My memory, even my involuntary memory, had lost all recollection of the love of Albertine. But it seems that there is also an involuntary memory of the limbs, a pale and fruitless imitation of the other kind, which lives on longer, rather as some non-intelligent animals or vegetables live longer than man. One’s legs and arms are full of torpid memories. Once, when I had left Gilberte rather early, I woke up in the middle of the night in my room at Tansonville and, still half asleep, called out: ‘Albertine!’ It was not that I had been thinking about her or dreaming of her, nor that I had mistaken her for Gilberte: but a recollection suddenly burgeoning within my arm had made me reach behind my back for the bell, as if I had been in my bedroom in Paris. And, not finding it, I had called out: ‘Albertine!’, thinking my dead lover was lying beside me as she often used to in the evenings, and that we were falling asleep together, I relying, when I woke up, on the time it would take Françoise to get to my room, so that Albertine might without risk pull the bell which I could not find.
Becoming – during this troublesome phase at least – much less sympathetic, Robert no longer displayed to his friends, to myself for example, any real evidence of sensitivity. On the other hand, he affected a sentimentality towards Gilberte that bordered on the theatrical, which was quite distasteful. Not that Gilberte was really unimportant to him. No, Robert loved her. But he lied to her all the time; his duplicitous nature, if not the root cause of his lying, was permanently exposed. And he therefore thought that the only way to redeem the situation was by exaggerating, on a ridiculous scale, the real sadness he felt at upsetting her. He used to arrive at Tansonville obliged, he would say, to leave again the next morning in order to attend to some business with a country neighbour who was meant to be waiting for him in Paris and who, encountered by chance that evening near Combray, would unintentionally expose the lie which Robert had neglected to tell him about, by saying that he had come down to the country for a month’s rest and would not be returning to Paris during that time. Robert would redden, see Gilberte’s sad, disdainful smile, extricate himself with some harsh words to the blunderer, return ahead of his wife and send her a despairing note in which he would claim to have lied in order not to upset her, so that when she saw him leave for reasons he was unable to explain to her, she would not think he did not love her (all of which, despite being written as a lie, was actually true), and would then send to ask if he could come to her room, where, partly in real distress, partly out of exhaustion at his life, and partly in a pretence that grew daily more outrageous, he would sob, drench his face in cold water, speak of his imminent death and sometimes throw himself on to the floorboards as if suddenly taken ill. Gilberte never knew how far she ought to believe him, imagined that he was lying about each individual instance, but that in some general way she was loved, and worried about these forebodings of imminent death, thinking that he did perhaps suffer from some illness she was unaware of and therefore did not dare to oppose him or to ask him to forgo his trips.
I was even more at a loss to understand why it was that Morel had to be treated as the son of the house, like Bergotte, wherever the Saint-Loups happened to be, in Paris or at Tansonville. Morel could mimic Bergotte perfectly. In fact after a while there was no need to ask him to do his imitation. Like those hysterics who do not have to be put into a trance in order for them to become some other person, he would of his own accord suddenly take on all his characteristics.
Françoise, who had seen everything that M. de Charlus had done for Jupien and everything that Robert de Saint-Loup was doing for Morel, did not thereby infer that this was a trait that resurfaced in different generations of Guermantes, but rather – as Legrandin too did so much to help Théodore – she concluded, moralistic and set in her ideas as she was, that this was a custom rendered respectable by its universality. She would always say of a young man, whether it were Morel or Théodore: ‘He’s found a gentleman who’s interested in him and has done ever so much to help him.’ And since in such cases it is the protectors who love, suffer and forgive, Françoise did not hesitate, between them and the minors they seduced, to accord them the better part, to find them ‘good-hearted’. She had no hesitation in blaming Théodore, who had played so many tricks on Legrandin, and yet it seemed almost impossible that she could have any doubt about the nature of their relationship, for she would add: ‘The boy realized he had to do his bit too, and said, “Take me with you, I’ll love you, I’ll be nice to you,” and, my goodness, the gentleman is so good-natured that Théodore is bound to be treated better than he deserves, because he’s a bit wild, but the gentleman is so good that I’ve often said to Jeanette (Théodores fiancée), “My dear, if you’re ever in trouble, go and see the gentleman. He’d sleep on the floor and give you his own bed. He’s been too fond of the boy (Théodore) to turn him out. Of course he won’t ever abandon him.” ’
Théodore was now living somewhere in the Midi, and out of politeness I asked his sister what his surname was. ‘But that must be the person who wrote to me about my Figaro article!’ I exclaimed when I heard that he was called Sautton.
In the same way she thought more highly of Saint-Loup than of Morel and reckoned that, despite all the things the boy (Morel) had done, the Marquis would always get him out of trouble, because he was such a good-hearted man, or else something terrible would have to have happened to prevent him.
Saint-Loup was insistent that I should remain at Tansonville, and on one occasion let slip, although he gave no other visible indication of wanting to please me, that my arrival had caused his wife such joy that she was transported by it, so she had told him, for the entire evening, an evening on which she had been feeling so wretched that by arriving unexpectedly I had miraculously saved her from despair, ‘or perhaps even worse’, he had added. He asked me to try to persuade her that he loved her, saying that the other woman he loved, he loved less than her, and that he would soon break with her. ‘And yet,’ he added with such complacency and such a need to confide in me that I thought that at any moment the name ‘Charlie’, despite himself, was going to ‘pop out’ like the winning number in a lottery, ‘I did have something to be proud of. This woman, who has shown her affection for me in so many ways, and whom I’m going to sacrifice for Gilberte, had never been attracted to a man, she thought she was incapable of being in love. I am the first. I was so deeply conscious of her having rejected everybody that, when I received the adorable letter telling me she could never be happy except with me, I couldn’t get over it. Obviously I could have lost my head completely, except that I couldn’t bear the thought of my poor little Gilberte in tears. Don’t you think she’s rather like Rachel?’ he went on. And in fact I had been struck by a vague resemblance that one could, at a stretch, now see between them. Perhaps this lay in the real similarity of some features (due possibly to their Jewish origins, though these were not very evident in Gilberte) which had caused Robert, when his family pressed him to marry, to feel more attracted to Gilberte than to other women of comparable fortune. It may also have had something to do with the fact that Gilberte, having come across some photographs of Rachel, who had previously not even been a name to her, attempted to please Robert by imitating some of the actress’s habits of dress, like always having red bows in her hair and a black velvet ribbon on her arm, and by dyeing her hair to make herself look darker. Then, realizing that her distress was making her look ill, she tried to remedy things. Sometimes she took this to extremes. One evening, when Robert was due to be spending twenty-four hours at Tansonville, I was astounded to see her take her seat at the dining-table looking so curiously different, not only from her former self but even from her habitual appearance, that I sat there in amazement, as if I were watching an actress, a sort of Théodora.2 I sensed that, despite myself, I was staring at her in my curiosity to discover what it was about her that was so changed. This curiosity was, however, soon satisfied when she wiped her nose, despite all the precautions she employed. From all the colours which remained o
n the handkerchief, turning it into a rich palette, I saw that she was entirely made-up. It was this that gave her the blood-red mouth which she tried to keep curved in a permanent smile, in the belief that it suited her, while the approaching arrival time of the train, with Gilberte still not knowing whether her husband would actually be on it or whether he would send one of those telegrams which M. de Guermantes had wittily characterized as: UNABLE TO COME: LIE FOLLOWS, made her cheeks grow pale beneath the violet perspiration of the rouge and etched dark shadows around her eyes.
‘Ah, you know,’ he would say to me, with a consciously affectionate manner which contrasted powerfully with the spontaneous affection of earlier times, in the voice of an alcoholic and with the modulations of an actor, ‘I’d give anything to see Gilberte happy! She’s done so much for me. You simply can’t know.’ And the most disagreeable aspect of all this was, again, his vanity, as he was flattered at being loved by Gilberte and yet, without daring to say that it was Charlie he loved, still provided details of the love the violinist was supposed to have for him, details which Saint-Loup knew were heavily exaggerated, if not entirely invented, given that Charlie was daily demanding larger and larger sums of money from him. And thus, entrusting Gilberte to my care, he would leave once again for Paris.
I did once have an opportunity (to anticipate a little, as I am still at Tansonville) to observe him in Paris society, from a distance, and on that occasion his conversation, lively and charming despite everything, enabled me to recapture the past; yet I was struck by how much he was changing. He was looking more and more like his mother: the haughty, elegant manner he had inherited from her and which she, after the most thorough education, had brought to perfection in him, was now becoming exaggerated and rigidified; the piercing gaze characteristic of all the Guermantes made it seem as if he were inspecting all the places in which he found himself, but in an almost unconscious way, out of a sort of habit or animal trait. Even when he was standing still, the colouring, which was more pronounced in him than in any of the other Guermantes, as if he were nothing but a day of golden sunlight given solid form, gave him as it seemed such a strange plumage, turned him into a species so rare and precious, as to make him a desirable acquisition for any ornithological collection; but when, in addition, this light become bird started to move, to act, when for example I was at a party and saw Robert de Saint-Loup enter the room, the way he held his head, so silkily and proudly crested beneath the gold plumes of his somewhat thinning hair, and moved his neck with so much more suppleness, pride and daintiness than humans display, inspired in one a curiosity and admiration half-social, half-zoological, such that one began to wonder whether one were in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the Jardin des Plantes,3 whether one were watching an aristocrat crossing a drawing-room or a bird walking round its cage. Furthermore, this whole regression to the birdlike elegance of the Guermantes, with pointed beak and sharpened eyes, was now being employed by his new vice, which was using it to maintain his dignity. And the more he used it, the more of a queen, as Balzac would say,4 he looked. It required only a slender act of imagination to see that his warblings lent themselves no less well to this interpretation than his plumage. He was beginning to speak in sentences which he believed sounded seventeenth-century, and in that was merely imitating the style of the Guermantes. But at the same time some indefinable inflection was causing them to develop into the manners of M. de Charlus. ‘I must leave you for a moment,’ he said to me during the course of the evening, when M. de Marsantes was standing a little way off from us. ‘I have to pay my court to my mother.’
As for his love, about which he spoke interminably, it was not, it must be said, only love for Charlie, even though that was the only affair that meant anything to him. Whatever the nature of a man’s love affairs, one is always wrong about the number of people with whom he is having liaisons, partly because one mistakenly interprets friendships as affairs, and gets the addition wrong, but also because one tends to believe that one proven affair precludes another, which is an error of quite a different kind. Two people may say: ‘X——’s mistress, yes, I know her’, utter two different names, and both be right. A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love. As for the type of love affairs that Saint-Loup had inherited from M. de Charlus, a husband who is that way inclined usually makes his wife very happy. This is a general rule to which the Guermantes managed to be an exception, since those who had this taste wanted it to be thought that, on the contrary, they desired women. They were seen everywhere with some woman or other and drove their wives to despair. The Courvoisiers behaved more sensibly. The young Vicomte de Courvoisier thought he was the only man on earth, since the beginning of the world, to be tempted by somebody of his own sex. Believing his inclination to come from the devil, he fought against it, married a very beautiful wife and gave her children. Then one of his cousins taught him that this inclination is really quite common, and was kind enough to take him to places where he could satisfy it. M. de Courvoisier’s love for his wife only intensified, he redoubled his prolific zeal, and he and she were cited as the happiest couple in Paris. Nothing of the sort was ever said of Saint-Loup’s household, because Robert, instead of being content with his inversion, caused his wife agonies of jealousy by keeping mistresses from whom he derived no pleasure.
It may be that Morel, being very dark-complexioned, was necessary to Saint-Loup in the same way as shadow is necessary to a beam of sunlight. It is very easy to imagine, somewhere within that ancient family, a golden-haired aristocrat, intelligent, endowed with every distinction, concealing deep down, unknown to everybody, a secret taste for negroes.
Furthermore, Robert never permitted his type of love to come up in conversation. If I mentioned it: ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he would reply, with such complete detachment that he would let his monocle drop, ‘I don’t have the least idea about that sort of thing. If you want information about that, my dear fellow, I advise you to enquire elsewhere. I’m a soldier, full stop. I’m as uninterested in all that as I am passionate about following the Balkan war. That was something that interested you once, the etymology of battles. I told you then that we would see the typical battles again, under very different conditions, like that great exercise in strategic encirclement, the Battle of Ulm. Well now, even with all the special features of the Balkan wars, Lülebürgaz is Ulm all over again: strategic encirclement. These are subjects you can talk to me about. But the kind of things you were hinting at, I know as much about them as I do about Sanskrit.’
Although Robert thus affected disdain for the subject, Gilberte on the other hand, after he had left, was very willing to broach it in conversation with me. Not of course in connection with her husband, as she was not aware, or pretended not to be, of anything. But she would happily expatiate on it where others were concerned, either because she saw it as an indirect excuse for Robert, or because he, torn like his uncle between a stern silence on such matters and a need to unburden himself and run others down, had alerted her to many instances of it. M. de Charlus, in particular, was not spared, probably because Robert, without speaking to Gilberte about Charlie, could not refrain, when he was with her, from repeating, in one form or another, what the violinist had told him. And he constantly harried his former benefactor with his detestation. These conversations, for which Gilberte had a predilection, enabled me to ask her whether, in a similar way, Albertine, whose name I had first heard spoken by her, when they were classmates, had any such tastes. Gilberte was unable to give me any information about this. And anyway it had long since ceased to be of any interest to me. But I continued to enquire mechanically, like an old man who has lost his memory periodically requesting news of the son he has lost.
In Search of Lost Time Page 2