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

by Marcel Proust

  And setting my own self-distrust against the ten-thousand-fold approbation which now sustained me, I drew as much strength and hope for my talent from reading the article at this moment as I drew misgivings when what I had written was addressed only to myself. I saw at that same hour my thought—or at least, failing my thought for those who were incapable of understanding it, the repetition of my name and as it were an embellished evocation of my person—shine on countless people, colour their own thoughts in an auroral light which filled me with more strength and triumphant joy than the multiple dawn which at that moment was blushing at every window. I saw Bloch, the Guermantes, Legrandin, Andrée, extracting from every sentence the images that it enclosed at the very moment in which I was endeavouring to be an ordinary reader, while reading as author, but not only as author. In order that the impossible creature I was endeavouring to be should combine all the opposites that might be most favourable to me, if I read as an author I judged myself as a reader, without any of the qualms that may be felt about a written text by him who compares it with the ideal which he has sought to express in it. Those passages which, when I wrote them, were so colourless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that the reading of them was a torture to me, had only accentuated in me the sense of my own impotence and of my incurable lack of talent. But now, in forcing myself to be a reader, I transferred to others the painful duty of judging me, and I succeeded at least in making a clean sweep of what I had attempted to do in reading what I had written. I read the article while forcing myself to imagine that it had been written by someone else. Then all my images, all my reflexions, all my epithets taken in themselves, untarnished by the memory of the failure which they represented in relation to my aims, charmed me by their brilliance, their unexpectedness, their profundity. And when I became aware of too blatant a weakness, taking refuge in the spirit of the ordinary and astonished reader, I said to myself: “Bah! how could a reader possibly notice that? There may well be something lacking there, but good heavens, they ought to be pleased! There are enough good things in it to be getting on with, more than they usually get.”

  And thus, no sooner had I finished this comforting perusal than I who had not had the courage to re-read my manuscript wanted to start again immediately, for there is nothing of which one can say more aptly than of an old article by oneself that “it bears re-reading.” I made up my mind to send Françoise out to buy more copies—in order to give them to my friends, I would tell her, but in reality to feel at first hand the miracle of the multiplication of my thought and to read, as though I were another person who had just opened the Figaro, the same sentences in another copy. It was, as it happened, a very long time since I had seen the Guermantes: I would go and pay them a visit in order to find out what people thought of my article.

  I thought of some female reader into whose room I would have loved to penetrate and to whom the newspaper would convey, if not my thought, which she would be incapable of understanding, at least my name, like a eulogy of me. But eulogies awarded to somebody one doesn’t love do not captivate the heart any more than the thoughts of a mind one is unable to penetrate attract the mind. With regard to other friends, however, I told myself that if the state of my health continued to grow worse and I could no longer see them, it would be pleasant to continue to write, in order thus to have access to them still, to speak to them between the lines, to make them share my thoughts, to please them, to be received into their hearts. I told myself this because, social relations having hitherto had a place in my daily life, a future in which they would no longer figure alarmed me, and because this expedient which would enable me to remain in the thoughts of my friends, perhaps to arouse their admiration, until the day when I should be well enough to begin to see them again, was a solace to me; I told myself this, but I was well aware that it was not true, that although I chose to imagine their attention as the object of my pleasure, that pleasure was an internal, spiritual, self-generated pleasure which they could not give me and which I could find not in conversing with them, but in writing far away from them, and that if I began to write in the hope of seeing them indirectly, in the hope they might have a better idea of me, in the hope of preparing for myself a better position in society, perhaps writing would relieve me of the wish to see them, and I should no longer have any desire to enjoy the position in society which literature might have given me, because my pleasure would be no longer in society but in literature.

  After lunch, when I went down to Mme de Guermantes, it was less for the sake of Mlle d’Eporcheville, who had been stripped, by Saint-Loup’s telegram, of the better part of her personality, than in the hope of finding in the Duchess herself one of those readers of my article who would enable me to form an idea of the impression that it had made upon those members of the public who were subscribers to or purchasers of the Figaro. It was not, incidentally, without pleasure that I went to see Mme de Guermantes. Although I told myself that what made her house different to me from all the rest was the fact that it had for so long haunted my imagination, by knowing the reason for this difference I did not abolish it. Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address-book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. Then once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes’s dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it. I forgot for an instant my own knowledge that none of this existed, as we think at times of a beloved friend forgetting for an instant that he is dead. Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess’s hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream.

  On entering the drawing-room, I saw the fair girl whom I had supposed for twenty-four hours to be the girl of whom Saint-Loup had spoken to me. It was she who asked the Duchess to “reintroduce” me to her. And indeed, the moment I came into the room I had the impression that I knew her quite well, an impression which the Duchess however dispelled by saying: “Oh! so you’ve met Mlle de Forcheville before?” For, on the contrary, I was certain that I had never been introduced to any girl of that name, which would certainly have struck me, so familiar was it in my memory ever since I had been given a retrospective account of Odette’s love-affairs and Swann’s jealousy. In itself my twofold error as to the name, in having remembered “de l’Orgeville” as “d’Eporcheville” and in having reconstructed as “d’Eporcheville” what was in reality “Forcheville,” was in no way extraordinary. Our mistake lies in supposing that things present themselves as they really are, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable notion of them. But in reality this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive. We see, we hear, we conceive the world in a lopsided fashion. We repeat a name as we have heard it spoken until experience has corrected our mistake—something that does not always happen. Everyone at Combray had spoken to Françoise for twenty-five years of Mme Sazerat and Françoise continued to say “Mme Sazerin,” not from that deliberate and proud perseverance in error which was habitual with her, which was strengthened by our contradictions, and which was all that she had added of the egalitarian principles of 1789 to the France of Saint-André-des-Champs in her make-up (she claimed only one civic right, that of not pronouncing words as we did and of maintaining that “hotel,” “été” and “air” were of the feminine gender), but because she really did continue to hear “Sazerin.” This perpetual
error, which is precisely “life,” does not bestow its countless forms merely upon the visible and the audible universe, but upon the social universe, the sentimental universe, the historical universe, and so forth. The Princesse de Luxembourg is no better than a prostitute in the eyes of the judge’s wife, which of course is of little consequence; what is of slightly more consequence is the fact that Odette is in Swann’s eyes a difficult woman to conquer, whence he builds up a whole romance which becomes all the more painful when he discovers his error; what is of even more consequence still, the French are thinking only of revenge in the eyes of the Germans. We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions. I should therefore have had no reason to be surprised when I heard the name Forcheville (and I was already wondering whether she was related to the Forcheville of whom I had so often heard) had not the fair girl said to me at once, anxious no doubt to forestall, tactfully, questions which would have been disagreeable to her: “Don’t you remember that you knew me well long ago … you used to come to our house … your friend Gilberte. I could see that you didn’t recognise me. I recognised you at once.” (She said this as if she had recognised me at once in the drawing-room, but the truth is that she had recognised me in the street and had greeted me, and later Mme de Guermantes informed me that she had told her, as something very comic and extraordinary, that I had followed her and brushed against her, mistaking her for a tart.) I did not discover until after her departure why she was called Mlle de Forcheville. After Swann’s death, Odette, who astonished everyone by her profound, prolonged and sincere grief, found herself an extremely rich widow. Forcheville married her, after making a long round of country houses and ascertaining that his family would acknowledge his wife. (The family raised some difficulties at first, but yielded to the material advantage of no longer having to provide for the expenses of a needy relative who was about to pass from comparative penury to opulence.) Shortly after this, an uncle of Swann’s, in whose hands the successive demise of innumerable relatives had accumulated an enormous inheritance, died, leaving the whole of his fortune to Gilberte who thus became one of the richest heiresses in France. But this was a time when in the aftermath of the Dreyfus case an anti-Semitic trend had arisen parallel to a growing trend towards the penetration of society by Jews. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that the discovery of the judicial error would be a severe blow to anti-semitism. But, temporarily at least, a form of social anti-semitism was on the contrary enhanced and exacerbated thereby. Forcheville, who, like every petty nobleman, had derived from conversations in the family circle the certainty that his name was more ancient than that of La Rochefoucauld, considered that, in marrying the widow of a Jew, he had performed a similar act of charity to that of a millionaire who picks up a prostitute in the street and rescues her from poverty and squalor. He was prepared to extend his bounty to Gilberte, whose prospects of marriage would be assisted by all her millions but hindered by that absurd name “Swann.” He declared that he would adopt her. We know that Mme de Guermantes, to the astonishment of her friends—which she enjoyed and was in the habit of provoking—had refused, after Swann’s marriage, to meet his daughter as well as his wife. This refusal had appeared all the more cruel inasmuch as what the possibility of marriage to Odette had long represented to Swann was the prospect of introducing his daughter to Mme de Guermantes. And doubtless he ought to have known, he who had already had so long an experience of life, that these scenes which we picture to ourselves are never realised for a diversity of reasons, among which there is one which meant that he seldom regretted his inability to effect that introduction. This reason is that, whatever the image may be—from the prospect of eating a trout at sunset, which makes a sedentary man decide to take the train, to the desire to be able to astonish the proud lady at a cash desk one evening by stopping outside her door in a magnificent carriage, which makes an unscrupulous man decide to commit murder or to long for the death of rich relatives, according to whether he is brave or lazy, whether he follows his ideas through or remains fondling the first link in the chain—the act which is destined to enable us to attain to it, whether the act be travel, marriage, crime or whatever, modifies us so profoundly that not merely do we cease to attach any importance to the reason which made us perform it, but the image conceived by the man who was not then a traveller, or a husband, or a criminal, or a recluse (who has set himself to work with the idea of fame and simultaneously lost all desire for fame), may perhaps never even once recur to his mind. Moreover, even if we are stubbornly determined to prove that our wish to act was not an idle one, it is probable that the sunset effect would fail to materialise, that feeling cold at that moment we would long for a bowl of soup by the fireside and not for a trout in the open air, that our carriage would fail to impress the cashier who perhaps for wholly different reasons had a great regard for us and in whom this sudden opulence would arouse suspicion. In short, we have seen Swann, once married, attach importance above all else to the relations of his wife and daughter with Mme Bontemps, etc.

  To all the reasons, derived from the Guermantes way of looking at social life, which had made the Duchess decide never to allow Mme and Mlle Swann to be introduced to her, we may add also that happy complacency with which people who are not in love dissociate themselves from that which they condemn in lovers and which is explained by their love. “Oh! I don’t get mixed up in all that. If it amuses poor Swann to behave idiotically and ruin his life, that’s his affair, but I’m not going to be dragged into that sort of thing; it may end very badly; I leave them to get on with it.” It is the suave man magno which Swann himself recommended to me with regard to the Verdurins, when he had long ceased to be in love with Odette and no longer cared about the little clan. It is what makes so wise the judgments of third persons with regard to passions which they themselves do not feel and the complications of behaviour which those passions bring about.