Most extraordinary of all, from this standpoint, was my personal enemy, M. d’Argencourt, the real star of the party. Not only, in place of his scarcely even pepper-and-salt beard, had he donned an extraordinary beard of improbable whiteness, but additionally (so much can little physical changes shrink or enlarge a person and, more broadly, change their apparent character, their personality) the man had become an old beggar, no longer commanding the slightest respect, although his solemn appearance, and starchy inflexibility, were still fresh in my memory, who brought to the part of decrepit old man such credibility that his limbs were quivering, and the slack lines of his face, which always used to be so haughty, were set in a permanent smile of beatific inanity. Taken to this extreme, the art of disguise becomes something more than that, it becomes a complete transformation of the personality. And indeed, although a few little details confirmed that it really was Argencourt who was putting on this hilarious and colourful show, I would have had to work back through I do not know how many successive states of that face if I wanted to rediscover that of the Argencourt I had known, who, with nothing but his own body to work with, had become so different from himself! This was evidently the furthest extremity to which he had been able to bring it without its collapsing entirely: the proudest face and the most jutting chest were now no more than a bunch of disintegrating rags, shaken in every direction. Only by recalling, with some difficulty, the occasional smile which in the past had for a moment tempered his aloofness, could one find in the living Argencourt the man whom I had seen so often, and understand how this daft old-clothes-merchant’s smile might have existed within the correct gentleman of earlier days. But, even supposing that a similar intention to Argencourt’s lay behind this smile, the very substance of the eye through which he expressed the smile was so changed, because of the extraordinary transformation of his face, that the expression itself became quite different and even appeared to belong to a different person. I was seized by giggles at the sight of this sublime dodderer, rendered as affable in this benevolent caricature of himself as was, in more tragic mode, the stricken and well-mannered M. de Charlus. M. d’Argencourt, in his incarnation as a comic ancient in a play by Regnard, exaggeratedly reworked by Labiche,94 was as approachable and as courteous as the King Lear version of M. de Charlus, who carefully doffed his hat to even the most obsequious of those he encountered. None the less it did not occur to me to tell him how much I admired the extraordinary sight he presented. It was not my old antipathy that held me back, for he had contrived to look so different from himself that I had the illusion of being in the presence of another person altogether, as kindly, helpless and inoffensive as the usual Argencourt was contemptuous, hostile and dangerous. So different a person that the sight of this ludicrously grimacing, white, comical character, this snowman looking like a childlike Général Dourakine,95 made me reflect that the human being could go through metamorphoses as total as those of some insects. I had a sense that I was looking through the plate glass of a natural history museum display at an example of what the speediest and surest insect may turn into, and standing in front of this limp chrysalis, vibratile rather than capable of movement, I was unable to experience any of the feelings that M. d’Argencourt had always inspired in me. But I said nothing, I did not congratulate M. d’Argencourt on putting on a show that seemed to extend the possibilities available for the transformation of the human body.
Backstage at the theatre, of course, or at a fancy-dress ball, politeness tends to make one exaggerate the difficulty, almost to affirm the impossibility, of recognizing the person in their costume. Here, on the contrary, some instinct had warned me to conceal this as far as possible; I felt that there was nothing flattering about it, because the transformation was not voluntary, and finally realized something I had not suspected when I walked into this drawing-room, namely that any party, however simple, which takes place a long time after one has stopped going into society, so long as it brings together some of the people one knew in the past, produces the same effect as a masked ball, of the most successful kind imaginable, where one is quite genuinely intrigué96 by the other guests, but where the disguises, which have long been set in their unintentional shape, cannot be removed with a wash once the party is over. Intrigued by other people? Also, alas, intriguing them ourselves. Because the same difficulty that I was experiencing in putting the right names to faces seemed to be shared by all the people who, seeing mine, took no more notice of it than if they had never seen it before, or else tried to release from my present appearance the memory of a different face.
If M. d’Argencourt had just performed this extraordinary ‘number’, which in its extravagant parody provided certainly the most striking vision that I would retain of him, he was like an actor coming out on to the stage for one last time before the curtain finally falls amidst gales of laughter. If I was no longer hostile to him, it was because he, having re-entered his childhood innocence, no longer had the slightest recollection of the scathing notions he might once have had about me, no memory of seeing M. de Charlus suddenly let go of my arm, either because he no longer had any such feelings, or because to get as far as me they were obliged to pass through physical refractors so distorting that they completely altered their meaning along the way, so that M. d’Argencourt seemed good in the absence of physical means of expressing the fact that he was still disagreeable, or of repressing his permanently engaging mirth. In fact to call him an actor would be an overstatement, unencumbered as he was by any kind of conscious spirit, it is more as a jigging puppet, with a beard made of white wool, that I saw him twitched about and walked up and down in the drawing-room, as if he were in a scientific and philosophical puppet-show, in which he served, as in a funeral address or a lecture at the Sorbonne, both as a reminder of the vanity of all things and as a specimen of natural history.
Puppets then, but puppets which, if one were to identify them with someone one had known, needed to be read on several levels at once, levels that underlay them and gave them depth and, when faced with one of these old marionettes, forced one to make an intellectual effort, because one was obliged to look at them with the memory at the same time as with the eyes; puppets steeped in the intangible colours of the years, puppets which were an expression of Time, Time which is normally not visible, which seeks out bodies in order to become so and wherever it finds them seizes upon them for its magic lantern show. As intangible as Golo had once been on my bedroom doorknob in Combray, the new, almost unrecognizable d’Argencourt stood there as the revelation of Time, which he rendered partially visible. In the new elements which made up the face and character of M. d’Argencourt one could read a certain tally of years, one could recognize the symbolic form of life not as it appears to us, that is as permanent, but in its reality, in such a shifting atmosphere that by evening the proud nobleman is depicted there in caricature, as an old-clothes-merchant.
In other people, too, these changes, these genuine estrangements seemed to go beyond the realm of natural history, and one was astonished, hearing a name, to find that the same individual might present, not like M. d’Argencourt the characteristics of a new species, but the external traits of some other personality. As in the case of M. d’Argencourt, many were the unsuspected possibilities that time had wrought with some young girl, but these possibilities, although entirely physiognomic or corporeal, seemed to have something moral about them, too. The facial features, if they change, if they form a different ensemble, if their expression habitually alters more slowly, take on a different meaning with their different appearance. In the case of a woman whom one had known as narrow-minded and unsympathetic, an unrecognizable relaxation of the cheeks, an unpredictable curving of the nose, caused the same surprise, often the same pleasant surprise, as some sensitive and profound remark or some noble and courageous deed that one would never have expected of her. All around this nose, this new nose, one could see opening up horizons which one could never have dared hope for. With those cheeks a kin
dness and affection once inconceivable became possible. One could make explicit in the presence of this chin, things that one would never have dreamed of intimating in front of its predecessor. All these new facial features implied different character traits, the unsympathetic, scrawny young woman turned into a large and indulgent dowager. It is no longer in a zoological sense, as in the case of M. d’Argencourt, so much as in a moral and social sense that one could say that this was a different person.
From all these aspects, a party like the one at which I found myself was something much more valuable than an image of the past, as it offered me, as it were, all the successive images, ones I had previously never seen, which separated the past from the present and, better still, the relationship that existed between the present and the past; it was like what we used to call an optical viewer, but giving an optical view of years, a view not of one moment, but of one person set in the distorting perspective of Time.
As for the woman whose lover M. d’Argencourt had been, she had not changed much, if one took account of the time that had passed, that is to say her face had not been completely ruined, at least for the face of a being which loses its shape progressively during the journey into the abyss towards which it has been hurled, the abyss whose direction we can express only by comparisons that are all equally pointless, since we can borrow them only from the spatial world, and whose only benefit, whether we define them by height, length or depth, is to make us feel that this inconceivable yet tangible dimension exists. The need, in order to put a name to the faces, to trace the years backwards, in effect, forced me then, in turn, to reinstate, by allowing them their real place, the years to which I had given no thought. From this point of view, and in order to prevent myself from being misled by the apparent identity of space, the entirely new appearance of an individual such as M. d’Argencourt was a striking revelation of this chronological reality, which normally remains an abstraction for us, just as the appearance of certain dwarf trees or giant baobabs tells us that we are in a different latitude.
Thus life begins to seem like a pantomime in which, from act to act, we watch a baby becoming an adolescent, then a grown man, then old and bent as he approaches the grave. And as one feels that it is by a permanent process of change that these individuals, encountered only at fairly long intervals, have become so different, one feels that one has followed the same law as these creatures, who are now so transformed that, although they have not ceased to exist, indeed precisely because they have not ceased to exist, they no longer resemble the appearance they presented to us in the past.
A young woman whom I had known long ago, now turned white and compacted into the form of a baleful little old woman, seemed to suggest that, in a theatrical finale, individuals need to be so disguised as to be unrecognizable. Her brother, however, had remained so upright, so like himself, that it was a complete surprise to see that he had whitened the elegantly curled moustache on his youthful face. The patches of white in beards hitherto entirely black rendered the human landscape of the party somewhat melancholy, like the first yellow leaves on the trees when one is still thinking one can count on a long summer, when before one has started to enjoy it one sees that it has already turned to autumn. So I, having lived from one day to the next since my childhood, and having also formed definitive impressions of myself and of others, became aware for the first time, as a result of the metamorphoses that had been produced in all these people, of all the time that had passed in their lives, an idea which overwhelmed me with the revelation that it had passed equally for me. And while irrelevant in itself, their old age devastated me by its announcing the approach of my own. This was, anyway, proclaimed by successive remarks which every few minutes assailed my ears like the trumpets of Judgment Day. The first was made by the Duchesse de Guermantes; I had just seen her, passing between a double line of onlookers who, unaware of the wonderful artifices of dress and aesthetic which created this effect, yet moved by the presence of this reddish head, this salmon-pink body barely emerging from its fins of black lace and stifled with jewels, gazed at it, at the hereditary sinuosity of its lines, as they might have gazed at some ancient sacred fish, encrusted with precious stones, in which was incarnate the tutelary spirit of the Guermantes. ‘Ah! she said to me, how wonderful to see you, my oldest friend.’ And although the vanity of the erstwhile young man of Combray, who never for a moment thought I might be one of her friends, actually sharing in the actual mysterious life she led among the Guermantes, one of her friends on the same footing as M. de Bréauté, as M. de Forestelle, as Swann, as all those who were dead, might have been flattered by these words, I was mainly saddened by them. ‘Her oldest friend! I said to myself, she is exaggerating; perhaps one of the oldest, but am I really…’ At that moment a nephew of the Prince came up to me: ‘As an old Parisian, you…,’ he began. Only a few seconds later, I was handed a note. Just as I arrived I had encountered a young Létourville, whose exact relationship to the Duchesse I had forgotten, but who knew me slightly. He had just left Saint-Cyr and, telling myself that he would be a nice friend for me to have, as Saint-Loup had been, able to initiate me into army affairs, and all the changes they had undergone, I had told him that I would find him later and that we might arrange to have dinner together, for which he had thanked me warmly. But I had stayed too long dreaming in the library and the note he had left for me was to say that he had not been able to wait, and to leave me his address. The letter from this imagined friend ended thus: ‘Most respectfully, your young friend, Létourville.’ ‘Young friend!’ That was how I used to write to people who were thirty years older than myself, like Legrandin. And now this second lieutenant, whom I was imagining as a companion like Saint-Loup, called himself my young friend. So it was clearly not just military tactics that had changed since those days, and for M. de Létourville I was not a companion but an old gentleman; and from M. de Létourville, in whose company I was picturing myself, as I imagined myself, as a friend and companion, I was separated by the division of an invisible pair of compasses I had never dreamed of, which set me so far away from the young second lieutenant that, to somebody who described himself as my ‘young friend’, it seemed that I was an old gentleman.
Almost immediately afterwards somebody mentioned Bloch, and I asked whether they meant the young man or the father (unaware of his death during the war, from shock, it was said, at seeing France invaded). ‘I didn’t know he had children, I didn’t even know he was married, said the Prince to me. But clearly we are talking about the father, because there’s nothing of the young man about him, he added with a laugh. If he had sons they’d be grown-up themselves by now.’ And I realized they were talking about my school-friend. Then a minute later, he came into the room. And superimposed on Bloch’s features, too, I saw that daft, acquiescent expression, those feeble nods of the head which so quickly find their stop-notch, and in which I would have recognized the learned weariness of an amiable old man if I had not at the same time recognized my friend standing before me, and if my memories were not animating him with that uninterrupted youthful energy of which he now seemed bereft. For me, who had known him on the threshold of his life and always pictured him thus, he was my school-friend, an adolescent whose youth I measured by that which, thinking myself to have carried on at the age I was then, I unconsciously attributed to myself. I heard somebody say that he certainly looked his age, and was astonished to notice on his face some of the signs generally thought to be more characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he really was old, and that it is out of adolescents who last a sufficient number of years that life makes old men.
As somebody, hearing that I had been unwell, asked whether I was not afraid of catching the flu which was so prevalent at that time, another well-meaning person reassured me by saying: ‘No, it usually attacks younger people. Someone of your age is not really at risk.’ I was also assured that the servants of the house had recognized me. They had whispered my name, and even, on
e lady told me, ‘in the way they put it’ she had them say ‘There’s old father…’ (this expression was followed by my surname). And as I did not have any children, it could only be an allusion to my age.
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