In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  I could not tell Gilberte about the thoughts I had been having for the last hour, but I did think that, purely in terms of entertainment, she might provide me with some pleasure, which in fact seemed unlikely to come from having to talk about literature with the Duchesse de Guermantes any more than with Mme de Saint-Loup. Certainly I intended to resume living in solitude from the next day onward, but this time with a specific purpose. Even at home I would not let people come to see me during my working moments, for the duty to write my book took precedence over that of being polite or even good-natured. They would probably insist, those who had not seen me for such a long time, coming to see me in the belief that I was cured, coming when the labour of their day or of their life was finished or interrupted, and having then the same need of me as I had once had of Saint-Loup; and because, as I had already noticed at Combray when my parents reprimanded me at the moment when, unknown to them, I had made the most praiseworthy resolutions, the internal clocks which are allocated to human beings are not all set to the same time. One strikes the hour of repose at the same time as another is striking that of work, one that of punishment by the judge when within the culprit the hour of repentance and self-improvement has long since struck. But I would have the courage to reply to those who came to see me, or who sent for me, that, because of essential matters which I needed to get abreast of immediately, I had an urgent, a crucially important meeting with myself. And yet, even though there is little relation between our true self and the other one, none the less, because they are homonymous and because they share a body, the abnegation which makes you sacrifice your simpler duties, even pleasures, appears to other people as selfishness.

  And anyway was it not so that I could be occupied by them that I was living apart from those people who would complain about not seeing me, so that I could be more deeply occupied by them than I could ever have been with them, in order to try to reveal them to themselves, to make them real? What use would it have been if I had continued for yet more years to waste whole evenings bouncing my equally vain remarks off the hardly defunct echo of theirs, all for the sterile pleasure of a social contact which excludes everything that is not superficial? Was it not better that I should take these gestures they made, these things they said, their lives, their natures, and attempt to describe the curve they made and to isolate and define their laws? I would unfortunately have to struggle against that habit of putting oneself in another person’s place which, although it may help the conception of a work, is a hindrance to its execution. For, through a kind of superior politeness, it impels one to sacrifice to others not only one’s pleasure but one’s duty because, looking at it from somebody else’s standpoint, this duty, whatever it may be, even if it is just somebody who can do nothing useful at the front staying behind the lines where he is useful, will look like our pleasure, when in reality it is not.

  And far indeed from thinking myself unfortunate, as even the greatest sometimes have, in this life without friends, without conversation, I realized that the forces of elation expended in friendship are so to speak out of true, aiming at one particular friendship which leads to nothing and deflecting us from a truth towards which they were capable of leading us. But in the end, when intervals of rest and society became necessary, I felt that, rather than the intellectual conversations which society people thought useful for writers, a few light love affairs with young girls in flower would be a select nutrient which, if I had to, I might allow my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses. What suddenly I hoped for again was what I had dreamed of at Balbec when, before I had yet met them, I had seen Albertine, Andrée and their friends walking beside the sea. But alas! I could no longer hope to rediscover those girls whom at that moment I desired so strongly. The action of the years which had transformed all the individuals I had seen today, including Gilberte herself, had certainly turned all those who still survived, as they would have done Albertine if she had not been killed, into women very different from my recollections of them. It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder than this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to that which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being. It is simply, as I had often had reason to suspect, that what seems unique in a person whom one desires does not in fact belong to her. But the passage of time was giving me a more complete proof of this since, after twenty years, spontaneously, I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now possessed the youth that the others had had then. (Nor is it only the re-awakening of our physical desires which corresponds to no reality because it fails to take account of lost time. I sometimes used to find myself wishing that, by a miracle, still alive contrary to what I had believed, my grandmother or Albertine might just walk into the room where I was. I imagined I could see them, my heart shot towards them. I forgot only one thing, which was that if they really were still living, Albertine would now have something like the appearance that Mme Cottard had presented at Balbec, and that my grandmother, being over ninety-five years old, would show me nothing of that beautiful, calm, smiling face with which I still imagined her now, as arbitrarily as one might give a beard to God the Father, or as in the seventeenth century Homeric heroes were depicted in all the accoutrements of gentlemen, without any attention paid to their antiquity.)

  I looked at Gilberte and I did not think: ‘I’d like to see her again,’ but I did tell her that she would always be giving me pleasure if she invited me to meet very young girls, preferably poor, so that I could give them pleasure by giving them little gifts, without asking anything of them except a revival of the reveries and sorrows of earlier times and perhaps, one unlikely day, a chaste kiss. Gilberte smiled and then seemed to be giving the idea her serious consideration.

  In the same way that Elstir liked to see incarnate before him, in his wife, the Venetian beauty he had often painted in his works, I gave myself the excuse that there was a degree of aesthetic selfishness in my attraction towards beautiful women who could cause me pain, and I felt something close to idolatry for the future Gilbertes, the future Duchesses de Guermantes, the future Albertines whom I might meet and who, it seemed to me, might inspire me, as if I were a sculptor walking among fine classical marbles. I ought, though, to have realized that even earlier than this attraction to each of them was my sense of the mystery surrounding them and that therefore, rather than asking Gilberte to introduce me to young girls, I would do better to go out to places where we have no connection with them, where between them and oneself one feels something unbridgeable, where two steps away, on the beach, going for a bathe, one feels separated from them by impossibility. That is how my sense of mystery had been able to attach itself in turn to Gilberte, to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to Albertine and to so many others. No doubt in due course the unknown, and almost the unknowable, had become the known, familiar, indifferent or painful, yet it always retained something of the charm it had once possessed.

  And to tell the truth, like those calendars the postman brings to get his Christmas box, there was not one of my years which might not have had as its frontispiece, or intercalated between its days, the image of a woman I had desired; an image made even more arbitrary by the fact that sometimes I had never seen the woman, as for example when it was Mme Putbus’s maid, or Mlle d’Orgeville, or some girl whose name I had glimpsed in the society page of a newspaper, among ‘the bevy of charming waltzers’. I would imagine her as beautiful, fall in love with her, and create for her an ideal body, its height dominating a landscape in the part of the country where, as I had read in the Annuaire des châteaux, her family
estates were to be found. For the women whom I had known, this landscape was at least twofold. Each woman arose, at a different point in my life, towering up like a local tutelary deity, first in the middle of one of these dream landscapes the juxtapositions of which chequered my life, the landscape in which I had first wanted to imagine her, then seen from the viewpoint of memory, surrounded by the places where I had known her and of which she reminded me, remaining attached to them, for although our lives are vagabond, our memories are sedentary and although we may move endlessly on, our memories, fastened to the places from which we free ourselves, continue to lead their unadventurous lives there, like the friends which a traveller makes briefly in a town and whom he is forced to abandon when he leaves it, because it is there that they who are not leaving will end that day and their lives as if he were still there, in front of the church, down by the harbour and beneath the trees of the promenade. So that the shadow of Gilberte, for instance, lay not only in front of a church in the Île-de-France where I had imagined her, but also across the path of a park on the Méséglise way, the shadow of Mme de Guermantes on a wet road where violet and reddish clusters rose in spikes, or on the morning gold of a Paris pavement. And this second person, born not of desire but of memory, was not for any of these women a single figure. For I had known each of them more than once, at different times, when each was a different woman for me, or I myself was different, steeped in dreams of a different colour. And the law which had governed the dreams of each year kept gathered around them the memories of a woman I had known, so that everything relating, for example, to the Duchesse de Guermantes at the time of my childhood was concentrated by a magnetic force around Combray, and everything which had to do with the Duchesse de Guermantes, when she was about to invite me to lunch, around a quite different sensitive entity; there were several Duchesses de Guermantes, as there had been several Mme Swanns since the lady in pink, separated by the colourless ether of the years, and from one to the other of whom I could no more jump than if I had to leave one planet and travel to another across the intervening ether. Not only separated, but different, adorned by dreams which I had at very different times, as with a particular flora not found on any other planet; to the extent that after having decided that I would lunch neither at Mme de Forcheville’s nor at Mme de Guermantes’s, I was able to tell myself only, so much had I been transported into a different world, that the one was not a different person from the Duchesse de Guermantes who was descended from Geneviève de Brabant, and the other from the lady in pink, because a knowledgeable man within me told me so with the same authority as a scientist might have told me that a Milky Way of nebulae was the result of the disintegration of one single star. In the same way Gilberte, whom none the less I was asking, without quite realizing that this was what I was doing, to enable me to have friends who would be like she had once been, was no longer anything to me but Mme de Saint-Loup. I no longer thought, when I saw her, of the part played in my love for her, which she had also forgotten about, by my admiration for Bergotte, for Bergotte once again simply the author of his books, without my remembering (save in rare and entirely distinct moments of recollection) the emotion of having been presented to the man, the disappointment, the astonishment at the conversation, in the drawing-room with the white fur rugs, filled with violets, where so many lamps were brought in so early, and set on so many consoles. All the memories which composed the original Mlle Swann had in effect been subtracted from the Gilberte of today, kept at a distance by the powers of attraction of another universe, grouped around a phrase of Bergotte’s with which they fused into a unity, and steeped in the scent of hawthorn.

  The fragmentary Gilberte of today listened to my request with a smile. Then, as she began to think about it, her face took on a more serious expression. And I was glad about this, as it prevented her from paying attention to a group the sight of which could certainly not have pleased her. The Duchesse de Guermantes could be seen deep in conversation with a frightful old woman, whom I looked at without being able even to guess who she was: I had absolutely no idea about her. It turned out to be Rachel, that is the actress, now famous, who in the course of the party was going to recite verses by Victor Hugo and La Fontaine, whom Gilberte’s aunt, Mme de Guermantes, was speaking to. For the Duchesse, aware for too long of occupying the foremost position in Paris society (unaware that such a position exists only in the minds of those who believe in it, and that many newcomers, if they never saw her anywhere, if they never read her name in the accounts of any smart functions, would think in fact that she occupied no position at all), no longer went, save for calls as few and infrequent as possible, and then with a yawn, to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which, she said, bored her to death, and instead indulged herself by having lunch with this or that actress whom she thought exquisite. In the new circles she moved in, having remained more like her old self than she thought, she continued to believe that being easily bored was a sign of intellectual superiority, but she expressed this with a sort of violence which gave her voice rather a harsh tone. When I mentioned Brichot to her: ‘He bored me so much for twenty years,’ and when Mme de Cambremer said: ‘You should reread what Schopenhauer says about music,’ she drew everyone’s attention to the phrase by saying, forcefully: ‘Re-read, that’s wonderful! Who does she think she’s taking in?’ Old M. d’Albon smiled at what he took to be a manifestation of the Guermantes wit. Gilberte, more up-to-date, remained impassive. Although Swann’s daughter, like a duckling hatched by a hen, she was more of a romanticist than he had been, and would say: ‘I think that’s so touching; or, he is delightfully sensitive.’

  I told Mme de Guermantes that I had run into M. de Charlus. She seemed to think he had ‘declined’ more than was in fact the case, people in society making distinctions, where intelligence is concerned, not only between different members of society amongst all of whom it is pretty much the same, but even within a single person at different points in their life. Then she added: ‘He has always been the image of my mother-in-law; but it’s more striking than ever now.’ There was nothing out of the ordinary in this resemblance. It is well known, in fact, that certain women as it were project themselves into another individual in perfect detail, the one error being in the matter of sex. An error of which one cannot say felix culpa, for the sex has implications for the personality, and in a man femininity becomes affectation, shyness becomes touchiness, and so on. It does not matter if the face is bearded or if the cheeks are heavily whiskered, they still have certain lines that could be superimposed on to a maternal portrait. There is scarcely an old Charlus who is not a ruin within which one can recognize with surprise under all the impasto of powder and paint a few fragments of a beautiful woman in her eternal youth. At that moment Morel entered the room; the Duchesse greeted him with a politeness which I found a little disconcerting. ‘Oh, I never take sides in family quarrels, she said. Don’t you find them boring, family quarrels?’

  And if over periods of twenty years conglomerations of coteries disintegrated and re-formed in accordance with the magnetic force of new stars, themselves also destined to fade away, then to reappear, a similar process of crystallization, then fragmentation, followed by fresh crystallization took place in the minds of individuals. If for me Mme de Guermantes had been a number of people, for Mme de Guermantes, for Mme Swann, etc., a given person had been a favourite in a era that preceded the Dreyfus Affair, then a fanatic or a fool after the Affair had broken and had changed the value of individuals for them and reclassified the parties, which since then had again disintegrated and re-formed. The most powerful effect on this, adding its own influence to purely intellectual affinities, is the passage of time, which makes us forget our antipathies, our disdains, the very reasons that explain our antipathies and our disdains. If one had scrutinized the fashionable young Mme de Cambremer closely, one would have found that she was the daughter of Jupien, the tradesman from our building, and that the additional factor which had enabled her to become a gl
ittering success was that her father procured men for M. de Charlus. But the combination of those things had produced dazzling effects, while the causes, already distant, not only were unknown to most of the newcomers, but most of those who had known them had forgotten them, being much more concerned with current brilliance than with past embarrassments, for a name is always taken at its current valuation. And the interesting thing about these drawing-room transformations was that they too were an effect of lost time, and a phenomenon of memory.

  The Duchesse still hesitated, for fear of a scene with M. de Guermantes, to approach Balthy and Mistinguett,109 whom she thought adorable, but had definitely taken Rachel as her friend. The new generations concluded from this that Mme de Guermantes, despite her name, must be some demi-rep who had never really been properly upper-crust. It is true that in the case of a few sovereigns for whose close friendship two other great ladies were mounting a challenge, Mme de Guermantes still went to the trouble of having them to lunch. But, on the one hand, they do not come very often, and tend to know people of little social standing, and also the Duchesse, out of the Guermantes’ superstitious adherence to old-fashioned protocol (because well-bred people bored her to tears while at the same time she insisted on good manners), always had her invitations read: ‘Her Majesty has commanded the Duchesse de Guermantes, has deigned’, etc. And the new strata, ignorant of these formulas, concluded from them that the position of the Duchesse was all the less elevated. From the point of view of Mme de Guermantes, close friendship with Rachel might indicate that we were mistaken when we thought her hypocritical and dishonest in her condemnations of smart society, when we thought that when she refused to go to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s she was acting not in the name of intelligence but of snobbery, thinking her stupid only because the Marquise allowed her snobbery to show, not yet having achieved her goal. But this intimacy with Rachel could also signify that the Duchesse’s intelligence was ordinary, unsatisfied and belatedly desirous, now she was tired of society, of some kind of fulfilment, though with a total ignorance of the true realities of intellectual life, and a touch of that fanciful spirit which makes quite respectable ladies think: ‘What fun that will be!’ and then end their evening in what turns out to be a very boring way, by going through the farce of waking somebody up, not in the end knowing what to say to them, standing by their bed for a little while in their evening cloak, after which, having noticed that it is very late, they finally go home to bed.