Strangely enough, the phenomenon of old age seemed in the way it operated to take account of some social customs. There were great noblemen, for instance, who had always been dressed in the plainest alpaca and worn old straw hats which an ordinary middle-class man would not have been seen dead in, who had aged in the same way as the gardeners and the countrymen among whom they had spent their lives. Patches of brown had appeared on their cheeks, and their faces had yellowed and darkened like the pages of a book.
I also thought about all the people who were not there, because they were unable to be, and whose secretaries, trying give the illusion that they were surviving, had excused by one of those telegrams which the Princesse was handed from time to time, those invalids who have been dying for years, who never get up, never go out and, even in the midst of the shallow attentiveness of visitors drawn there by tourist curiosity or pilgrim piety, lie with their eyes closed, clutching their rosary, feebly pushing away their sheet which is already more like a pall, looking like effigies, carved into skeletal thinness by illness out of flesh stiff and white as marble, recumbent on their tomb.
The women attempted to keep in contact with what had been most individual in their charm, but often the new material of their faces no longer lent itself to this. One was afraid, thinking of the periods of time which must have elapsed before being accompanied by a parallel revolution in the geology of a face, to see what erosion had occurred along the nose, what great alluvia at the edge of the cheeks now surrounded the whole face with their opaque and refractory masses.
Some women, of course, were still eminently recognizable, their faces remaining almost the same, and all they had done, as if in harmony with the season, was to put on their autumn accessory of grey hair. But for others, and for some men, too, the transformation was so complete, the continued identity so impossible to establish – for example between the evil womanizer one remembered and the old monk before one’s eyes – that even more than the actor’s art, it was the skill of some of the best mime-artists, Fregoli97 being the greatest, that these fabulous transformations reminded one of. The old woman had wanted to cry when she realized that the indefinable, melancholy smile which had been her main charm was no longer capable of radiating as far as the surface of the plaster mask that old age had applied to her face. Then suddenly deterred from crying, deciding that it showed more mental character to put up with things, she used it like a theatrical mask to provoke laughter! But for nearly all the women there was no respite in their attempt to fight against old age, and they were always holding out towards the beauty which was retreating, like a setting sun whose last rays they passionately wanted to conserve, the mirror of their face. To succeed in this, some of them tried to smooth it down, to enlarge the white surface, renouncing the lure of already threatened dimples and the roguishness of a smile condemned and already half disarmed; while others, seeing beauty finally vanished and obliged to take refuge in facial expression, like someone compensating for the loss of their voice with skilful diction, they clung on to a pout, or to a way of wrinkling their eyes, to a dreamy look, or sometimes to a smile which, because of the lack of coordination between no longer obedient muscles, made them look as if they were crying.
Furthermore, even among the men who had undergone only slight alteration, whose moustaches had turned white, etc., one felt that the change was not strictly speaking material. It was as if one had seen them through a mist of dye or a painted lens which changed the appearance of their faces, but also, more than that, by adding this blurring factor to our vision, showed that what we were being enabled to see ‘life-size’ was in reality very far away from us, within a different sort of distance, admittedly, from that of space, but at the far end of which, as from another shore, we felt that they were having as much difficulty in recognizing us as we were in recognizing them. Only perhaps Mme de Forcheville, as if she had been injected with a liquid, something like paraffin, which soaks into the skin and prevents it changing, still looked like a cocotte from the old days, now permanently ‘stuffed’.
‘You think I’m my mother,’ Gilberte had said to me. It was true. Yet it was also almost kind: one starts off with the idea that people are the same and one finds them old. But if one starts with the idea that they are old, one rediscovers them, one finds that they don’t seem so bad after all. In the case of Odette it was not only that; her appearance, once one knew her age and anticipated seeing an old woman, seemed a more miraculous defiance of the laws of chronology than the conservation of radium was of the laws of nature. If at first I had not recognized her, this was not because she had, but because she had not changed. Having become aware during the last hour of time’s new additions to people and my need to subtract again in order to rediscover people as I had known them, I now rapidly made that calculation, adding to the former Odette the number of years which had passed over her, the result of which turned out to be a person who it seemed to me could not possibly be the one I was looking at, precisely because she was so like her old self. What part did make-up and dye play in this? Under her flat golden hair – a bit like the tousled chignon of a large mechanical doll, over a face set in an expression of surprise as immutable as a doll’s – on which was superimposed an equally flat straw hat, she looked like the spirit of the 1878 Exhibition98 (at which she might indeed easily have been, even more so if she were as old then as she was today, the most extraordinary attraction) coming to deliver her party-piece in an end-of-year revue, but the 1878 Exhibition played by a woman who was still young.
Close beside us passed a minister from before the Boulangist99 period, now a minister once again, throwing a distant and tremulous smile to the ladies, looking as if he were imprisoned in the myriad ties of the past, like a little ghost led about by an invisible hand, reduced in stature, altered in substance and looking like a little version of himself made out of pumice-stone. This former Prime Minister, so welcome in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had once been the subject of criminal proceedings, vilified by society and by the people. But thanks to the replacement of the individuals constituting each of these entities and, among those individuals who still survived, the replacement of their strong feelings and even their memories, nobody any longer knew about it, and he was honoured and respected. It seems therefore that there is no humiliation so great that one should not put up with it easily, in the knowledge that after a few years our buried faults will be no more than an invisible dust over which will smile the smiling and blossoming peace of nature. An individual who has momentarily strayed will find himself, thanks to the equilibrium effect of time, caught between two new social strata, both of which feel nothing but deference and admiration for him, in which he will strut and bask very comfortably. Nothing but time can achieve this; and while his troubles are still continuing nothing can console him for the fact that the young dairy-maid over the road has heard the shouts of ‘sleaze’ from the crowd, shaking their fists as he climbed into the ‘Black Maria’, the young dairy-maid who does not see things in the perspective of time, and who does not know that the men lauded in the morning newspaper were previously discredited, and that the man on the brink of a prison sentence at this moment yet, perhaps thinking of the dairy-maid, unable to utter the words of humility which might win her sympathy for him, will one day be celebrated by the press and sought after by duchesses. In a similar way time distances family quarrels. At the Princesse de Guermantes’s party there was a couple, husband and wife, who had as uncles two men, dead now, one of whom, not content with their having come to blows with each other, and wanting further to humiliate the other, had sent his porter and butler as his seconds, as if he deemed gentlemen too good for him. These stories, though, were buried in the newspapers of thirty years ago, and nobody any longer remembered them. And thus the Princesse de Guermantes’s drawing-room was illuminated, forgetful, and flowery, like a peaceful cemetery. There, time had not only brought about the ruin of the creatures of a former epoch, it had made possible, had indeed created, new a
ssociations.
To return to that politician, despite the changes in his physical substance, every bit as far-reaching as the transformation of the moral ideas which he now evoked in the public mind, in a word despite all the years that had passed since he had been Prime Minister, he became a member of the new cabinet, the leader of which had given him a portfolio, rather as a theatre director gives a part to one of his old friends, long retired, whom he deems still to be more capable than younger actresses of playing the part with subtlety, and whose difficult financial situation he is also aware of, and who, at almost eighty, still shows the public the whole of her talent almost at the height of its powers, along with that continuing vitality which people were subsequently amazed to have seen so vividly just a few days before her death.
The case of Mme de Forcheville, on the other hand, was so miraculous that one could not even say that she was rejuvenated, more that, with all her carmines and her russets, she had come back into flower again. More even than the incarnation of the 1878 Universal Exhibition, she might have been the chief curiosity and star attraction in a modern horticultural exhibition. To me, she did not seem to say: ‘I am the 1878 Exhibition’ so much as: ‘I am the Allée des Acacias, 1892.’ She looked as if she might still have been there. And precisely because she had not changed, she hardly seemed to be alive. She was like a sterilized rose. I said good-afternoon to her, she tried for a long time to discover my name from my face, like a pupil looking at the examiner’s face for an answer he could more easily have found in his own head. I mentioned my name and immediately, as if the name had powers of enchantment thanks to which I stopped looking like an arbutus tree or a kangaroo or whatever appearance old age must have given me, she recognized me and started to talk in that intensely individual voice which those people who had applauded her in little theatres were so impressed, when they were invited to lunch with her ‘in town’, to hear again in everything she said, throughout the conversation, for as long as they liked to listen. The voice had stayed the same, needlessly warm, captivating, with a very slight English accent. And yet, just as her eyes seemed to be looking at me from a distant shore, her voice was sad, almost pleading, like that of the dead in the Odyssey. Odette was still capable of acting. I complimented her on her youthfulness. She said: ‘You’re very kind, my dear, thank you,’ and, as she found it hard to express even the truest feelings in a manner unaffected by her need to seem what she took to be smart, she repeated several times: ‘Thank you so much, thank you so much.’ But I, who had long ago walked so far to catch sight of her in the Bois, who, the first time I went to see her, had listened for the sound of her voice falling from her lips as if it were treasure, now found the minutes spent in her company interminable because it was impossible to know what to say to her, and I moved on, telling myself that Gilberte’s words ‘You think I’m my mother’ were not only true, but also that they could only be flattering for the daughter.
Besides, Gilberte was not the only one on whom family traits had appeared which had previously remained as invisible on their face as those parts of a seed, coiled up inside it, whose sudden eruption up out of it is completely unpredictable. Thus a great maternal beak appeared on this or that person at about the age of fifty, transforming a nose that until then had been straight and pure. Another woman, the daughter of a banker, found that her complexion, once fresh as a daisy, turned red and leathery and started to look as if it were a reflection of the gold her father had spent so much time handling. Some even ended up looking like the part of town they lived in, somehow bearing in their faces a reflection of the rue de l’Arcade, the avenue de Bois or the rue de l’Élysée. For the most part, though, they reproduced the characteristics of their parents.
She was not, alas, always to remain as unchanged as this. Less than three years later I was to see her, not in her second childhood, but not quite all there, at an evening party given by Gilberte; she had become incapable of concealing beneath a mask of impassivity what she was thinking, or rather – thinking puts it too high – what was going through her mind, nodding her head, pursing her lips, shrugging her shoulders at every impression she was feeling like a drunk does, or a small child, or poets who, sensing inspiration and oblivious to their surroundings, start composing a poem at a social gathering, furrowing their eyebrows and distorting their features, to the astonishment of the woman on their arm whom they are taking in to dinner. These impressions of Mme de Forcheville – all except one, which was actually the cause of her presence at the party, her affection for her beloved daughter and her pride that she should be giving such a glittering party, a pride which could not mask the mother’s sadness at not being anything herself any more – these impressions were not joyful, they simply required a permanent defence in the face of the snubs she received, a defence as timorous as a child’s. All one heard was people saying: ‘I don’t know if Mme de Forcheville knew who I was, perhaps I ought to get someone to introduce me again. – Oh, there’s no point in doing that,’ somebody else would say, at the top of their voice, not thinking that Gilberte’s mother could hear every word (either not thinking or not caring). ‘It’s quite useless. You won’t get anything out of it. Best leave her alone. She’s a bit gaga, you know.’ Furtively, Mme de Forcheville would dart a glance out of her still beautiful eyes towards those talking so offensively about her, then quickly withdraw the look, afraid of having been rude; although keeping her feeble indignation to herself, she was still upset by the insult, and one saw her head nodding and her breast heaving as she cast a fresh glance at another equally discourteous guest, and yet she was not particularly surprised because, having felt very ill for some days, she had guardedly suggested that her daughter should rearrange the party, but her daughter had refused. Mme de Forcheville did not love her any the less for it; all the duchesses arriving, and everybody’s admiration of the new mansion, flooded her heart with joy; and when the Marquise de Sabran came in, who at the time was the lady whose salon was the very pinnacle of the social ladder, Mme de Forcheville felt that she had been a good and foresightful mother and that her maternal task had been accomplished. More sniggering guests made her look up again and talk to herself, if you can call it talking when the language is dumb and expressed solely through movement and gesture. Although still beautiful, she had become – something she had never been before – an object of infinite sympathy; because she who had betrayed Swann and everybody else was now being betrayed by the entire universe; and she had become so weak that she no longer even dared, now the roles were reversed, to defend herself against men. And soon she would not defend herself against death. But all this is to anticipate: we must go back three years, to the afternoon party we are attending at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes.
I had some difficulty recognizing my friend Bloch, who in fact had now permanently adopted his pseudonym of Jacques du Rozier as his own name, behind which it would have needed my grandfather’s flair to detect the ‘sweet valley’ of Hebron and the ‘bonds of Israel’ which my friend seemed definitively to have broken. His face had been completely transformed in accordance with the latest English fashion, and every unevenness seemed to have been smoothed away, as with a plane. His once curly hair was brushed flat, with a centre parting, and gleamed with brilliantine. His nose was still large and red, but now seemed swollen by a sort of permanent cold, which also explained the nasal drawl in which he produced his languid sentences, for he had found, not only a hair-style appropriate to his complexion, but an intonation that suited his pronunciation, in which the old twang took on an air of disdain for full articulation which went well with his inflamed nostrils. And thanks to the haircut, to the removal of his moustache, to the general air of elegance, to the whole impression, and to sheer will-power, his Jewish nose had disappeared, in the way that a hunchback, if she presents herself well, can seem to stand almost straight. But as soon as Bloch appeared, the one thing that altered the significance of his physiognomy more than any other was a formidable monocle. By
introducing a mechanistic element into Bloch’s face this monocle exempted him from all the difficult duties the human face is subject to, the duty to be beautiful, to express intellect, kindness or effort. The mere presence of this monocle on Bloch’s face exempted people, first of all, from wondering whether or not he was good-looking, just like looking over some English things in a shop which the assistant has said ‘are the latest thing’, after which one does not dare wonder whether one actually likes it. Also he was able to take up a position behind the glass of the monocle where he was as aloof, distant and comfortable as if it had been the glass window of an elegant, well-sprung carriage, and his other features, in keeping with the flattened hair and the monocle, never expressed anything now at all.
Bloch asked me to introduce him to the Prince de Guermantes; I did not even feel a hint of the difficulties I had found in my way on the day when I went first went to an evening party at his house and which had seemed quite natural to me then, whereas now it seemed perfectly simple to introduce to him one of his guests, and it would even have seemed simple for me to have led over to him, and unexpectedly introduced to him, somebody whom he had not invited. Was this because, since that distant epoch, I had become an ‘intimate’, although for some time now one of the ‘forgotten’, of that world in which I was then so new; or was it, on the contrary, because, not really being a member of fashionable society, all the things which they find so difficult no longer had any reality for me, once I had overcome my shyness; or was it because, people having gradually dropped for me their outward (and often their second and third) masks, I sensed behind the disdainful haughtiness of the Prince a great human avidity to know people, even to get to know those he affected to despise? Was it also because the Prince had changed, like all those who are overbearing in their youth and their maturity, but to whom old age brings a more measured nature (particularly as the coming men and the unknown ideas at which they used to balk have now long been recognized and accepted by those around them), and especially if old age brings with it some virtue or vice which extends his acquaintance, or the revolution caused by a political conversion, like the Prince’s conversion to Dreyfusism?
In Search of Lost Time Page 33