish under her grease-paint, tried for a little longer to hold out, then stopped and gazed round the audience with a look of misery and rage which succeeded only in increasing the uproar. The instinct to imitate others, the desire to show off their own wit and daring, added to the party several pretty actresses who had not been forewarned but now exchanged with the others glances charged with malicious connivance, and gave vent to such violent peals of laughter that at the end of the second song, although there were still five more on the programme, the stage manager rang down the curtain. I did my utmost to pay no more heed to the incident than I had paid to my grandmother’s sufferings when my great-uncle, to tease her, used to give my grandfather brandy, the idea of deliberate unkindness being too painful for me to bear. And yet, just as our pity for misfortune is perhaps not very precise since in our imagination we re-create a whole world of grief by which the unfortunate who has to struggle against it has no thought of being moved to self-pity, so unkindness has probably not in the minds of the unkind that pure and voluptuous cruelty which we find it so painful to imagine. Hatred inspires them, anger prompts them to an ardour and an activity in which there is no great joy; sadism is needed to extract any pleasure from it; whereas unkind people suppose themselves to be punishing someone equally unkind. Rachel certainly imagined that the actress whom she had tortured was far from being of interest to anyone, and that in any case, by having her hissed off the stage, she was herself avenging an outrage on good taste and teaching an unworthy colleague a lesson. Nevertheless, I preferred not to speak of this incident since I had had neither the courage nor the power to prevent it, and it would have been too embarrassing for me, by speaking well of their victim, to make the sentiments which animated the tormentors of the novice look like gratifications of cruelty.

  But the beginning of this performance interested me in quite another way. It made me realise in part the nature of the illusion of which Saint-Loup was a victim with regard to Rachel, and which had set a gulf between the images that he and I respectively had of his mistress, when we saw her that morning among the blossoming pear-trees. Rachel had scarcely more than a walking-on part in the little play. But seen thus, she was another woman. She had one of those faces to which distance—and not necessarily that between stalls and stage, the world being merely a larger theatre—gives form and outline and which, seen from close to, crumble to dust. Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milky way of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more. At a respectable distance, all this ceased to be visible and, from cheeks that withdrew, were reabsorbed into her face, there rose like a crescent moon a nose so fine and so pure that one would have liked to be the object of Rachel’s attention, to see her again and again, to keep her near one, provided that one had never seen her differently and at close range. This was not my case, but it had been Saint-Loup’s when he first saw her on the stage. Then he had asked himself how he might approach her, how get to know her, a whole miraculous world had opened up in his imagination—the world in which she lived—from which emanated an exquisite radiance but into which he could never penetrate. He had left the theatre in the little provincial town where this had happened several years before, telling himself that it would be madness to write to her, that she would not answer his letter, quite prepared to give his fortune and his name for the creature who now lived within him in a world so vastly superior to those too familiar realities, a world made beautiful by desire and dreams of happiness, when he saw emerging from the stage door the gay and charmingly hatted band of actresses who had just been playing. Young men who knew them were waiting for them outside. The number of pawns on the human chessboard being less than the number of combinations that they are capable of forming, in a theatre from which all the people we know and might have expected to find are absent, there turns up one whom we never imagined that we should see again and who appears so opportunely that the coincidence seems to us providential, although no doubt some other coincidence would have occurred in its stead had we been not in that place but in some other, where other desires would have been born and another old acquaintance forthcoming to help us to satisfy them. The golden portals of the world of dreams had closed upon Rachel before Saint-Loup saw her emerge from the theatre, so that the freckles and spots were of little importance. They displeased him nevertheless, especially as, being no longer alone, he had not now the same power to dream as in the theatre. But she, for all that he could no longer see her, continued to dictate his actions, like those stars which govern us by their attraction even during the hours in which they are not visible to our eyes. And so his desire for the actress with the delicate features which were not now even present in Robert’s memory caused him to fling himself at the old friend whom chance had brought to the spot and get himself introduced to the person with no features and with freckles, since she was the same person, telling himself that later on he would take care to find out which of the two the actress really was. She was in a hurry, she did not on this occasion address a single word to Saint-Loup, and it was only some days later that he finally induced her to leave her companions and allow him to escort her home. He loved her already. The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of, ensure that not much time is required before one entrusts all one’s chances of happiness to someone who a few days since was no more than a fortuitous, unknown, insignificant apparition on the boards of a theatre.