‘What! did I know the Maréchal? said the Duchesse to me. But I knew people who were even more typical, the Duchesse de Galliera, Pauline de Périgord, or Monsignor Dupanloup.’ Hearing her, I naïvely regretted not having known what she called a relic of the old order. I ought to have thought that we call it the old order because we were able only to see the tail end of it; in the same way, what we see on the horizon takes on a mysterious grandeur and seems to close the door on a world we shall never see again; yet we continue to go forward, and soon it is we ourselves who are on the horizon for the generations who come after us; meanwhile the horizon retreats, and the world, which seemed to be finished, begins again. ‘When I was a girl, added Mme de Guermantes, I even saw the Duchesse de Dino. My word, I’m not as young as I used to be.’ That last remark annoyed me: ‘She shouldn’t have said that, that’s how old ladies talk.’ And immediately I remembered that she was in fact an old lady. ‘As for you, she went on, you don’t ever change. Yes, she told me, you’re astonishing, you always look so young,’ a saddening remark, because, however we may look, it only means anything if we have in fact grown old. She delivered the final blow by adding: ‘I’ve always thought it was such a pity you didn’t marry. But perhaps, who knows, it is all for the best. You would have been of an age to have sons in the war, and if they had been killed, like poor Robert (I still often think of him), you with your sensitivity would never have survived the loss.’ I could see myself, as though in the first truthful glass I had ever encountered, reflected in the eyes of old men, who in their opinion were still young, just as I was in mine, and who when I described myself as an old man, hoping to hear a denial, showed in the way they looked at me, seeing me not as they saw themselves but as I saw them, no glimmer of protestation. Because we did not see our own true appearance, or age, and each of us, as though in a facing mirror, saw those of the others. And I am sure that many people confront the discovery that they have grown old with less sadness than I did. But old age, to begin with, has something in common with death. Some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination. And then, a man who since his childhood has had one single idea in his mind, but who has been forced by idleness and his state of health continuously to put off its realization, each evening to write off the day that has been lost, so that the illness which hastens the ageing of his body retards that of his mind, is more surprised and overwhelmed to see that he has never ceased living in Time than somebody who has little interior life, organizes his life by the calendar, and does not all at once discover the total of the years whose increasing tally he has followed daily. But a more serious reason underlay my anxiety; I discovered this destructive action of Time at the very moment when I wanted to begin to clarify, to intellectualize within a work of art, realities whose nature was extra-temporal.
With some people the gradual replacement, achieved in my absence, of each cell by new ones, had brought about such a complete change, such a total metamorphosis, that I could have dined opposite them in a restaurant a hundred times without suspecting I had once known them, any more than I would have been able to guess the royal identity of a sovereign going incognito or the vices of a stranger. In fact even this comparison does not apply to the cases where I heard their names, because it is quite possible that the person sitting opposite you might be a criminal or a king, whereas these were people I had known, or rather I had known people of the same name but who were so different that I was unable to believe that they could be the same. However, just as I would have done with the idea of royalty or vice, which lose no time in giving a new face to the stranger, with whom one might, while one’s eyes were still blindfolded, have committed the gaffe of being insolent or pleasant, and in whose same features one now discerns something distinguished or suspicious, I set about introducing into the face of one unknown, completely unknown woman, the idea that she was Mme Sazerat, and eventually restored the once familiar meaning of her face, which would, however, have remained truly alienated for me, utterly that of another person, as lacking now in all the human attributes I had once known as that of a man who has reverted to being a monkey, if the name and the affirmation of identity had not set me, despite the arduousness of the problem, on the track of the solution. Sometimes, though, the old face reappeared with enough precision for me to be able to try a confrontation; and then, like a witness brought face to face with a suspect he has seen, the difference was so great that I was forced to say: ‘No… I don’t recognize her.’
Gilberte de Saint-Loup said to me: ‘Shall we go and dine, just the two of us, at a restaurant?’ As I replied: ‘So long as you don’t think it compromising to dine alone with a young man,’ I heard everybody round me laughing, and hastily added: ‘or rather, with an old man.’ I felt that the phrase which had caused the laughter was one that my mother might have used when speaking of me, my mother for whom I was always a child. Now I noticed that in matters of self-examination, I looked at things from the same point of view as she did. If I had finally taken in, like her, certain changes which had occurred since my early childhood, these were nevertheless now very old changes. I had stopped at the one which once made someone say, almost before it was true: ‘He’s almost a grown-up young man now.’ I still thought this, but these days it was vastly out of date. I was not fully aware how much I had changed. But what, in fact, had those people who had just burst out laughing really noticed? I had not a single grey hair, my moustache was black. I would like to have been able to ask them what it was that revealed the evidence of this terrible thing.
And now it dawned upon me what old age was – old age, which of all realities is perhaps the one we continue longest to think of in purely abstract terms, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, and then our friends’ children, without understanding, whether out of fear or laziness, what it all means, until the day when we see a silhouette we do not recognize, like that of M. d’Argencourt, which makes us realize that we are living in a new world; until the day when the grandson of one of our friends, a young man whom we instinctively treat as an equal, smiles as if we were making fun of him, as to him we have always seemed like a grandfather; now I understood the meaning of death, loves, the pleasures of the mind, the use of suffering, a vocation, etc. For while names had lost their individuality for me, words were yielding up their full meaning. The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them. So that the former cease to impress us when we reach them, whereas we have to go beyond the latter in order to understand them.
The cruel discovery which I had just made could not but be of use to me as far as the raw material of my book was concerned. Since I had decided that it could not be constituted solely out of genuinely full impressions, impressions which exist outside time, of the other truths among which I was planning to set these, those which related to time, time, in which men, societies and nations are immersed and in which they change, would play an important part. I would not be concerned only to find a place for the alterations which the features of human beings undergo, and of which I was noticing new examples each minute, because, while I was thinking about my work, now definitively enough under way not to let itself be stalled by temporary distractions, I continued to greet people whom I knew and to chat with them. Ageing, it was clear, did not show itself in the same way for all of them.
I saw someone who was asking my name, and was told that it was M. de Cambremer. And then to show that he had recognized me: ‘Do you still have your attacks of breathlessness?’ he asked me; and, at my reply in the affirmative: ‘You see that it’s no barrier to longevity,’ he said, as though I were a hundred years old. While I talked to him, I kept a close eye on two or three characteristics which I was able by an effort of thought to reintroduce into this synthesis, different though it was from my recollections, which I called his identity. Then for a moment he turned his head to one side. And I saw that what had made him so difficult to recogn
ize was the addition of great red pouches to his cheeks which prevented him from fully opening his mouth and his eyes, so much so that I stood there stupefied, not daring to look at these carbuncular growths, which it seemed more polite not to mention until he did. But like a brave invalid, he made no allusion to them, laughed, and I was afraid of seeming heartless if I did not ask, and tactless if I did ask, what they were. ‘But don’t you get them less often with age?’ he asked, continuing to talk about my breathlessness. I said not. ‘No, no, my sister definitely has fewer than she used to,’ he told me, in a contradictory tone of voice, as though it were impossible for my situation to be any different from his sister’s, and as though old age were one of those remedies which, since they had been beneficial for Mme de Gaucourt, he could not believe might not be helpful to me. Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin having joined us, I grew increasingly anxious about appearing insensitive for not giving some expression of concern about what I had observed on her husband’s face, yet did not dare mention it first myself. ‘Are you pleased to see him? she said to me – He’s in good health? I replied, hesitantly. – Heavens yes, pretty good, as you can see.’ She had not noticed the affliction which I found so difficult to look at and which was no more than one of Time’s masks which Time had fastened to the face of the Marquis, but only little by little, thickening it so gradually that the Marquise had been unaware of it. When M. de Cambremer had finished his questions about my breathlessness, it was my turn to ask somebody in a low voice whether the Marquis’s mother was still alive. When one is estimating the passage of time, it is actually only the first step that is difficult. It is very hard at first to imagine that so much time could have passed, and then after a while it seems strange that even more has not passed. One had never dreamed that the thirteenth century was so distant, but then it seems almost impossible to believe that thirteenth-century churches might still exist, although there are countless examples of them in France. In the space of a few moments I had gone through the same process as happens more slowly to those people who, having had difficulty in believing that somebody they knew as a child is still alive at sixty, find it even harder fifteen years later to learn that they are still living and are still only seventy-five. I asked M. de Cambremer how his mother was. ‘She is still wonderful,’ he told me, using an adjective which, in contrast to those tribes where aged parents are treated mercilessly, is applied in certain families to old people whose command of the most basic faculties, such as hearing, walking to Mass and being impervious to bereavements, are imbued in the eyes of their children with a strange moral beauty.
With others whose faces were still intact, the only thing that seemed to worry them was having to walk; at first one imagined there was something wrong with their legs; only later did one realize that age had fastened its leaden soles to their feet. Some, like the Prince d’Agrigente, seemed to be made more attractive by age. The tall, thin man with the lacklustre eyes and hair that seemed destined to stay red for ever, had given place, through a metamorphosis analogous to that of insects, to an old man whose red hair, too long exposed to view, had been whipped away like an over-used table-cloth and replaced with white. His chest had taken on an unexpected, robust, almost warlike burliness, which must have required a positive rupture of the fragile chrysalis I had known; a conscious gravity lighted his eyes, tinged with a new kindness which seemed to be directed to everybody. And since, despite everything, some points of resemblance still persisted between the mighty prince of the present and the portrait lodged in my memory, I was lost in admiration of the original powers of revitalization possessed by Time, which, while continuing to respect the unity of the individual and the laws of life, can thus do so much to change the outward finish and to introduce bold contrasts between two successive aspects of a single character. For many of these people were immediately identifiable, but rather as if they were bad portraits of themselves brought together at an exhibition where an inaccurate and malicious artist has hardened the features of one, removed the fresh complexion or the slender figure of another, and dulled her eyes. Comparing these images with the ones that answered to the eye of memory, I was less taken with the more recent ones. Just as one often finds less good, and rejects, one of the photographs between which a friend has asked one to choose, as I looked at the image of themselves that each person presented, I would have liked to say to them: ‘No, not this one, you’re not so good in this one, it isn’t you.’ I would not have dared add: ‘Instead of your lovely straight nose, somebody’s given you your father’s hooked nose, which I’ve never seen on you before.’ And it was in fact a new nose, but it was also the family nose. Briefly put, Time, the artist, had ‘rendered’ all these models in such a way that they were still recognizable but they were not likenesses, not because he had flattered them, but because he had aged them. He is also an artist who works extremely slowly. That replica of Odette’s face, for example, the first outline sketch for which I had glimpsed in Gilberte’s face on the day I saw Bergotte for the first time, Time had now finally taken to the most perfect likeness, in the same way that some painters keep a work for a long time, finishing it gradually, year by year.
If some women acknowledged their old age by using make-up, it became visible in contrasting fashion through an absence of make-up in the case of certain men on whose faces I had never particularly noticed it, and who yet struck me as greatly changed since, having lost heart in the attempt to please, they had stopped using it. Among these was Legrandin. The removal of the pink, which I had never suspected of being artificial, from his lips and his cheeks, gave his face the greyish look, as well as the sculptural precision, of stone, sculpted his doleful, elongated features to look like those of some Egyptian gods. Gods? Ghosts would be more appropriate. He had lost the courage not only to paint himself, but to smile, to make his eyes sparkle, to say clever things. One was astonished to see him so pale, so demoralized, uttering only occasional words which were as insignificant as those of the invoked dead. One wondered what cause was preventing him being lively, eloquent and charming, just as one asks the same thing about the nondescript ‘double’ of a man, brilliant in his lifetime, when a medium puts questions to it which ought to give rise to engaging and extensive answers. And one told oneself that this cause, which had substituted for the quick-thinking, brightly coloured Legrandin a pallid, pensive phantom of himself, was old age.
In several guests I eventually recognized not only themselves but them as they once used to be, Ski, for example, who was no more altered than a flower or a fruit which had been dried. He was a rough draft, confirming my theories about art. Others were not in the least interested in art, being society people. But they had not been ripened by old age either and their chubby faces, even if surrounded with a first circle of wrinkles and an arc of white hair, retained the cheerfulness of an eighteen-year-old. They were not old men, just extremely faded young people of eighteen. It would have taken very little to efface life’s signs of wear, and death would find it no harder to restore youth to these faces than it is to clean a portrait which only a thin coating of dirt prevents from shining in the way it used to. I also thought about the illusion we fall victim to when, listening to some famous old man speaking, we are immediately ready to trust his goodness, his fairness and his generosity of spirit; because I felt that, forty years earlier, these people had been dreadful young men, and there was no reason to suppose that they had not kept that vanity, duplicity, arrogance and cunning.
Yet in complete contrast to these, I was surprised, when I was talking to men and women who used to be unbearable, to find that they had lost almost all their faults, perhaps because life, by disappointing or fulfilling their desires, had rid them of their pretension or their bitterness. A rich marriage putting an end to the need for struggle and ostentation, or the influence of the wife herself, and the slowly acquired awareness of values other than those that comprised the credo of a frivolous youth, had allowed their temperament to unbend and reveal their better qualiti
es. These people, as they had grown old, seemed to have taken on a different personality, just as trees, as they change colour in the autumn, seem to change their essential nature. In them the essence of old age was indeed visible, but as something moral. In others it was primarily physical, and so new that the person (Mme d’Arpajon, for example) seemed both unfamiliar and familiar. Unfamiliar because it was impossible to suspect that it was she, and despite all I did I could not, as I returned her greeting, prevent myself revealing the mental effort which was causing me to hesitate between three or four individuals (among whom Mme d’Arpajon was not included) in my attempt to work out whose greeting I was returning, with a warmth which must have astonished her, for in my state of uncertainty, afraid of seeming too cool if she were a close friend, I had compensated for the vagueness of my gaze by the warmth of my handshake and my smile. On the other hand, though, her new appearance was not unfamiliar to me. It was the one I had often seen in the course of my life on the faces of stout, elderly ladies, but without ever suspecting that they could, many years before, have looked like Mme d’Arpajon. Her appearance was so different from the Marquise I had known that one might have taken her for a damned soul, a character out of a play, appearing first as a young girl, then as a sturdy matron, and soon no doubt to return as a bent and doddering old woman. She seemed, like an exhausted swimmer for whom the shore appears a long way away, to be scarcely able to rise above the waves of time that were submerging her. Gradually, though, by dint of studying her face, hesitant and uncertain like an unreliable memory which can no longer retain the shapes of earlier times, I finally managed to retrieve something of it by playing a little game of eliminating the squares and hexagons which age had added to her cheeks. Of course, it was not always merely geometric shapes that age combined with women’s faces. In the cheeks of the Duchesse de Guermantes, still very recognizable but now as variegated as nougat, I could make out a trace of verdigris, a small pink patch of crushed shell, and a little lump, hard to define, smaller than a mistletoe berry and less transparent than a glass pearl.
In Search of Lost Time Page 31