I took a cab to go to the house of the Prince de Guermantes, who was no longer living in his old hôtel but in a magnificent new mansion he had had built on the Avenue du Bois. It is one of the mistakes of society people not to realize that if they want us to believe in them they have to believe in themselves, or at least respect the essential elements of our belief. At the time when I believed, even though I knew that the contrary was true, that the Guermantes inhabited such a palace by an hereditary right, to penetrate into the palace of the wizard or the fairy, for the gates which open only when one utters the magic word to open before me, seemed to me as difficult a task as to obtain an interview with the wizard and the fairy themselves. Nothing was easier than to make myself believe that the old servant, in fact only just engaged, or supplied by the Potel and Chabot Agency, was the son, grandson or descendant of those who served the family before the Revolution, and I was only too willing to take the portrait, bought from Bernheim Jeune the previous month, to be a family portrait. But the spell of a place cannot be simply decanted or transferred, memories cannot be divided up, and of the Prince de Guermantes, now that he had himself destroyed the illusions of my belief by going to live in the Avenue du Bois, little of any note remained. The ceilings which I had been afraid would fall in on me when my name was announced, and beneath which much of the magic and fear of long ago might still for me have hovered, now looked down on parties given by an American lady in whom I had no interest. Of course, things have no potency in themselves, and since it is we who confer it upon them, some young middle-class schoolboy was probably at that very moment experiencing the same thoughts outside the mansion in the Avenue du Bois as I had once felt outside the Prince de Guermantes’s old hôtel. He, however, would still be young enough to have these beliefs, but I had passed that age, and lost that privilege, as after early infancy one loses the power that babies have to divide the milk they ingest into digestible quantities. Which forces adults, out of more than prudence, to take milk in small quantities, while babies can suck indefinitely without pausing for breath. At least the Prince de Guermantes’s change of residence had this advantage for me, that the cab which came to collect me, and within which I was having these thoughts, had to pass along the streets leading to the Champs-Élysées. They were, at that time, very badly paved, but from the moment I entered them, what actually distracted me from my thoughts was a sensation of extreme smoothness such as one feels when, suddenly, a car proceeds more easily, more smoothly, silently, as when, the gates of a park being opened, one glides along over fine sand or dead leaves. Materially, nothing was different; but I suddenly felt the elimination of those external obstacles because in fact I was no longer having to make the effort of adaptation or attention which we make, without even being aware of it, when we come across something new: the streets through which I was now passing were those, forgotten for so long, through which I had walked with Françoise on the way to the Champs-Élysées. The ground knew of its own accord where it had to lead; its resistance was overcome. And, like an aviator, who has up to that point travelled laboriously along the ground, suddenly ‘taking off’, I rose up slowly towards the silent heights of memory. In Paris, these streets will always stand out for me, as if made of a different material from the rest. When I reached the corner of the rue Royale, where once had stood the open-air vendor of the photographs of which Françoise had been so fond, I felt that the cab, carried forward by so many hundreds of previous turnings, would be unable to resist turning of its own accord. I was not passing through the same streets as those who were out walking along them that day, but instead moving through a shifting past, sad and gentle. Yet it was composed of so many different pasts that it was hard to define what was causing my feeling of melancholy, whether it was due to those walks on the way to see Gilberte, simultaneously fearful that she would not come, or to the proximity of a certain house to which I had been told that Albertine had gone with Andrée, or to the sense of philosophical futility that a route seems to emanate when one has travelled it a thousand times, with a passion that has died, and which bore no fruit, like the route over which after lunch I used to run so hastily, so feverishly, to gaze on the posters, their paste still wet, advertising Phèdre or the Domino Noir. When I arrived at the Champs-Élysées, not being particularly keen to hear the whole of the concert being given at the Guermantes’ place, I had the cab stop, and was just about to climb down and walk about for a little while, when I was struck by the sight of another cab, also in the process of coming to a halt. A man, eyes fixed straight ahead, body bent, was placed, rather than seated, in the back, and was making the same sort of effort to sit upright as a child does when he has been told to be good. But his panama hat revealed an unruly forest of entirely white hair; a white beard, like those formed by the snow on the statues of river-gods in the public gardens, flowed from his chin. With Jupien, who was endlessly attentive, at his side, this was M. de Charlus, convalescing now from an attack of apoplexy, of which I had been unaware (I had been told only that he had lost his sight; but this had in fact been a temporary condition, and he could now see perfectly well again) and which, unless he had previously dyed his hair and had now been forbidden to continue doing anything so tiring, seemed rather, as if by a kind of chemical precipitation, to have rendered gleamingly visible all the metal with which the locks, now pure silver, of his head and his beard were saturated and which sprang out from them like so many geysers, so that the old, decayed prince now wore the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear. His eyes had not escaped this upheaval, this metallurgical alteration of his head, but by some inverse phenomenon they had lost all their lustre. But the saddest thing was that one felt that this lost lustre represented his moral pride, and that this enabled the physical and even the intellectual life of M. de Charlus to survive the disappearance of the aristocratic pride that at one time had been part and parcel of it. Just at that moment, as if to illustrate this, also no doubt on her way to the Prince de Guermantes’s, there passed a victoria in which was Mme de Saint-Euverte, whom the Baron used to regard as beneath his notice. And immediately, with infinite difficulty but with all the determination of an invalid who wants to show that, however difficult they may still be, he can perform all his movements, M. de Charlus raised his hat, bowed and greeted Mme de Saint-Euverte with as much respect as if she had been the Queen of France. Perhaps there was, in the very difficulty that M. de Charlus experienced in making this greeting, a reason for him to do it, knowing that he would be making a greater impression by an act which, painful to an invalid, would become doubly meritorious on the part of him who performed it and doubly flattering in the eyes of the person to whom it was addressed, invalids like kings being prone to exaggerate politeness. Perhaps also the Baron’s movements still suffered from the lack of co-ordination which follows from problems with the spinal cord and the brain, so that his gestures went further than he intended they should. For myself, I saw something more like physical gentleness, and a detachment from the realities of life, characteristics so marked among those over whom death has already cast its shadow. The exposure of the silver-bearing lodes of his hair revealed a change less profound than that unconscious social humility which turned all social relations upside down, and humiliated before Mme de Saint-Euverte, as it would have humiliated in front of the latest American hostess (who might have been able finally to attain the polite attentions, hitherto beyond her reach, of the Baron), what once used to seem the proudest snobbery of all. For the Baron was still alive, still thinking; his intellect had not been extinguished. And more than any chorus by Sophocles on the humbled pride of Oedipus, more than death itself and any funeral oration on the subject of death, the humble and ingratiating manner in which the Baron greeted Mme de Saint-Euverte proclaimed the full fragility and perishability of the love of earthly greatness and the whole of human pride. M. de Charlus, who up to then would never have consented to dine with Mme de Saint-Euverte, now bowed down before her. He greeted her perhaps out of ignorance o
f the rank of the person whom he was greeting (the articles of the social code being just as susceptible of destruction by a stroke as any other aspect of memory), perhaps by a lack of co-ordination of the movements which transposed on to the level of apparent humility the uncertainty, which would otherwise have been haughty, that he might have felt about the identity of the woman who was passing. He greeted her with the politeness of a child coming timidly forward, at his mother’s request, to say how do you do to some important people. And indeed a child, without a child’s pride, was what he had become.
To receive the homage of M. de Charlus had been for her the apogee of snobbery, as it had been the essence of snobbery in the Baron to refuse it. And now the whole of that inaccessible and affected nature which he had succeeded in making Mme de Saint-Euverte believe lay at the heart of his character had been annihilated at a stroke by the painstaking timidity, the apprehensive zeal, with which he had raised a hat, from beneath which, for as long as he left his head deferentially uncovered, had tumbled, with the eloquence of a Bossuet,80 the torrents of his silver hair. When Jupien had helped the Baron out of the cab, and I had greeted him, he spoke very rapidly, in a voice so imperceptible that I could scarcely make out what he was saying to me, which drew from him, when for the third time I made him repeat his words, a gesture of impatience which surprised me because of the impassivity his face had registered, due no doubt to some residue of his paralysis. But when finally I grew accustomed to this pianissimo of whispered words, I realized that the invalid’s intellect had survived absolutely unimpaired.
There were, however, two distinct M. de Charluses, quite apart from any of the others. Of the two, the intellectual spent his time complaining that he was becoming aphasic, that he was constantly pronouncing one word or one letter instead of another. But whenever he happened to do this, the other M. de Charlus, the subconscious one, who wanted as much to be envied as the other did to be pitied, and had a degree of vanity and affectation despised by the first, stopped immediately, like an orchestral conductor when his musicians are floundering, in mid-sentence, and with infinite ingenuity substituted for what was about to follow the word actually spoken another word which none the less appeared to be one he had chosen. Even his memory was intact, from which moreover his vanity made him, not without the fatigue of extremely arduous concentration, dredge up this or that ancient recollection, of no importance, relating to me, in order to show me that he had retained or recovered all his clarity of mind. Without moving his head or his eyes, nor varying a single inflection of his delivery, he said to me, for example: ‘Look, there’s a poster on that telegraph-pole just like the one I was standing beside when I saw you for the first time at Avranches, no I’m wrong, at Balbec.’ And it would indeed be an advertisement for the same product.
At first I had hardly been able to make out what he was saying, just as to begin with one can make out nothing in a room where all the curtains are drawn. But like eyes in the half-darkness, my ears soon grew accustomed to this pianissimo. I think also that his voice had gradually became louder as he continued speaking, either because the feebleness of his voice was in part the product of a nervous apprehension which gradually dissipated as he became distracted by the presence of another person and stopped thinking about it; or, on the contrary, because this feebleness corresponded to his true state and the momentary strength with which he spoke in the conversation was provoked by an excitement that was factitious, short-lived and rather doleful, making strangers think: ‘He’s much better, he must be careful not to think about his illness,’ but which in fact aggravated the illness, which rapidly took hold again. Whatever the reason, the Baron at that moment (and even taking into account my own adjustment) was tossing out his words more forcefully, rather as the tide, on days when the weather is bad, flings down its twisted little waves. And the residue of his recent attack could be heard underneath his words, like the sound of pebbles dragging on the shore. Yet continuing to speak to me about the past, probably as much as anything else to show me that he had not lost his memory, he evoked it in a funereal manner, yet without any sadness. He enumerated at endless length all the members of his family or his social circle who were no longer alive, less, it seemed, with any sadness that they were no longer with us than with a sense of satisfaction at surviving them. Recalling their demise seemed to make him more aware of his own return to health. It was with an almost triumphal severity that he repeated monotonously, with his slight stammer and a faintly sepulchral resonance: ‘Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!’ and, every time, the word ‘dead’ seemed to fall on the deceased man like a spadeful of earth, each one heavier than the last, thrown down by a gravedigger trying to pin them more securely in their graves.
The Duchesse de Létourville, who was not going to the Princesse de Guermantes’s party as she was just recovering from a long illness, passed us at that moment on foot, and seeing the Baron, and unaware of his recent attack, stopped to say good-afternoon. But having been ill herself had not made her more understanding of the illness of others, indeed it had given her a greater impatience, a bad-tempered nervousness which may perhaps have concealed the fact that she felt sorry for them. Realizing that the Baron was having difficulty in pronouncing, even remembering, certain words, and in moving his arm, she looked at Jupien and myself in turn, as if asking us for an explanation of such a shocking phenomenon. As neither of us said anything, it was to M. de Charlus himself she addressed a long look full of sadness, but also critical. She looked as if she was about to reproach him for being out of doors with her in a state as unusual as if he had come out without a tie or shoes. When the Baron made yet another error of pronunciation, the Duchesse’s annoyance and indignation both became too much to bear, and she said to the Baron: ‘Palamède!’ in the exasperated interrogative tone of those nervous people who cannot bear to wait a few minutes, and who, if one invites them to come in straight away, apologizing for not being quite ready, will ask in a tart tone of voice, more accusatory than apologetic: ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’ as if the person being disturbed was to blame.
He asked if he could sit down on a bench and rest while Jupien and I went for a stroll, and painfully pulled a book out of his pocket, one which looked to me like a prayer-book. I was not displeased to have this opportunity to learn more details from Jupien about the state of the Baron’s health. ‘I’m glad to have a chance to speak to you, sir, said Jupien, but we shan’t walk any further than the Circus. The Baron is much better now, thank heavens, but I don’t dare leave him alone for very long, it’s always the same thing, he’s too generous, he gives everything he’s got to other people; and anyway that’s not all, he’s still as randy as a young man, so I have to keep my eyes open. – All the more, since he got his own sight back, I replied; I was very sad when I heard that he had gone blind. – Yes, that was a side-effect of his stroke, he lost his vision completely. Imagine, right through the cure, which did him so much good in every other way, it was as if he’d been blind since birth. – At least that must have made some of your surveillance unnecessary? – Don’t you believe it! We’d hardly got to the hotel before he starts asking me what the various members of staff look like. I told him they were all ghastly. But he soon realized that they couldn’t all be, and that I must be lying about some of them. You see what I mean, what a little monkey he is! And then he had a kind of nose for it, something in people’s voices maybe, I don’t know. So he’d arrange to send me off on some urgent errand. One day – excuse me telling you this, but you did once come to the Temple of Shamelessness by mistake so I’ve got nothing to hide from you (besides which, Jupien always obtained a rather unpleasant satisfaction from divulging the secrets he was privy to) – I was coming back from one of these so-called urgent errands, hurrying back in fact because I was fairly sure it’d been arranged on purpose, when, just as I had almost reached the Bar
on’s bedroom, I heard a voice saying: “What? – Really? replied the Baron, you mean that was the first time?” I entered without knocking, and you can imagine my fright! The Baron, misled by the voice, which was in fact much lower than is usual at that age (and remember the Baron was still, at that point, completely blind), this man who used to have a taste for somewhat older men, was with a child who wasn’t even ten years old.’
I had been told that during that time he had been subject almost daily to crises of mental depression, characterized not by any actual mental divagation, but by his avowal, at the top of his voice in front of third parties whose presence or severity he had forgotten, of opinions he had been accustomed to conceal, like his pro-Germanism. Even though the war was long over, he would groan about the defeat of the Germans, among whom he counted himself, and say with pride: ‘And yet there is no doubt but that we shall have our revenge, for we have proved that it is we who are capable of the greater resistance and who have the better organization.’ Or else his confidences would take another direction, and he would proclaim angrily: ‘Lord X—— or the Prince den—— had better not repeat what they said yesterday, it was all I could do then not to reply: “You know perfectly well that you are as much one as I am.” ’ Needless to say, when M. de Charlus thus uttered, at the times when, as one says, he was not ‘all there’, pro-German or other opinions, the members of his close circle who happened to be there, whether Jupien or the Duchesse de Guermantes, would as a matter of habit interrupt his incautious words and provide for the less intimate and more indiscreet listeners an interpretation of them which, while strained, was not dishonourable.
In Search of Lost Time Page 22