But perhaps I am wrong in saying an idiot, such postcards not having always been bought by a person of that sort at random, for their interest as coming from Versailles. For two whole years men of intelligence, artists, used to find Siena, Venice, Granada a “bore,” and would say of the humblest omnibus, of every railway carriage: “There you have true beauty.” Then this fancy passed like the rest. Indeed, I am not sure that people did not revert to the “sacrilege of destroying the noble relics of the past.” At any rate, a first-class railway carriage ceased to be regarded as a priori more beautiful than St Mark’s in Venice. People continued to say: “Here you have real life, the return to the past is artificial,” but without drawing any definite conclusion. At all events, while retaining full confidence in the chauffeur, to ensure that Albertine would be unable to desert him without his daring to stop her for fear of being taken for a spy, I no longer allowed her to go out after this without the reinforcement of Andrée, whereas for a time I had found the chauffeur sufficient. I had even allowed her then (a thing I would never dare do now) to stay away for three whole days by herself with the chauffeur and to go almost as far as Balbec, such a craving did she have for travelling at high speed in an open car. Three days during which my mind had been quite at rest, although the rain of postcards that she had showered upon me did not reach me, owing to the appalling state of the Breton postal system (good in summer, but disorganised, no doubt, in winter), until a week after the return of Albertine and the chauffeur, so hale and hearty that on the very morning of their return they resumed their daily outings as though nothing had happened. I was delighted that Albertine should be going this afternoon to the Trocadéro, to this “special” matinee, but above all reassured by the fact that she would have a companion there in the shape of Andrée.
Dismissing these reflexions, now that Albertine had gone out, I went and stood for a moment at the window. There was at first a silence, amid which the whistle of the tripe vendor and the hooting of the trams reverberated through the air in different octaves, like a blind piano-tuner. Then gradually the interwoven motifs became distinct, and others were combined with them. There was also a new whistle, the call of a vendor the nature of whose wares I never discovered, a whistle that exactly resembled the whistle of the trams, and since it was not carried out of earshot by its own velocity, it gave the impression of a single tram-car, not endowed with motion, or broken down, immobilised, screeching at brief intervals like a dying animal.
And I felt that, should I ever have to leave this aristocratic quarter—unless it were to move to one that was entirely plebeian—the streets and boulevards of central Paris (where the greengrocery, fishmongering and other trades, established in big stores, rendered superfluous the cries of the street hawkers, who in any case would have been unable to make themselves heard) would seem to me very dreary, quite uninhabitable, stripped, drained of all these litanies of the small trades and itinerant victuals, deprived of the orchestra that came every morning to charm me. On the pavement a woman with no pretence to fashion (or else obedient to an ugly fashion) came past, too brightly dressed in a sack overcoat of goatskin; but no, it was not a woman, it was a chauffeur who, enveloped in his goatskin, was proceeding on foot to his garage. Winged messengers of variegated hue, escaped from the big hotels, were speeding towards the stations bent over their handlebars, to meet the arrivals by the morning trains. The whirring of a violin was due at one time to the passing of a car, at another to my not having put enough water in my electric hot-water bottle. In the middle of the symphony an old-fashioned tune rang out; replacing the sweet-seller, who generally accompanied her song with a rattle, the toy-seller, to whose kazoo was attached a jumping-jack which he sent bobbing in all directions, paraded other puppets for sale, and, indifferent to the ritual declamation of Gregory the Great, the reformed declamation of Palestrina or the lyrical declamation of the moderns, warbled at the top of his voice, a belated adherent of pure melody:
Come along all you mammies and dads,
Here’s toys for your lasses and lads!
I make them myself,
And I pocket the pelf.
Tralala, tralala, tralalee.
Come along youngsters …
Making no attempt to compete with this lively aria, little Italians in berets offered their statuettes for sale in silence. Soon, however, a young fifer compelled the toy merchant to move on and to chant more inaudibly, though in brisk time: “Come along all you mammies and dads!” Was this young fifer one of the dragoons whom I used to hear in the mornings at Donciéres? No, for what followed was: “Here comes the china restorer. I repair glass, marble, crystal, bone, ivory and antiques. Here comes the restorer.” In a butcher’s shop, between an aureole of sunshine on the left and a whole ox suspended from a hook on the right, a young assistant, very tall and slender, with fair hair and a long neck emerging from a sky-blue collar, was displaying a lightning speed and a religious conscientiousness in putting on one side the most exquisite fillets of beef, on the other the coarsest parts of the rump, and placing them on glittering scales surmounted by a cross from which there dangled a set of beautiful chains, and—although he did nothing afterwards but arrange in the window a display of kidneys, steaks and ribs—was really far more reminiscent of a handsome angel who, on the Day of Judgment, will organise for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the wicked and the weighing of souls. And once again the thin, shrill music of the fife rose into the air, herald no longer of the destruction that Françoise used to dread whenever a regiment of cavalry filed past, but of “repairs” promised by an “antiquary,” simpleton or rogue, who, in either case highly eclectic and very far from specialising, applied his art to the most diverse materials. The little bakers’ girls hastened to stuff into their baskets the long loaves ordered for some luncheon party, while the dairymaids deftly attached the milk-churns to their yokes. Could it, I wondered, be altogether warranted, the nostalgic view I had of these young creatures? Would it not have been different if I had been able to detain for a few moments at close quarters one of those whom from the height of my window I saw only inside their shops or in motion? To estimate the loss that I suffered by my seclusion, that is to say the riches that the day had to offer me, I should have had to intercept in the long unwinding of the animated frieze some damsel carrying her laundry or her milk, transfer her for a moment, like the silhouette of a mobile piece of stage decor between its supports, into the frame of my door, and keep her there before my eyes for long enough to elicit some information about her which would enable me to find her again some day, like the identification discs which ornithologists or ichthyologists attach before setting them free to the legs or bellies of the birds or fishes whose migrations they are anxious to trace.
And so I told Françoise that I wanted some shopping done, and asked her to send up to me, should any of them call, one or other of the girls who were constantly coming to the house with laundry or bread or jugs of milk, and whom she herself used often to send on errands. In doing so I was like Elstir, who, obliged to remain closeted in his studio, on certain days in spring when the knowledge that the woods were full of violets gave him a hunger to see some, used to send his concierge out to buy him a bunch; and then it was not the table upon which he had posed the little floral model, but the whole carpet of undergrowth where in other years he had seen, in their thousands, the serpentine stems bowed beneath the weight of their tiny blue heads, that Elstir would fancy that he had before his eyes, like an imaginary zone defined in his studio by the limpid odour of the evocative flower.
Of a laundry girl, on a Sunday, there was not the slightest prospect. As for the baker’s girl, as ill luck would have it she had rung the bell when Françoise was not about, had left her loaves in their basket on the landing, and had made off. The greengrocer’s girl would not call until much later. Once, I had gone to order a cheese at the dairy, and among the various young female employees had noticed a startling towhead, tall in s
tature though little more than a child, who seemed to be day-dreaming, amid the other errand-girls, in a distinctly haughty attitude. I had seen her from a distance only, and for so brief an instant that I could not have described her appearance, except to say that she must have grown too fast and that her head supported a mane that gave the impression far less of capillary characteristics than of a sculptor’s stylised rendering of the separate meanderings of parallel snow-tracks on a mountainside. This was all that I had been able to make out, apart from a sharply defined nose (a rare thing in a child) in a thin face, which recalled the beaks of baby vultures. It was not only the clustering of her comrades round her that prevented me from seeing her distinctly, but also my uncertainty whether the sentiments which I might, at first sight and subsequently, inspire in her would be those of shy pride, or of irony, or of a scorn which she would express later on to her friends. These alternative suppositions which I had formed about her in a flash had thickened the blurred atmosphere around her in which she was veiled like a goddess in a cloud shaken by thunder. For moral uncertainty is a greater obstacle to an exact visual perception than any defect of vision would be. In this too skinny young person, who also struck one’s attention too forcibly, the excess of what another person would perhaps have called her charms was precisely what was calculated to repel me, but had nevertheless had the effect of preventing me from even noticing, let alone remembering, anything about the other dairymaids, whom the aquiline nose of this one and her uninviting look, pensive, private, seeming to be passing judgment, had totally eclipsed, as a white streak of lightning plunges the surrounding countryside into darkness. And thus, of my call to order a cheese at the dairy, I had remembered (if one can say “remember” in speaking of someone so carelessly observed that one adapts to the nullity of the face ten different noses in succession), I had remembered only the girl I had found unpleasing. This can be enough to set a love affair in motion. And yet I might have forgotten the startling towhead and might never have wished to see her again, had not Françoise told me that, though still quite a nipper, she had all her wits about her and would shortly be leaving her employer, since she had been going too fast and owed money in the neighbourhood. It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure may be a beginning of beauty.
I began to read Mamma’s letter. Behind her quotations from Mme de Sévigné (“If my thoughts are not entirely black at Combray, they are at least dark grey; I think of you constantly; I long for you; your health, your affairs, your absence: think how they must seem to me when the dusk descends”) I sensed that my mother was vexed to find Albertine’s stay in the house prolonged, and my intention of marriage, although not yet announced to the betrothed, confirmed. She did not express her annoyance more directly because she was afraid that I might leave her letters lying about. Even then, veiled as they were, she reproached me for not informing her immediately, after each of them, that I had received it: “You remember how Mme de Sévigné used to say: ‘When one is far away, one no longer laughs at letters which begin: I have received yours.’ ” Without referring to what distressed her most, she expressed displeasure at my lavish expenditure: “Where on earth does all your money go? It is distressing enough that, like Charles de Sévigné, you do not know what you want and are ‘two or three people at once,’ but do try at least not to be like him in spending money so that I may never have to say of you: ‘He has discovered how to spend and have nothing to show, how to lose without gambling and how to pay without clearing himself of debt.’ ”
I had just finished Mamma’s letter when Françoise returned to tell me that she had in the house that same rather too forward young dairymaid of whom she had spoken to me. “She can quite well take Monsieur’s letter and do his shopping for him if it’s not too far. You’ll see, she’s just like a Little Red Ridinghood.” Françoise went to fetch the girl, and I could hear her showing the way and saying: “Come along now, frightened because there’s a passage! Stuff and nonsense, I never thought you’d be such a goose. Have I got to lead you by the hand?” And Françoise, like a good and faithful servant who means to see that her master is respected as she respects him herself, had draped herself in the majesty that ennobles the procuress in the paintings of the old masters, wherein the mistress and the lover fade into insignificance by comparison.
Elstir, when he gazed at the violets, had no need to bother about what they were doing. The entry of the young dairymaid at once robbed me of my contemplative calm; I could no longer think of anything except how to give plausibility to the fable of the letter that she was to deliver and I began to write quickly without venturing to cast more than a furtive glance at her, so that I might not seem to have brought her into my room to be scrutinised. She was invested for me with that charm of the unknown which would not have existed for me in a pretty girl whom I had found in one of those houses where they attend on one. She was neither naked nor in disguise, but a genuine dairymaid, one of those whom we picture to ourselves as being so pretty when we do not have the time to approach them; she was a particle of what constitutes the eternal desire, the eternal regret of life, the twofold current of which is at length diverted, directed towards us. Twofold, for if it is a question of the unknown, of a person who, from her stature, her proportions, her indifferent glance, her haughty calm, we suspect must be divine, at the same time we want this woman to be thoroughly specialised in her profession, enabling us to escape from ourselves into that world which a special costume makes us romantically believe to be different. Indeed, if we wanted to embody in a formula the law of our amorous curiosities, we should have to seek it in the maximum divergence between a woman glimpsed and a woman approached and caressed. If the women of what used at one time to be called the closed houses, if prostitutes themselves (provided that we know them to be prostitutes) attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain; it is because they are not conquests. The divergence, there, is at its minimum. A whore smiles at us in the street as she will smile when she is by our side. We are sculptors. We want to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from the one she has presented to us. We have seen a girl strolling, indifferent and insolent, along the seashore, we have seen a shop-assistant, serious and active behind her counter, who will answer us curtly if only to avoid being subjected to the jibes of her comrades, or a fruit-vendor who barely answers us at all. Whereupon we will not rest until we can discover by experiment whether the proud girl on the seashore, the shop-assistant obsessed with what other people will say, the aloof fruit-vendor, cannot be made, by skilful handling on our part, to relax their uncompromising attitude, to throw about our necks those arms that were laden with fruit, to bend towards our lips, with a smile of consent, eyes hitherto cold or absent—oh, the beauty of the eyes of a working-girl, eyes which were stern in working hours when she was afraid of the scan-dalmongering of her companions, eyes which shunned our obsessive gaze and which, now that we have seen her alone and face to face, allow their pupils to light up with sunny laughter when we speak of making love! Between the shopgirl, or the laundress busy with her iron, or the fruit-seller, or the dairymaid—and that selfsame wench when she is about to become one’s mistress, the maximum divergence is attained, stretched indeed to its extreme limits, and varied by those habitual gestures of her profession which make a pair of arms describe, during the hours of toil, an arabesque as different as it is possible to imagine from those supple bonds that already every evening are fastened about one’s neck while the mouth shapes itself for a kiss. And so one spends one’s life in anxious approaches, constantly renewed, to serious working-girls whose calling seems to distance them from one. Once they are in one’s arms, they are no longer what they were, the distance that one dreamed of bridging is abolished. But one begins anew with other women, one devotes all one’s time, all one’s money, all one’s energy to these
enterprises, one is enraged by the too cautious driver who may make us miss the first rendezvous, one works oneself up into a fever. And yet one knows that this first rendezvous will bring the end of an illusion. No matter: as long as the illusion lasts one wants to see whether one can convert it into reality, and then one thinks of the laundress whose coldness one remarked. Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 280