For the rest, to conclude the topic of the duchesses who now frequented Mme Verdurin’s, they came there, though this never occurred to them, in search of exactly the same thing as the Dreyfusards had once done, that is to say a social pleasure constituted in such a way that its enjoyment both assuaged political curiosity and satisfied the need to discuss among themselves the incidents they read about in the newspapers. Mme Verdurin would say: ‘Do come in at five o’clock to talk about the war,’ just as she would once have said ‘to talk about the Affair’, or more recently: ‘Do come and listen to Morel.’
Not that Morel ought to have been there, for the reason that he had not been rejected for active service. He had simply never joined up, and so was a deserter, but nobody knew this.
Things were so extremely similar that people quite naturally found themselves using the old terms: ‘right-thinking, wrong-headed’. And because they appeared different, just as the former Communards had been anti-revisionists, the greatest Dreyfusards wanted to have everybody shot and had the support of the generals, as those at the time of the Affair had been against Gallifet.25 To these gatherings Mme Verdurin would invite a few recently arrived ladies, renowned for their good works, who came the first few times in striking outfits, with great necklaces of pearls which Odette, who had one equally fine, the display of which she had formerly over-indulged, looked at, now that she was in ‘war dress’ in imitation of the ladies of the Faubourg, with a degree of severity. But women are very adaptable. After three or four times they realized that the outfits they had believed chic were precisely the ones proscribed by those who actually were, and they put their golden dresses aside and resigned themselves to simplicity.
One of the stars of the salon was the ‘also-ran’26 who, despite his sporting tastes, had managed to obtain a medical discharge. So completely had he become for me the author of a series of admirable works which were constantly in my thoughts, that it was only by chance, when I established a cross-current between two sets of memories, that it came into my head that he was the same person as had brought about Albertine’s departure from my house. But again this cross-current led, as far as these residual memories of Albertine were concerned, to a train of thought that stopped in the middle of nowhere, several years away. Because I simply never thought about her. It was a train of memories, a line that I never went down any more. Whereas the works of the ‘also-ran’ were recent, and that line of memories in permanent and active use by my mind.
I have to say that the acquaintance of Andrée’s husband was neither very easy nor very pleasant to make, and that any attempted friendship was destined to have a number of disappointments. He was, in fact, at this point already very ill and avoided tiring himself unless perhaps there was a prospect of pleasure to be had. But only meetings with people he did not yet know, and whom his ardent imagination probably thought of as having a chance of being different from the rest, fell into this category. So far as those he already knew were concerned, he knew too well what they were like and what they would be like, and they no longer seemed worth the bother of his becoming dangerously, perhaps even fatally tired. In short, he was a very poor friend. And perhaps his taste for new people retained something of the mad recklessness that he had shown in the old days at Balbec, at sport, gambling and all the excesses of the table.
Mme Verdurin, for her part, insisted, every time I went, on trying to introduce me to Andrée, being unable to accept that I already knew her. But Andrée rarely came with her husband. To me she was an admirable and sincere friend and, faithful to the aesthetic ideas of her husband, who had taken against the Russian Ballet, she would say of the Marquis de Polignac: ‘He’s had his house decorated by Bakst. How anyone can sleep in the middle of all that! I’d much rather have Dubufe.’27 The Verdurins, too, as part of the inevitable fate of aestheticism which ends up eating its own tail, began to say they could not bear Art Nouveau (there was also the fact that it came from Munich) or white rooms; all they liked now was old French furniture set against dark colours.
I saw a lot of Andrée at that period. We did not know what to say to each other, and on one occasion the name of Juliette came to me, which had risen from the depths of the memory of Albertine like a mysterious flower. Mysterious then, but today it would no longer arouse any feeling in me: while I spoke of many subjects to which I was indifferent, on that one I was silent, not because it was less important than anything else, but there is a sort of supersaturation of matters one has thought too much about. Perhaps the period when I saw so much mystery in it was the true one. But as these periods do not last for ever, one cannot sacrifice health and fortune to the revelation of mysteries which one day will cease to be interesting.
People were very surprised at that period, too, when Mme Verdurin could have anybody she wanted to the house, to see her making indirect advances to a person she had completely lost touch with, Odette. It was generally thought that she could add nothing to the glittering circle that the little group had become. But an extended separation, at the same time as diminishing bitterness, sometimes reawakens friendship. And then the phenomenon which not only leads dying men to utter only the names they knew long ago, but old men to take delight in their childhood memories, also has its social equivalent. In order to succeed in her attempt to get Odette to return to her, Mme Verdurin did not of course make use of the ‘ultras’, but the less faithful members of her circle, who had kept one foot in each salon. She would say: ‘I don’t know why we don’t see her here any more. She may feel that we’ve quarrelled, but I don’t: after all, what wrong have I done her? It was in my house that she met both her husbands. If she ever wants to come back, let her know that my door is always open.’ These words, which might have made the Patronne swallow her pride if they hadn’t been dictated by her imagination, were relayed, but without success. Mme Verdurin waited in vain for Odette to appear, until the events we shall see later brought about for quite different reasons what the representations, zealous though they were, of the deserters had failed to achieve. So seldom do we meet either with easy success or with final failure.
Mme Verdurin would say: ‘It’s simply too bad, I must telephone Bontemps to get him to do the needful for tomorrow. They’ve blue-pencilled the whole of the end of Norpois’s article, simply because he hinted that Percin had been bowler-hatted.’ For the currently voguish silliness meant that everyone gloried in using currently voguish expressions, believing this showed them to be fashionable, like a middle-class woman hearing people talk about de Bréauté, d’Agrigente or de Charlus and saying: ‘Who? Babal de Bréauté? Grigri? Mémé de Charlus?’ And this is exactly what the duchesses did, really, taking the same pleasure in saying ‘bowler-hatted’: for with duchesses – in the eyes of commoners with a little poetry in their hearts – it is only the name that sets them apart; they actually express themselves in ways that are typical of the category of minds to which they belong, the membership of which is overwhelmingly middle-class. Classes of the mind have nothing at all to do with birth.
All this telephoning of Mme Verdurin’s, however, was not without its difficulties. Although we have forgotten to say so, the Verdurin ‘salon’, while it continued in spirit and in its essential nature, had been moved temporarily to one of the largest hotels in Paris, the shortage of coal and light making it increasingly difficult for the Verdurins to entertain in the very damp former home of the Venetian ambassadors. But the new salon did have its attractions. Just as, in Venice, a site delimited by water dictates the plan of a palazzo, or a scrap of garden in Paris gives more pleasure than parkland in the country, the narrow dining-room that Mme Verdurin had in the hotel, an unevenly shaped rhombus with dazzlingly white walls, became a sort of screen against which were sharply outlined every Wednesday, and almost every other day, a diversity of the most interesting men and the most elegant women in Paris, all more than happy to take advantage of the luxury of the Verdurins, which continued to increase with their wealth at a time when even the richest
people, unable to draw their dividends, were economizing. The form of these receptions was thus modified, but Brichot’s enchantment with them continued undiminished, and the more extended the Verdurins’ web of acquaintances grew, the more new pleasures he found packed into a small space, like surprises in a Christmas stocking. In the end the diners were sometimes so numerous that the dining-room in the private suite was too small and the dinner was given in the huge dining-room downstairs, where the faithful, while hypocritically pretending to lament the loss of the intimacy of upstairs, as long ago the need to invite the Cambremers had led them to tell Mme Verdurin that they would be too crowded, were at heart delighted – while continuing to keep their group separate from the others, as they once had on the little railway – to be a focus and an object of envy for the neighbouring tables. Under normal peacetime conditions a note would probably have been sent to the social pages of the Figaro or the Gaulois to inform a more numerous society than the dining-room of the Majestic Hotel could hold that Brichot had dined with the Duchesse de Duras. But since the outbreak of war, the society columnists having cut out that sort of news (although they made up for it with funerals, mentions in dispatches and Franco-American banquets), self-advertisement could exist only in an undeveloped and restricted form, appropriate to an earlier age, before the coming of Gutenberg’s invention: being seen at Mme Verdurin’s table. After dinner people went upstairs to the Patronne’s reception rooms, and the telephoning began. But many of the grand hotels at that period were full of spies, who noted down the news telephoned through by Bontemps with an indiscretion that was, fortunately, only matched by the unreliability of his information, which was always proved wrong by subsequent events.
Before the hour at which the afternoon teas came to an end, as dusk came on but while the sky was still light, one would see in the distance little brown dots that might have been taken, in the blue evening, for gnats or birds. Similarly, a mountain seen from far away can be taken for a cloud. At the same time, it is emotionally unsettling because one knows that the cloud is vast, solid and resistant. Thus I was moved by the knowledge that each brown dot in the summer sky was neither a gnat nor a bird, but an aeroplane crewed by men who were watching over Paris. (The memory of the aeroplanes which I had seen with Albertine on our last drive near Versailles did not play any part in this emotion, for the memory of that drive had become indifferent to me.)
By dinner-time the restaurants were full; and if passing in the street I saw a poor soldier, home on leave, having had six days’ escape from the constant risk of death, and now ready to set off back to the trenches, allow his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows, I suffered as I had in the hotel at Balbec when fishermen had watched us eating, yet this time the pain was greater because I knew that the misery of the soldier is worse than that of the poor, as it combines every variety of misery, and even more touching because it is more resigned and nobler, and because it was with a philosophical shake of the head, without hatred, that, ready to set off back to the war, he would say, as he saw the shirkers rushing to grab their tables: ‘You’d never know there was a war on here.’ Then at half past nine, even though nobody had yet had time to finish eating, all the lights were abruptly turned off because of the police regulations, and the new rush of shirkers snatching their overcoats from the attendants, in that restaurant where I had dined with Saint-Loup one evening when he was on leave, took place at 9.35 in a mysterious semi-darkness, as of a room during a magic-lantern show, or of the film-projection hall of one of the cinemas to which the men and women diners would soon be hurrying. But after that time, for those who, like me, on the evening I am talking about, had stayed at home to dine and were then going out to see friends, Paris was, at least in certain quarters, even darker than the Combray of my childhood; when people went to call on each other, it felt like a visit to a neighbour in the country.
Ah, if Albertine had been alive, how lovely it would have been, on evenings when I had dined out, to arrange to meet her out of doors, beneath the arcades! At first I would not have seen anything, I would have had the pang of thinking that she had failed to come, then suddenly I would have seen one of her cherished grey dresses take shape against the black wall, seen her smiling eyes which had already noticed me, and we would have been able to walk along with our arms round each other without anybody recognizing us or disturbing us, and then go back home. But alas, I was alone and I felt as if I were going to pay a visit to a neighbour in the country, like the visits Swann used to pay us after dinner, encountering no more people in the darkness of Tansonville, along the narrow tow-path as far as the rue du Saint-Esprit, than I now met in the streets, which had become like winding country lanes, between Saint-Clotilde and the rue Bonaparte. Moreover, since those remembered fragments of landscape borne to me by the changing weather were no longer thwarted by my surroundings, which had become invisible, on evenings when the wind was chasing a glacial squall, I had a much more powerful sense of being beside that angry sea I had once dreamed so much about than ever I had felt at Balbec; and other features of nature, too, previously non-existent in Paris, could make one imagine that, climbing down from the train, one had just arrived for a holiday deep in the countryside: for instance, the contrast of light and shadow that lay all around one on moonlit evenings. The moonlight created effects that are normally unknown in the city, even in the middle of winter; its beams spreading across the snow on the boulevard Haussmann that there was nobody now to shovel away, just as they might have done on a glacier in the Alps. The outlines of the trees were revealed, sharp and pure against the golden-blue snow, with all the delicacy of a Japanese painting or a Raphael background; as shadows, they stretched out over the ground from the very foot of each tree, as one often sees them in the country when the rays of the setting sun flood the meadows, creating reflections of their evenly spaced trees. But by a wonderfully delicate subtlety, the meadow over which these tree shadows, weightless as souls, extended was a paradisal meadow, not green but of a white so dazzling, by virtue of the moonlight which shone on to the jade snow, that it might have been woven entirely from the petals of flowering pear trees. And in the squares, the divinities of the public fountains holding jets of ice in their hands looked like statues made of some twofold material, for whose creation the artist had set out to make a pure marriage of bronze and crystal. On rare days such as these the houses were all completely dark. But in the spring, on the other hand, every now and then, in defiance of police regulations, a private town house, or just one floor of a house, or even just one room of one floor, not having closed its shutters, appeared, as if independently supported by the impalpable darkness, like a projection of pure light, like an apparition without substance. And the woman whom, lifting up one’s eyes, one could make out in that gilded shadow, took on, in this night in which one was lost and in which she too seemed cloistered, the veiled and mysterious charm of an oriental vision. Then one walked on, and nothing else interrupted the monotonous tramp of one’s constitutional in the rustic darkness.
It occurred to me that it was a long time since I had seen any of the people who have been mentioned in this work. Only in 1914, during the two months I had spent in Paris, did I catch a glimpse of M. de Charlus and meet Bloch and Saint-Loup, and the latter only twice. The second time was undoubtedly the one when he had seemed most himself, effacing all the disagreeable impressions of insincerity he had created during the stay at Tansonville which I have just recounted, so that I again saw in him all the fine qualities he had once displayed. The first time I had seen him after the declaration of war, which was at the beginning of the following week, while Bloch was parading the most chauvinistic opinions, Saint-Loup, once Bloch had left us, could not be sufficiently ironical about the fact that he himself had not re-enlisted, and I had been almost shocked by the violence of his tone.
Saint-Loup had recently returned from Balbec. Later, I learned indirectly that he had made unsuccessful advances towards the manager of the restaurant
. The latter owed his position to his inheritance from M. Nissim Bernard. In fact he was none other than the young waiter whom Bloch’s uncle had once ‘taken under his wing’. But with wealth had come virtue. With the result that Saint-Loup attempted in vain to seduce him. Thus by some compensatory process, while virtuous young men abandon themselves, as they grow older, to the passions of which they have finally become conscious, promiscuous youths become men of principle, from whom the Charluses of this world, turning up on the strength of the old stories, but too late, receive a disagreeable refusal. It is all a matter of chronology.
‘No, he exclaimed with blithe emphasis, if anyone doesn’t fight, whatever reason they give, it’s really because they don’t want to be killed, because they’re afraid.’ And with an even more energetic reiteration of the gesture with which he had underlined the fear of others, he added: ‘And that goes for me too. If I don’t re-enlist it’s quite frankly because I’m afraid, so there!’ I had already noticed in several other people that the affectation of laudable opinions is not the only way of cloaking bad ones, and that an alternative is the open display of these disreputable sentiments, so that at least one does not appear to be concealing them from oneself. This tendency was further intensified in Saint-Loup by his habit, when he had committed some indiscretion or made a gaffe for which he was likely to be blamed, of broadcasting it and saying that he had done it deliberately. A habit which, I rather think, he must have picked up from one of the instructors at the École de Guerre whom he had been quite close to, and for whom he professed great admiration. So I had no hesitation in interpreting this sally as the verbal confirmation of an attitude which, as it had dictated Saint-Loup’s conduct and his non-participation in the war that was just beginning, he preferred to make publicly known.
In Search of Lost Time Page 6