Some men walked with a limp which one knew was not the result of a motor accident but was caused by a first stroke and by the fact that they already had, as they say, one foot in the grave. Almost at the mouth of theirs, half-paralysed, some women seemed unable fully to free their dress, which remained caught on the stone of the vault, and could not stand up, bent as they were, head lowered, in a curve which echoed their current descent between life and death, awaiting the final fall. Nothing could counter the movement of this parabola which was sweeping them away, and when they tried to rise they shook, and their fingers could not hold on to anything.
Some did not even have white hair. Thus, when he came over to pass a message to his master, I recognized the Prince de Guermantes’s old valet. The shaggy whiskers that bristled on his cheeks, as well as the hair on his head, were still an almost pinkish red, and nobody could suspect him of using dye like the Duchesse de Guermantes. Nevertheless, he looked old. One simply felt that there are some kinds of men, as in the vegetable kingdom there are some kinds of mosses, lichens and the like, which do not change at the approach of winter.
These changes were usually, in fact, atavistic, and the family – often even – especially among Jews – the race – filled up the gaps left by the passing of time. After all, ought I to tell myself that these characteristics would die? I had always thought of the self, at any given moment, as a colony of polyps, where the eye, an independent but associated organism, blinks when a particle passes by without the intelligence ordering it to do so, or where the intestine, with a buried parasite, is infected without the intelligence learning of it; similarly for the soul, but over the duration of a life, as a sequence of selves which die one after another, or even alternate between themselves, like those at Combray which took one another’s place within me when evening came. But I had also seen that these moral cells which make up an individual are more durable than he is. I had seen the vices and the courage of the Guermantes recur in Saint-Loup, as also his own strange and short-lived character defects, and in Swann’s case his Semitism. I could see it again in Bloch. He had lost his father some years ago and, when I had written to him then, had not at first been able to reply to me, because in addition to the powerful family feeling that often exists in Jewish families, the idea that his father was a man utterly superior to all others had turned his love for him into worship. He had not been able to bear losing him and had to retreat to a sanatorium for almost a year. He had replied to my condolences in a tone both deeply felt and almost aloof, so enviable he thought my having been able to approach this superior being, whose two-horse carriage he would have liked to give to some museum of history. And now, at his family table, the same anger which animated M. Bloch against M. Nissim Bernard animated Bloch against his father-in-law. He made the same attacks on him at table. In the same way that I, listening to Cottard, Brichot and many other people talking, had felt that a single undulation uses culture and fashion to propagate identical patterns of speech and thinking throughout the whole expanse of space, so throughout the length of time a mighty ground-swell stirs up from the depths of the ages the same angers, the same sorrows, the same acts of bravery, the same obsessions, which rise through generation after superimposed generation, so that any section taken through a few of the same series will show the repetition, like shadows on successive screens, of a scene identical to, although frequently less insignificant than, the one that shows Bloch and his father-in-law battling against each other like M. Bloch senior and M. Nissim Bernard, and like other people whom I never knew.
Some faces under their cowl of white hair already had the rigidity, the sealed eyelids, of those about to die, and their lips, shaking with a permanent tremor, seemed to be mumbling the prayer of the dying. A face whose lines were still unchanged needed nothing for its appearance to be altered except white hair in place of black or blond. Theatrical costumiers know that a powdered wig is enough to disguise someone quite adequately and render them unrecognizable. The young Comte de ——, whom I had seen in Mme de Cambremer’s box when he was still a lieutenant, the day when Mme de Cambremer was in the box below with her cousin, still had features as perfectly regular, in fact more so, the physiological rigidity of arteriosclerosis exaggerating further the impassive rectitude of his dandy’s physiognomy, and giving his features the intense definition, which immobility turned almost to a grimace, which they would have had in a study by Mantegna or Michelangelo. His complexion, once a louche red, now had a funereal pallor; some silver hairs, a slight stoutness, a Doge-like nobility, a weariness that approached somnolence, all combined in him to give the novel and prophetic impression of doomed majesty. In place of his rectangle of blond beard, the equal rectangle of his white beard transformed him so perfectly that, noticing that the second lieutenant I had known now had five rings of braid, my first thought was to congratulate him, not on having been promoted colonel, but on looking so good as a colonel, a disguise for which he seemed to have borrowed both the uniform and the mournful gravity of the superior officer that his father had been. On another figure, the substitution of a white for a blond beard, while the face remained lively, smiling and young, simply made him appear ruddier and more militant, augmented the sparkle of the eyes and gave the still youthful socialite the inspired air of a prophet.
The transformation which white hair and other factors had effected, especially among the women, would have impressed me less forcefully had it been no more than a change of colour, which can be a pleasure to the eye, rather than a change of character, which is intellectually disturbing. To ‘recognize’ somebody, after all, even more, to identify somebody after not being able to recognize them, is to think two contradictory things under a single heading, to admit that what was here, the individual one remembers, no longer exists, and that what is here is a being one did not formerly know; it is to have to think about a mystery almost as disturbing as that of death, of which it is effectively the preface and the herald. Because I knew what these changes meant, what they were a prelude to. So that these women’s white hair disturbed me, combined as it was with so many other changes. I was told a name and I was stunned by the thought that it applied both to the fair-haired woman I remembered waltzing long ago and the large lady with white hair ponderously crossing the room near me. Beyond a slight pinkness of complexion, the name might perhaps be the only thing these two women had in common, each – the one in my memory and the one at the Guermantes’ party – more unlike the other than an innocent young girl and a dowager in a play. For life to have succeeded in giving the waltzing girl this enormous body, in slowing down her ungainly movements as if in response to some metronome, for it to have substituted, with perhaps as the one common factor the cheeks, broader now admittedly but rosaceous since youth, this portly old campaigner for that slender blonde, it must have had to carry through more demolition and reconstruction than replacing a steeple with a dome, and when one thought that this operation was conducted not on inert matter but on only imperceptibly changing flesh, the staggering contrast between the present apparition and the being whom I remembered drove the latter into a past that was more than distant, that was almost unbelievable. It was difficult to reconcile the two appearances, to think of the two people under a single heading; for just as it is hard to imagine that a dead person used to be alive, or that somebody who was alive is now dead, it is almost as difficult, and of the same order of difficulty (for the annihilation of youth, the destruction of a person full of energy and light-heartedness, is already a form of oblivion), to conceive that she who was young is now old, when the juxtaposition of the appearance of this old woman with that of the young one seems so strongly to exclude it that old and young and old again seem to be taking it in turns, alternating as in a dream, so that one would never have believed that this one had ever been that one, that they are made of the same material, that the original stuff did not take refuge elsewhere, but through the cunning manipulation of time has become this, that it really is the same material
, never having left the one body – without the clue of the identical name and the positive testimony of friends, and the one appearance of verisimilitude provided by the rosacea, once a small patch among clusters of golden corn, now broadly spread beneath the snow.
And as with snow, too, the degree of whiteness of the hair seemed generally to be a sign of the depth of time lived, like those mountaintops which, even when they seem to the naked eye to be at the same level as others, nevertheless reveal their altitude by their degree of snowy whiteness. Yet this is not universally true, especially among women. Thus the locks of the Princesse de Guermantes, which when they were grey and lustrous as silk looked like silver around her domed forehead, now that they had become white had taken on a tow-coloured, woolly mattness, which had the opposite effect of making them look as grey as dirty snow that has lost its sheen.
And in many case those fair-haired dancers had not only appropriated, along with a wig of white hair, the friendship of duchesses whom they never used to know. Having done nothing in the past but dance, they had been touched by art, as if by grace. And just as illustrious ladies in the seventeenth century would enter a religious order, they lived in apartments filled with Cubist paintings, each one with a Cubist painter working for her alone and she living only for him. As for the old men whose features had changed, they still tried to keep permanently fixed on their faces one of those fleeting expressions one adopts for a second in front of a camera in an attempt either to make the most of one’s best features or else to compensate for some defect; they looked rather as if they had finally become immutable snapshots of themselves.
All these people had spent so much time putting on their disguises that these generally went unnoticed by those who lived with them. In many cases they were allowed an extension during which they could continue to remain themselves until quite late on. But then the deferred disguise was adopted more rapidly; whichever way it happened, it was unavoidable. I had never found any resemblance between Mme X—— and her mother, whom I had known only as an old woman, when she looked like a shrunken little Turk. Mme X—— herself I had always known as charming and upright, and for a long time that was how she remained, in fact for too long because, like someone who has to remember to put on her Turkish disguise before night falls, she had left it to the very last minute and had therefore been forced very hastily, almost suddenly, to shrink herself down and faithfully to reproduce the old Turkish woman’s appearance adopted long ago by her mother.
There were some men whom I knew to be related to others without ever having thought that they might have features in common; in admiring the old recluse with white hair whom Legrandin had become I suddenly discerned, I may say I discovered with the satisfaction of a zoologist, in the different planes of his cheeks, the same construction as in those of his young nephew, Louis de Cambremer, who yet appeared to look nothing like him; then to this first common feature I added another which I had never noticed on Léonor de Cambremer, then others again, none of which were ones usually presented to me by my synthesis of the young man, so that I soon had a caricature of him which was truer and more profound than any literal likeness; his uncle now seemed merely the young Cambremer after entertaining himself by putting on the appearance of the old man which he would in reality one day become, so that now it was not only what had become of the young people of the past, but what would become of the young people of today, that was giving me such a strong sensation of time.
The features in which are graven if not their youth at least their beauty having vanished, the women had tried to discover whether, out of the face that was left, they could possibly make another. Displacing the centre, if not of gravity then at least, perspectivally speaking, of their face and grouping the features around it on a different principle, at the age of fifty they began a new kind of beauty, as one might take up a new career late in life, or as ground that is no longer any good for vines can be used for growing beet. Around these new features a new youthfulness started to flourish. The only women who could not make use of these transformations were those who were too beautiful or too ugly. The former, sculpted like a piece of marble with permanent lines, nothing of which could be changed, would crumble away like a statue. The second group, those who had some deformity of the face, actually had some advantages over the beautiful ones. To begin with, they were the only ones who were instantly recognizable. One knows that there are no two mouths alike in Paris, and each one of this group demanded my recognition, even at this party where I did not recognize anybody else. And on top of that, they did not really look as if they had aged. Old age is something human; they were monsters, and they no more seemed to have ‘changed’ than whales do.
Some men, and some women, did seem not to have aged, their figures were still as slender, their faces as young as ever. But if, in order to speak to them, one leaned closer to the smooth-skinned face, with its fine contours, it suddenly appeared quite different, like the surface of a plant, or a drop of water or blood, when they are placed under a microscope. I could then make out numerous greasy patches on the skin which I had thought was smooth, which filled me with disgust. The lines could not sustain this enlargement either. Close up, the line of the nose broke down, filled out, was prey to the same oily circles as the rest of the face; and seen at close quarters the eyes retreated into bags which destroyed the resemblance between this current face and the face of the past which I thought I had rediscovered. So that these particular guests were young when seen from a distance, but their age increased with the enlargement of the face and the possibility of observing it from different angles; but it remained dependent on the spectator, who had to position himself carefully if he wanted to see these faces, and apply to them only the sort of distant looks which diminish the object, like the lens the optician chooses for a presbyopic patient; for them old age, like the presence of infusoria in a drop of water, was brought about less by the progress of the years than by the place on the scale occupied by the vision of the observer.
I met one of my oldest friends there, someone whom I had seen almost every day for ten years. Somebody asked if they could reintroduce us. So I went over to him, and he said in a voice that was immediately familiar to me: ‘This is a great pleasure for me after all these years!’ But what a surprise this was for me! The voice seemed to be emitted by an advanced phonograph, for while it was that of my friend, it emanated from a stout, grey-haired old fellow whom I did not know, and after that it seemed to me that it could only be artificially, by a mechanical trick, that my friend’s voice could have been placed inside this stout old man who might have been anybody. Yet I knew it was he, and the person who had introduced us after so long was not given to playing practical jokes. My friend himself declared that I had not changed, and I realized he did not think that he had changed either. Then I looked at him more closely. And, in fact, although he had become very stout, he had kept many things from the old days. Yet I still could not grasp the fact that it was he. So I tried to remember. When he was young he had had blue eyes, always laughing, perpetually in motion, clearly in quest of something I had never thought about and which was likely to be very unselfish, the truth probably, pursued in perpetual uncertainty, with a sort of childishness but with an errant respect for all the friends of his family. Now a capable, influential and despotic politician, those blue eyes of his, which had never actually found what they were looking for, had lost their mobility, which gave them a pointed look, as if from beneath a frowning eyebrow. And the expression of gaiety, freedom and innocence had turned to one of cunning and dissimulation. I was on the point of deciding that this must indeed be another man when I suddenly heard, at something I said, his laugh, his old uncontrolled laughter, the laughter that went with the gay, perpetual mobility of his eyes. Some music-lovers find that, orchestrated by X——, the music of Z—— becomes absolutely different. These are nuances that ordinary people do not grasp. But a stifled, wild, boyish laugh coming from beneath an eye as pointed as a well-sha
rpened blue pencil is more than a difference of orchestration. Then the laugh stopped; and although I would very much like to have recognized my friend, like Ulysses in the Odyssey attempting to embrace his dead mother, like a medium trying unsuccessfully to obtain from an apparition a response which would identify it, like a visitor to an exhibition of electricity who cannot help believing that the voice which the phonograph restores unaltered is, all the same, spontaneously emitted by a person, I stopped recognizing him.
There is, however, one important qualification to all this, namely that the tempo of time itself may for certain people be accelerated or slowed down. Four or five years ago I happened, for instance, to encounter the Vicomtesse de Saint-Fiacre in the street (the daughter-in-law of the friend of the Guermantes). Her sculptured features seemed to assure her of eternal youth. Besides which, she was still young. Now, in spite of her smiles and her greetings, I simply could not recognize her in a lady with features so ravaged that the lines of her face were beyond reconstruction. This was because for three years she had been taking cocaine and other drugs. Her eyes, deeply ringed with black, looked almost wild. Her mouth was fixed in a strange rictus. She had got up, I was told, especially for the party, having spent months without leaving her bed or her chaise-longue. Time, therefore, has its special express trains which take you rapidly to a premature old age. But on the parallel track, trains run almost as quickly in the opposite direction. I mistook M. de Courgivaux for his son, because he looked the younger (he must have been over fifty, and looked younger than he had when he was thirty). He had found an intelligent doctor, and cut out alcohol and salt; he had gone back to being about thirty and in fact on this particular day seemed not yet to have reached that age. This was because, only that morning, he had had his hair cut. There was still one man, though, whom I could not recognize, even when I was told his name; I thought it must be someone with the same name, because there could be absolutely no connection between this man and the one whom I not only knew in the past, but had met again only a few years ago. Yet it was he, only white-haired and fatter, but he had shaved off his moustache and that had been enough to strip him of his personality.
In Search of Lost Time Page 32