I had seen members of the nobility become common when their minds, like that of the Duc de Guermantes for example, were common (‘Don’t stand on ceremony,’ as Cottard would have said). During the Dreyfus Affair, during the war, in medicine, I had seen people believe truth to be a kind of fact, believe that ministers or doctors possess a yes or no which requires no interpretation, and which ordains that an X-ray photograph indicate what the patient has without interpretation, believe that the men in power knew whether Dreyfus was guilty, knew (without needing to send Roques to make enquiries on the spot) whether Sarrail did or did not have the means to mobilize at the same time as the Russians.90 There is no moment in my life which would not have served to teach me that only coarse and inaccurate perception places everything in the object when the opposite is true: everything is in the mind.
In short, when I thought about it, the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte.It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann. Rather a slender stem, perhaps, to support in this way the whole span of my life (the ‘Guermantes way’ thus being seen to derive from the ‘way by Swann’s’). But this source of the different aspects of our life is frequently a person much inferior to Swann, somebody of complete insignificance. Would it not have been enough for any school-friend to have told me about a good-looking girl to be had there (whom I would probably not have met) for me to have gone to Balbec? Thus it often happens that later in life one encounters some dislikable school-mate and scarcely even shakes his hand, whereas if one ever thought about it, it is from some passing comment he made to us, like ‘You ought to come to Balbec,’ that our whole life and our whole work have sprung. We make no recognition of this to him, but that does not constitute proof of ingratitude. For when he said those words he did not for a moment think of the tremendous consequences they would have for us. It is our sensibility and our intellect which have exploited the circumstances which, once the primary impetus has been given, have generated themselves, one after another, without his ever having been able to foresee anything, whether my living with Albertine, or the masked ball at the Guermantes’. No doubt his impetus was necessary, and in that sense the external form of our life and the very material of our work derive from him. Without Swann, it would never have occurred to my parents to send me to Balbec. Yet he was not responsible for the sufferings which he himself had indirectly caused me. They were due to my weakness. His had caused sufferings of his own through Odette. But by determining in this way the life that we have led, he has thereby excluded all the lives that we might have led in place of this one. If Swann had not talked to me about Balbec, I would not have known Albertine, the dining-room in the hotel, the Guermantes. But I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which I cannot even imagine, and the novelty of which, in its unfamiliarity, is appealing enough to make me regret not having gone in that direction instead, and regret too that Albertine and the beach at Balbec and Rivebelle and the Guermantes had not remained for ever unknown to me.
Of course, it is with that face, as I had seen it for the first time by the sea, that I associated certain things which I should no doubt be writing about. In a sense, I was right to associate them with her, because if I had not walked along the sea-front that day, if I had not met her, all these ideas would not have been developed (unless they had been developed by another woman). I was also wrong, though, because this generative pleasure which we try retrospectively to situate in a beautiful feminine face comes from our own senses: it was actually quite clear that the pages I would write were something that Albertine, especially the Albertine of those days, would not have understood. That is precisely why (and this is a recommendation not to live in too intellectual an atmosphere), because she was so different from me, that she had fertilized me through grief, and even at the beginning through the sheer effort of imagining something different from oneself. If she had been capable of understanding these pages then, for that very reason, she would not have inspired them.
Jealousy is a good recruiting officer who, when there is a gap in our picture, goes searching through the streets for the beautiful girl we needed. If she is no longer beautiful, she regains her looks because we are jealous of her, and she will fill the empty space.
Once we are dead, we shall feel no joy at the picture being completed in this way. But there is nothing at all discouraging about that thought. Because we sense that life is a little more complicated than people say, and circumstances likewise. And there is an urgent necessity to demonstrate this complexity. Jealousy, for all its usefulness, does not necessarily arise from a look, or from a tale, or from a backward glance. It can turn up, ready to sting us, between the pages of a directory – the ones called Tout-Paris for Paris, and the Annuaire des châteaux for the country.91 We had absent-mindedly heard the girl we are no longer interested in saying she had to go and see her sister for a few days in the Pas-de-Calais, near Dunkirk; we had also at one time vaguely thought that M. E—— had perhaps made advances to the girl, though now she never saw him, as she never went to the bar where she used to meet him. What could her sister be? Maybe a housemaid? Being discreet, we had never asked. And now, opening the Annuaire des châteaux at random, we discover that M. E—— has a country place in the Pas-de-Calais, near Dunkirk. Suddenly everything becomes clear, to please the girl he has taken her sister on as a housemaid, and if the girl no longer meets him in the bar, it is because he has had her come to his house, living as he does in Paris almost all of the year, but unable to do without her even for the period he is in the Pas-de-Calais. The brushes, drunk with rage and love, continue to paint it all in. And yet, what if it was not like that? If M. E—— really was not seeing the girl any longer but, out of a wish to be helpful, had recommended her sister to one of his brothers who lives all the year round in the Pas-de-Calais? So that she goes, perhaps even quite by chance, to see her sister at a time when M. E—— is not there, as they no longer have any interest in each other? Or again perhaps the sister is not a housemaid in that country house or anywhere else but has relatives in the Pas-de-Calais. Our initial grief subsides in the face of these latter conjectures and jealousy is allayed. But what difference does it make? Hidden among the pages of the Annuaire des châteaux, it came at the right time, because now the empty space that was there in the canvas has been filled in. And the whole design comes together thanks to the presence, created by jealousy, of the beautiful girl of whom already we are no longer jealous and whom we no longer love.
*
At that moment the butler came to tell me that, the first piece having ended, I could leave the library and enter the drawing-rooms. This made me recollect where I was. But I was not at all disturbed in the train of thought which I had just begun by the fact that a fashionable party, my return to society, had provided me with my point of departure for a new life which I had not been able to find in solitude. There was nothing extraordinary about this fact, an impression capable of resuscitating the eternal man in me not necessarily being linked to solitude any more than to society (as I had once thought it was, as had perhaps once been the case for me, as ought still perhaps to be the case if I had developed harmoniously, instead of experiencing this long intermission, which seemed only now to be ending). F
or experiencing this impression of beauty only when, in the grip of some immediate sensation, however insignificant, a similar sensation, spontaneously re-arising within me, had just extended the first over several periods of time at once, and filled my soul, where individual sensations usually left so much emptiness, with a general essence, there was no reason why I should not receive sensations of this kind in society as much as in the natural world, since they are produced by chance, helped doubtless by the particular excitement which, on the days when one finds oneself outside the regular tenor of life, makes even the simplest things start to give us sensations which habit usually makes us spare our nervous system. I was going to try to find the objective reason why it should be precisely and uniquely this kind of sensation which led to the work of art, by continuing the thoughts which had come to me in such rapid sequence in the library; for I felt that the impetus given to my intellectual life was now strong enough for me to be able to continue as successfully in the drawing-room, among all the guests, as alone in the library; it seemed that, from this point of view, even in the midst of this large gathering I should be able to retain my solitude. Because for the same reason that great events do not impinge from outside on our mental powers, and that a third-rate writer living in an epic epoch will remain just as poor a writer, what was really dangerous in society was the socialite attitude one brings to it. By itself it was no more capable of rendering you third-rate than a heroic war was capable of making a third-rate poet sublime.
In any case, whether it was theoretically useful or not that the work of art was constituted in this fashion, and while I was waiting until I had examined this point as fully as I was intending to, I could not deny that so far as I was concerned, whenever truly aesthetic impressions had come to me, it had always been after sensations of this kind. They had, admittedly, been rather rare in my life, but they dominated it, and I was able to rediscover in the past some of those peaks which I had made the mistake of losing sight of (something I was intending not to do from now on). And already I could say that, although this characteristic might in my case, by the exclusive importance it assumed, have appeared personal to me, I had been reassured to discover that it was related to other, less marked but discernible characteristics, at bottom quite similar, in certain other writers. Is it not from a sensation of the same sort as that of the madeleine that the finest part of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe depends: ‘Yesterday in the evening I was walking alone… I was roused from my reflections by the twittering of a thrush perched in the highest branch of a birch tree. Instantly, the magical sound made my father’s estate reappear before my eyes; I forgot the catastrophes I had just witnessed, and, transported suddenly into the past, saw once again the countryside where so often I heard the thrush’s piping song.’ And is not this one of the two or three most beautiful passages in those memoirs: ‘A delicate, sweet scent of heliotrope wafted from a little patch of beans in full flower; it was brought to us not by a breeze from our own land, but by a wild wind from Newfoundland, unconnected to the exiled plant, without congenial reminiscence and pleasure. In this perfume not breathed by beauty, not purified in her bosom, not scattered in her path, in this perfume of a new dawn, new cultivation and new world, there was all the melancholy of regret, of absence and of youth.’92 One of the masterpieces of French literature, Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie, just like the book of Mémoires d’outre-tombe which deals with Combourg, contains a sensation of the same sort as the taste of the madeleine and the ‘twittering of the thrush’. And above all in Baudelaire these reminiscences, more numerous still, are clearly less fortuitous and therefore, in my opinion, conclusive. Here it is the poet himself who with a more indolent resolution seeks deliberately, in the scent of a woman, for instance, of her hair and her breast, the analogies which will inspire him and evoke for him ‘l’azur du ciel immense et rond’ and ‘un port rempli de flammes et de mâts’.93 I was about to try to remember the passages in Baudelaire at the heart of which there is this sort of transposed sensation, in order finally to establish a place for myself in such a noble tradition, and thereby to give myself the assurance that the work which I no longer had the slightest hesitation in undertaking was worth the effort I was going to devote to it, when having arrived at the foot of the staircase leading down from the library, I found myself suddenly in the great drawing-room and in the midst of a party which was going to seem very different from any I had been present at before, and for me was going to take an unusual turn and assume a new meaning. In fact, as soon as I entered the great drawing-room, although my mind was still firmly fixed on the plan I had just reached the point of formulating, a dramatic turn of events occurred which seemed to raise the gravest of objections to my undertaking. An objection which I would probably overcome but which, as I continued to reflect inwardly on the conditions necessary for the work of art, was at any moment, through the hundredfold repetition of instances of the one consideration most likely to make me hesitate, about to interrupt the course of my thinking.
To begin with I did not understand why I was so slow to recognize the master of the house and the guests nor why everybody seemed to have put on make-up, in most cases with powdered hair which changed them completely. The Prince, as he received his guests, still had that air of a genial, fairy-tale king which I had noticed the first time I met him, but this time, as if he had submitted himself to the stipulations of dress he had imposed on his guests, he had decked himself out in a white beard and, dragging his feet along as though they were weighing him down like lead boots, seemed to have taken on the task of representing one of the ‘Ages of Man’. His moustaches were white, too, as though still dusted with the frost of Hop o’ my Thumb’s forest. They seemed uncomfortable for his tightening mouth and, once the effect had been achieved, as if they ought to have been taken off. To be quite honest, I recognized him only by a process of logical deduction, by deciding on the identity of the person on the simple basis of a few recognizable features. I do not know what young Fezensac had put on his face, but while others had whitened, in some cases half their beard, in others just their moustache, he had not bothered himself with dyes of that sort, but had found a way of covering his face with wrinkles, his eyebrows with bristling hairs, although that did not suit him in the least, making his face look as if it had been hardened, rigidified, made solemn, ageing him so much that no one could possibly have taken him for a young man. I was even more astonished a moment later when I heard somebody address as Duc de Châtellerault a little old man with a silvery, ambassadorial moustache, in whom only some lingering remnant of the way he glanced around enabled me to recognize him as the young man whom I had met once when I had called on Mme de Villeparisis. In the case of the first person whom I thus succeeded in identifying, by trying to forget the disguise and then, by an effort of memory, adding to the features which were still unchanged, my first thought ought to have been, and for less than a second perhaps was, to congratulate him on being so marvellously made up that one felt at first, before recognizing him, the same hesitancy that great actors, appearing in a role in which they are very different from their usual selves, as they make their first entry, create in the audience, who, despite being forewarned by the programme, remain for a moment dumbfounded before bursting into applause.
In Search of Lost Time Page 29