In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  Kindness, a simple process of maturation which has succeeded eventually in sweetening natures more initially acidic than Bloch’s, is as widespread as the feeling of justice which makes us believe that if our cause is good we can have no more to fear from a prejudiced judge than from a friendly one. And Bloch’s grandchildren will be good and unassuming almost from birth. Bloch was perhaps not quite there yet. But I observed that he, who once pretended to believe himself obliged to undertake a two-hour railway journey to go to see someone who had only quite casually asked him, now that he received so many invitations not only to lunch and to dinner, but also to spend a fortnight here and a fortnight there, declined many of them, without mentioning them, without boasting of having received them, nor of having declined them. Discretion, discretion in actions and in words, had come to him with social position and with age, with a sort of social age, if one can say that. No doubt Bloch was once as indiscreet as he was incapable of benevolence or thoughtfulness. But certain defects, certain qualities, are not so much attached to this or that individual as to this or that moment of existence considered from the social point of view. They are almost external to individuals, who move in their light as if beneath a variety of solstices, pre-existent, general, unavoidable. Doctors who are trying to discover whether some medicament diminishes or increases the acidity of the stomach, stimulates or slows down its secretions, obtain differing results, not in relation to the stomach from whose secretions they have taken a small amount of gastric juice, but in relation to whether they take it earlier or later in the process of ingesting the remedy.

  Thus at all moments in its history, the name of Guermantes, considered as an agglomeration of all the names which it admitted into itself, around itself, suffered decline, recruited new elements, like those gardens in which, at any moment, flowers scarcely in bud and the ones already beginning to wither which they are preparing to replace, all blend into a single mass which looks the same, save to those who have not yet seen the new arrivals and retain in their memory the precise image of the ones that no longer exist.

  More than one of the individuals assembled at this afternoon party, or whose memory was evoked by it, by making me remember the aspects he or she had in turn presented to me through the different, or opposite, circumstances from which they had, one after the other, arisen before me, caused the varied aspects of my life to emerge in my mind’s eye, the differences of perspective, just as a feature in the landscape, a chateau or a hill, appearing sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, seems first to look down over a forest, then to emerge from a valley, and thereby reveals to the traveller the changes of direction and the differences in altitude along the road he is following. As I went further and further back, I eventually came across images of the same person separated by such a long interval of time, retained by such distinct selves, and themselves having such different meanings, that I habitually omitted them when I believed I was considering the whole past course of my relations with them, that I had even ceased to think of them as the same people I had once known, and that it needed a chance flash of attention to reconnect them, etymologically as it were, to the original meaning they had had for me. Mlle Swann threw me, from the other side of the pink hawthorn hedge, a look the significance of which I would later, in fact, have retrospectively to retouch, it being a look of desire. Mme Swann’s lover, as all Combray regarded him, looked at me behind the same hedge with an unfriendly stare which equally did not have the meaning I then attributed to it, and subsequently changed so much that I had completely failed to recognize him at Balbec as the gentleman perusing a poster by the casino, a look which I would perhaps recall once every ten years and say to myself: ‘And that was M. de Charlus, even then! It’s very strange!’ Mme de Guermantes at Dr Percepied’s wedding; Mme Swann wearing pink at my great-uncle’s; Mme de Cambremer, Legrandin’s sister, so smart that he was terrified we were going to ask him to give us an introduction to her, these, as well as a number of others concerning Swann, Saint-Loup, etc., were just so many images which I sometimes amused myself with, when I came across them, in setting up as frontispieces at the threshold of my relations with different individuals, but which did in fact seem no more than images, not something lodged within me by the individuals themselves, to whom nothing any longer connected them. Not only do some people have good memories and others bad (without going as far as the constant forgetfulness in which the Turkish Ambassadress lives, and others like her, which enables them always to find – since recent news evaporates after a week, and fresh reports have the knack of exorcizing it – always to find room for the contradictory news people tell them), but two people with equally good memories do not even remember the same things. One will have paid little attention to an act for which the other will always retain a feeling of great remorse, and he, conversely, will have instantly seized upon some remark which the other just let fall almost without thinking, and elevated it as a characteristic sign of congeniality. One’s investment in not having been wrong when one has issued a mistaken forecast shortens the lifetime of one’s memory of it, and allows one very quickly to affirm that one did not issue it. Lastly, a deeper and more disinterested investment diversifies people’s memories, so that the poet who has almost forgotten almost all the facts which one is recalling to him still retains a fleeting impression of them. All this shows why it is that, after an absence of twenty years, where one had expected bitterness one finds involuntary and unconscious forgiveness, while on the other hand one encounters numerous instances of hatred for which (because one has forgotten in one’s turn the bad impression one once made) one can find no explanatory reason. When it comes to the sequence of events in the lives even of those one has known best, one has forgotten the dates. And because it was at least twenty years since she had met Bloch for the first time, Mme de Guermantes would have been prepared to swear that he had been born into her world and been dandled on the knee of the Duchesse de Chartres when he was two years old.

  And how many times these people had reappeared before me in the course of their lives, the diverse circumstances of which seemed to present me with the same individuals, but in various forms and for various ends; and the diversity of the points of my life through which had passed the thread of the life of each of these characters had ended up mingling those which seemed furthest apart, as if life possessed only a limited number of threads with which to achieve the most widely differing patterns. What could be more separate, for example, in my various pasts, than my visits to my uncle Adolphe, the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis, the Maréchal’s cousin, Legrandin and his sister, and Françoise’s friend, the old waistcoat-maker in the courtyard? And today all those different threads had come together to create the web, here of the Saint-Loup household, there of the young Cambremer couple, not to mention Morel, and so many others whose conjunction had combined to create a set of circumstances that it seemed to me that the circumstances were the complete unity, and the characters merely component parts. And my life was already sufficiently long that, for more than one of the individuals that it presented me with, I could find in opposite regions of my memories, to complete him or her, another being. Even to the Elstirs which I saw here hung in positions which were an indication of his fame, I was able to add very old memories of the Verdurins, the Cottards, the conversation in the Rivebelle restaurant, the reception at which I had met Albertine, and numerous other things. In the same way a connoisseur of art, shown one wing of an altarpiece, remembers in which church, what museums, what private collection, the others are dispersed (just as by keeping abreast of the sale catalogues or by regularly visiting the antique shops he will eventually find the object that is twin to the one he possesses and which forms its pair); he is able to reconstitute the predella, and the entire altar, in his head. Just as a bucket being hauled up on a pulley swings around and knocks into the rope here and there on different sides, there was no character with a place in my life, and hardly even any things, that had not in their turn pla
yed different roles. A simple social relationship, even a material object, if I rediscovered it in my memory after a few years, I saw that life had gone on weaving different threads around it which eventually became dense enough to form that inimitable, lovely, velvety bloom on the years, like the accretion which in old parks shrouds a simple water-pipe in a sheath of emerald.

  It was not only the appearance of these characters that made one think of them as people in a dream. They themselves were finding that life, already drowsy in youth and in love, had become more and more of a dream. They had even forgotten their resentments and their hatreds, and in order to be certain that it was the person now in front of them with whom they had not been on speaking terms ten years ago, they would have had to consult a register, which, however, would have been just as vague as a dream in which one had been insulted, without it being clear by whom. All these dreams helped to shape the contradictory appearances of political life, with men who had accused each other of murder or treason being members of the same government. And the dream became as murky as death in some old men on the days after those on which they had made love. On those days, there was no point in asking any questions of the President of the Republic, he forgot everything. Then, if one left him in peace for a few days, his memory of public affairs returned, as fortuitously as the memory of a dream.

  Sometimes it was not in a single image that this individual, so very different from the person I had subsequently come to know, appeared. For years I had imagined Bergotte as a gentle, godlike old man, I had felt paralysed as if by a ghost at the sight of Swann’s grey hat or his wife’s violet cloak, or the mystery in which the family name shrouded the Duchesse de Guermantes, even in a drawing-room; almost legendary origins, a fascinating mythology of relations which subsequently became so banal, but which are thus extended back into the past as if into the depths of the sky, with a brilliance equal to the light emanating from the glittering tail of a comet. And even the ones which had not begun in mystery, like my relations with Mme de Souvré, so dry and purely social these days, still retained from their earliest phase that first smile, calmer, sweeter and so smoothly traced in the fullness of an afternoon by the sea, or the close of a spring day in Paris, with the noise of carriages, dust in the air, and sunlight rippling like water. And while Mme de Souvré might not, perhaps, have been worth very much if taken out of this frame, like those monuments – the Salute,106 for example – which, while having no great beauty of their own, do admirably in their place, she was part and parcel of a whole bundle of memories which I valued at a certain price as a ‘job lot’, without asking myself exactly how much of it the person of Mme de Souvré accounted for.

  One thing about all these beings which struck me even more forcibly than the social and physical changes they had undergone, and that was the change in the different ideas they all had about each other. Legrandin used to despise Bloch and would never speak to him. Now he was on the best of terms with him. This was not entirely due to the more elevated position that Bloch had taken, which in this instance would not be worth noting, because social changes necessarily lead to alterations in the respective positions of those concerned. No: it was because in our memories people – and by people I mean as they are for us – do not have the same uniformity as a picture. Their development is subject to the arbitrary whims of our forgetting. Sometimes we go so far as to confuse them with other people: ‘Bloch, that’s somebody who used to come to Combray’, saying Bloch, when in fact it was me they meant. Conversely, Mme Sazerat was convinced that I was the author of a certain historical treatise about Philip II (which was actually by Bloch). Without going to these extremes of transposition, one does forget the dirty tricks which somebody has played on you, his defects, and how the last time you met you left without shaking hands, and one remembers instead an earlier occasion when you got on very well together. And it is to that earlier occasion that Legrandin’s manners were responding, in his friendliness towards Bloch, either because he had lost the memory of some part of the past, or because he judged it taboo, from a mixture of forgiveness, forgetting and indifference, which is another of the effects of Time. Nor are the memories we all have of one another, even in love, the same. I had known Albertine recall in extraordinary detail some remark I had made to her at one of our first meetings, and which I had completely forgotten. Yet of another incident, permanently settled deep in my mind like a pebble, she would have no memory at all. Our parallel lives seemed like those garden walks where, at regularly positioned intervals, tubs of flowers are placed symmetrically but never opposite each other. This makes it all the more understandable that when it comes to people with whom we have only a slight acquaintance we should have difficulty remembering who they are, or else that we should remember something different from how we used to think of them, something from an earlier time, something suggested by the people amongst whom we meet them again, who have only known them for a short while, adorned with qualities and a social position which they used not to have, but which we, oblivious, instantly accept.

  No doubt life, by setting these people in my path on a number of occasions, had presented them to me in particular circumstances which, by surrounding them on all sides, had limited the view I had had of them and had prevented me from knowing their essence. Even those Guermantes, who had been the focus of such elaborate dreams for me, had appeared to me, when I had first come close to any of them, under the aspect, one of an old friend of my grandmother, the other of a gentleman who had looked at me in an unpleasantly forbidding way one morning in the gardens of the casino. (Because between us and other beings there is a margin of contingencies, just as I had understood in my readings at Combray that there is a margin in perception which prevents absolute contact taking place between reality and the mind.) So that it was only ever after the event, by relating them to a name, that my acquaintance with them became an acquaintance with the Guermantes. But perhaps that may even have made my life seem more poetic, the thought that this mysterious family with the piercing eyes, the beak of a bird, this rose-coloured, golden, unapproachable family, had so often, and so naturally, as a consequence of blind and varied circumstance, offered itself to my contemplation, to my society and even to my friendship, to the point that, when I had wanted to meet Mlle de Stermaria or to have dresses made for Albertine, it was to the Guermantes that I turned, as being the most helpful of all my friends. Certainly I was sometimes bored by having to go to their houses, as I was in the houses of other society people whom I had later come to know. Even with the Duchesse de Guermantes, as with certain pages of Bergotte, her charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished when I was close to her, for it all lay in my memory and my imagination. But in the end the Guermantes, and Gilberte too, differed from the other people in society in that they thrust their roots further down into a past time of my life in which I dreamed more and believed more strongly in individuals. What at least I had before me, bored as I was chatting away first with one then with the other Guermantes, were those of my childhood imaginings whom I had found the most beautiful and believed the most inaccessible, and I consoled myself, like a shop-keeper whose book-keeping has become muddled, by confusing the value of having them there with the price my desire had once put on them.

  In the case of some other people, though, my relations with them in the past had been inflated with more ardent dreams, conceived without hope, in which my life of that time blossomed so richly, and was so entirely dedicated to them, that I could scarcely comprehend how their fulfilment could have been that narrow, thin and lustreless ribbon of indifferent and disdainful intimacy, in which I was never afterwards able to rediscover anything of their old mystery, their fever and their sweetness. Not all had been ‘received’, or been decorated, for some the adjective was different, though not more important: they were recently dead.

  ‘How is the Marquise d’Arpajon? asked Mme de Cambremer. – Oh, she’s dead, replied Bloch. – You’re confusing her with the Comtesse d’Arpaj
on, who died last year.’ The Princesse d’Agrigente joined the discussion; the young widow of a very rich old husband and bearer of a great name, she was much sought after in marriage and this had greatly increased her self-assurance. ‘The Marquise d’Arpajon died too, about a year ago. – A year? Oh, surely it can’t be, replied Mme de Cambremer, I was at a musical evening in her house less than a year ago.’ Bloch was no more capable of making a useful contribution to the discussion than any of the elegant young men in society, for the deaths of all these old people were too distant from them, either by virtue of the enormous difference in years, or by recent arrival (as in the case of Bloch) in a changing society which he approached indirectly, at the moment when it was starting to decline into a twilight where the memory of a past that was unfamiliar to him could provide no illumination. And for people of the same age and social background death had lost some of its strange significance. Every day they would send out for news of so many people who were at the point of death, of whom some would have rallied while others would have ‘succumbed’, that they could no longer remember with any accuracy whether somebody who no longer ever appeared anywhere had recovered from their pneumonia or had expired. Death became much more active and more indeterminate in these aged regions. At this crossroads of two generations and of two societies which, ill-placed for different reasons to distinguish death, almost confused it with life, the former had been socialized, had become an incident which more or less described a person but without the tone of voice seeming to signify that this incident put an end to everything for him or her. People said: ‘But you’re forgetting, so and so is dead,’ in the same way as they might say: ‘He’s been decorated’ or ‘he’s a member of the Academy’, or – and this came to the same thing since it also prevented their presence at parties – ‘he’s gone south for the winter’, ‘he’s been ordered to get some mountain air’. And in the case of well-known men, what they left behind them when they died helped to remind people that their existence was over. But with ordinary, very old, society people, one got confused about whether they were dead or not, not only because one knew little about, or had forgotten, their past, but because they had no connection of any sort with the future. And the difficulty each of them had in selecting one from among the illness, absence, retirement to the country, or death of old society people, made the insignificance of the departed quite as acceptable as the indifference of the hesitant.