If I had questioned M. de Charlus about old French silver, this was because, when we had been planning to have a yacht, we had asked Elstir’s advice on the off chance, even though Albertine did not believe that we would ever have one. Now, no less than in matters of women’s dress, the painter’s taste in the furnishing of yachts was refined and severe. He would allow only English furniture and old silver. This had led Albertine, who had at first thought only of clothes and furniture, to become interested in silver, and since our return from Balbec she had read books on the silversmith’s art and on the hallmarks of the old craftsmen. But old French silver—having been melted down twice, at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht when the King himself, setting the example to his great nobles, sacrificed his silver plate, and again in 1789—is now extremely rare. At the same time, although modern silversmiths have managed to copy all this old plate from the Pont-aux-Choux designs, Elstir considered this reproduction work unworthy to enter the dwelling of a woman of taste, even a floating one. I knew that Albertine had read the description of the marvels that Roettiers had made for Mme du Barry. If any of these pieces remained, she longed to see them, and I to give them to her. She had even begun to form a neat collection which she installed with charming taste in a glass case and which I could not contemplate without affectionate dismay, for the art with which she arranged them was that, born of patience, ingenuity, homesickness, the need to forget, which prisoners practise.
In the matter of dress, what appealed to her most at this time was everything made by Fortuny. These Fortuny gowns, one of which I had seen Mme de Guermantes wearing, were those of which Elstir, when he told us about the magnificent garments of the women of Carpaccio’s and Titian’s day, had prophesied the imminent return, rising from their ashes, as magnificent as of old, for everything must return in time, as it is written beneath the vaults of St Mark’s, and proclaimed, as they drink from the urns of marble and jasper of the Byzantine capitals, by the birds which symbolise at once death and resurrection. As soon as women had begun to wear them, Albertine had remembered Elstir’s prophecy, had coveted them, and we were shortly to go and choose one. Now even if these gowns were not those genuine antiques in which women today seem a little too got up in fancy dress and which it is preferable to keep as collector’s items (I was looking for some of these also, as it happens, for Albertine), neither did they have the coldness of the artificial, the sham antique. Like the theatrical designs of Sert, Bakst and Benois, who at that moment were re-creating in the Russian ballet the most cherished periods of art with the aid of works of art impregnated with their spirit and yet original, these Fortuny gowns, faithfully antique but markedly original, brought before the eye like a stage decor, and with an even greater evocative power since the decor was left to the imagination, that Venice saturated with oriental splendour where they would have been worn and of which they constituted, even more than a relic in the shrine of St Mark, evocative as they were of the sunlight and the surrounding turbans, the fragmented, mysterious and complementary colour. Everything of those days had perished, but everything was being reborn, evoked and linked together by the splendour and the swarming life of the city, in the piecemeal reappearance of the still-surviving fabrics worn by the Doges’ ladies. I had tried once or twice to obtain advice on this subject from Mme de Guermantes. But the Duchess did not care for clothes that gave the effect of fancy dress. She herself, though she possessed several, never looked so well as in black velvet with diamonds. And with regard to gowns like Fortuny’s, she had little useful advice to give. Besides, I had scruples about asking her advice lest I might give the impression that I called on her only when I happened to need her help, whereas for a long time past I had been declining several invitations a week from her. It was not only from her, moreover, that I received them in such profusion. Certainly, she and many other women had always been extremely friendly to me. But my seclusion had undoubtedly multiplied their friendliness tenfold. It seems that in our social life, a minor echo of what occurs in love, the best way to get oneself sought after is to withhold oneself. A man may think up everything that he can possibly cite to his credit, in order to find favour with a woman; he may wear different clothes every day, look after his appearance; yet she will not offer him a single one of the attentions and favours which he receives from another woman to whom, by being unfaithful to her, and in spite of his appearing before her ill-dressed and without any artifice to attract, he has endeared himself for ever. Similarly, if a man were to regret that he was not sufficiently courted in society, I should not advise him to pay more calls, to keep an even finer carriage; I should tell him not to accept any invitation, to live shut up in his room, to admit nobody, and that then there would be a queue outside his door. Or rather I should not tell him so. For it is a sure way to become sought-after which succeeds only like the way to be loved, that is to say if you have not adopted it with that object in view, if, for instance, you confine yourself to your room because you are seriously ill, or think you are, or are keeping a mistress shut up with you whom you prefer to society (or for all these reasons at once), in the eyes of which, even if it is unaware of the woman’s existence, and simply because you resist its overtures, it will simply be a reason to prefer you to all those who offer themselves, and to attach itself to you.
“We shall have to begin to think soon about your Fortuny dressing-gown,” I said to Albertine one evening. Surely, for her, who had long desired them, who would choose them with me after long deliberation, who had a place reserved for them in advance, not only in her wardrobe but in her imagination, the possession of these gowns, every detail of which, before deciding among so many others, she would carefully examine, was something more than it would have been to a woman with too much money who has more dresses than she knows what to do with and never even looks at them. And yet, notwithstanding the smile with which Albertine thanked me, saying: “It’s so sweet of you,” I noticed how weary and even sad she was looking.
From time to time, while we were waiting for these gowns to be finished, I used to borrow others of the kind, sometimes merely the stuffs, and would dress Albertine in them, drape them over her; she walked about my room with the majesty of a Doge’s wife and the grace of a mannequin. But my captivity in Paris was made more burdensome to me by the sight of these garments which reminded me of Venice. True, Albertine was far more of a prisoner than I. And it was curious to remark how fate, which transforms persons, had contrived to penetrate the walls of her prison, to change her in her very essence, and turn the girl I had known at Balbec into a dreary, docile captive. Yes, the walls of her prison had not prevented that influence from reaching her; perhaps indeed it was they that had produced it. It was no longer the same Albertine, because she was not, as at Balbec, incessantly in flight upon her bicycle, impossible to find owing to the number of little watering-places where she would go to spend the night with friends and where moreover her lies made it more difficult to lay hands on her; because, shut up in my house, docile and alone, she was no longer what at Balbec, even when I had succeeded in finding her, she used to be upon the beach, that fugitive, cautious, deceitful creature, whose presence was expanded by the thought of all those assignations which she was skilled in concealing, which made one love her because they made one suffer and because, beneath her coldness to other people and her casual answers, I could sense yesterday’s assignation and tomorrow’s, and for myself a sly, disdainful thought; because the sea breeze no longer puffed out her skirts; because, above all, I had clipped her wings, and she had ceased to be a winged Victory and become a burdensome slave of whom I would have liked to rid myself.
Then, to change the course of my thoughts, rather than begin a game of cards or draughts with Albertine, I would ask her to give me a little music. I remained in bed, and she would go and sit down at the end of the room before the pianola, between the two bookcases. She chose pieces which were either quite new or which she had played to me only once or twice, for, beginning to know
me better, she was aware that I liked to fix my thoughts only upon what was still obscure to me, and to be able, in the course of these successive renderings, thanks to the increasing but, alas, distorting and alien light of my intellect, to link to one another the fragmentary and interrupted lines of the structure which at first had been almost hidden in mist. She knew and, I think, understood the joy that my mind derived, at these first hearings, from this task of modelling a still shapeless nebula. And as she played, of all Albertine’s multiple tresses I could see but a single heart-shaped loop of black hair clinging to the side of her ear like the bow of a Velasquez Infanta. Just as the volume of that angel musician was constituted by the multiple journeys between the different points in the past which the memory of her occupied within me and the different signs, from the purely visual to the innermost sensations of my being, which helped me to descend into the intimacy of hers, so the music that she played had also a volume, produced by the unequal visibility of the different phrases, according as I had more or less succeeded in throwing light on them and joining up the lines of the seemingly nebulous structure. She guessed that at the third or fourth repetition my intellect, having grasped, having consequently placed at the same distance, all the parts, and no longer having to exert any effort on them, had conversely projected and immobilised them on a uniform plane. She did not, however, yet move on to another piece, for, without perhaps having any clear idea of the process that was going on inside me, she knew that at the moment when the exertions of my intelligence had succeeded in dispelling the mystery of a work, it was very rarely that, in compensation, it had not, in the course of its baleful task, picked up some profitable reflexion. And when in time Albertine said: “We might give this roll to Françoise and get her to change it for something else,” often there was for me a piece of music the less in the world, perhaps, but a truth the more.
I was so convinced that it would be absurd to be jealous of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, inasmuch as Albertine gave not the least sign of wanting to see them again, and among all the plans for a holiday in the country which we had formed had herself rejected Combray, so near to Montjouvain, that often I would ask her to play to me some of Vinteuil’s music, without its causing me pain. Once only this music had been an indirect cause of jealousy. This was when Albertine, who knew that I had heard it performed at Mme Verdurin’s by Morel, spoke to me one evening about him, expressing a keen desire to go and hear him play and to make his acquaintance. This, as it happened, was shortly after I had learned of the letter, unintentionally intercepted by M. de Charlus, from Lea to Morel. I wondered whether Lea might not have mentioned him to Albertine. The words “you naughty girl,” “you vicious thing,” came back to my horrified mind. But precisely because Vinteuil’s music was in this way painfully associated with Léa—and not with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend—when the anguish caused by Lea had subsided, I could listen to this music without pain; one malady had cured me of the possibility of the others. In the music I had heard at Mme Verdurin’s, phrases I had not noticed, obscure larvae that were then indistinct, turned into dazzling architectural structures; and some of them became friends, that I had scarcely distinguished, that at best had appeared to me to be ugly, so that I could never have supposed that they were like those people, antipathetic at first sight, whom we discover to be what they really are only after we have come to know them well. Between the two states there was a real transmutation. At the same time, phrases which had been quite distinct the first time but which I had not then recognised, I identified now with phrases from other works, such as that phrase from the Sacred Variation for Organ which, at Mme Verdurin’s, had passed unperceived by me in the septet, where nevertheless, like a saint that had stepped down from the sanctuary, it found itself consorting with the composer’s familiar sprites. Moreover, the phrase evoking the joyful clanging of the bells at noon, which had seemed to me too unmelodious, too mechanical in its rhythm, had now become my favourite, either because I had grown accustomed to its ugliness or because I had discovered its beauty. This reaction from the disappointment which great works of art cause at first may in fact be attributed to a weakening of the initial impression or to the effort necessary to lay bare the truth—two hypotheses which recur in all important questions, questions about the truth of Art, of Reality, of the Immortality of the Soul; we must choose between them; and, in the case of Vinteuil’s music, this choice was constantly presenting itself under a variety of forms. For instance, this music seemed to me something truer than all known books. At moments I thought that this was due to the fact that, what we feel about life not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary, that is to say intellectual expression describes it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose it as does music, in which the sounds seem to follow the very movement of our being, to reproduce that extreme inner point of our sensations which is the part that gives us that peculiar exhilaration which we experience from time to time and which, when we say “What a fine day! What glorious sunshine!” we do not in the least communicate to others, in whom the same sun and the same weather evoke quite different vibrations. In Vinteuil’s music, there were thus some of those visions which it is impossible to express and almost forbidden to contemplate, since, when at the moment of falling asleep we receive the caress of their unreal enchantment, at that very moment in which reason has already deserted us, our eyes seal up and before we have had time to know not only the ineffable but the invisible, we are asleep. It seemed to me, when I abandoned myself to this hypothesis that art might be real, that it was something even more than the merely nerve-tingling joy of a fine day or an opiate night that music can give; a more real, more fruitful exhilaration, to judge at least by what I felt. It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture or a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some definite spiritual reality, or life would be meaningless. Thus nothing resembled more closely than some such phrase of Vinteuil the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments in my life, when gazing, for instance, at the steeples of Martinville, or at certain trees along a road near Balbec, or, more simply, at the beginning of this book, when I tasted a certain cup of tea. Like that cup of tea, all those sensations of light, the bright clamour, the boisterous colours that Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination, insistently but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something that I might compare to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium. But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he “heard” the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. “Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world. “If it were not so late, my sweet,” I said to her, “I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise as I do, my little Albertine, the same in the sonata, in the septet, in the other works, would be, say for instance in Barbey dAurevilly, a hidden reality revealed by a
physical sign, the physiological blush of the Bewitched, of Aimée de Spens, of old Clotte, the hand in the Rideau cramoisi, the old manners and customs, the old words, the ancient and peculiar trades behind which there is the Past, the oral history made by the herdsmen with their mirror, the noble Norman cities redolent of England and charming as a Scottish village, the hurler of curses against which one can do nothing, la Vellini, the Shepherd, a similar sensation of anxiety in a passage, whether it be the wife seeking her husband in Une vieille maîtresse, or the husband in L’Ensorcelée scouring the plain and the Bewitched herself coming out from mass. Another example of Vinteuil’s key-phrases is that stonemason’s geometry in the novels of Thomas Hardy.”
Vinteuil’s phrases made me think of the “little phrase” and I told Albertine that it had been as it were the national anthem of the love of Swann and Odette, “the parents of Gilberte, whom I believe you know. You told me she was a bad girl. Didn’t she try to have relations with you? She spoke to me about you.”
“Yes, you see, her parents used to send a carriage to fetch her from school when the weather was bad, and I seem to remember she took me home once and kissed me,” she said, after a momentary pause, laughing as though it were an amusing revelation. “She asked me all of a sudden whether I was fond of women.” (But if she only “seemed to remember” that Gilberte had taken her home, how could she say with such precision that Gilberte had asked her this odd question?) “In fact, I don’t know what weird idea came into my head to fool her, but I told her that I was.” (It was as though Albertine was afraid that Gilberte had told me this and did not want me to see that she was lying to me.) “But we did nothing at all.” (It was strange, if they had exchanged these confidences, that they should have done nothing, especially as, before this, they had kissed, according to Albertine.) “She took me home like that four or five times, perhaps more, and that’s all.”
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