In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  It must be added that the antipathy which the unpredictable Duchesse had recently developed towards Gilberte may have meant that she took a certain pleasure in receiving Rachel, which also allowed her to proclaim one of the Guermantes maxims, namely that they were too many to take sides in one another’s quarrels (almost too many to take notice of each other’s bereavements), an independence of the ‘I don’t see why I should have to’ sort, which had been reinforced by the policy they had been obliged to adopt in relation to M. de Charlus, who, if you had followed him, would have involved you in hostilities with the whole of society.

  As for Rachel, if she had in reality gone to considerable lengths to establish a connection with the Duchesse de Guermantes (lengths which the Duchesse had not been able to discern beneath the affected disdain, the deliberate impoliteness, which had whetted her appetite and given her an inflated idea of an actress so little given to snobbery), that was doubtless something, in a general way, to do with the fascination which people in society begin after a certain time to exert over the most hardened bohemians, parallel to the one that bohemians themselves exercise over people in society, a double reflux corresponding in the political order to the reciprocal curiosity and the desire to form an alliance between nations which have recently been at war. But there may have been a more specific reason for Rachel’s desire. It was in the house of Mme de Guermantes, from Mme de Guermantes herself, that she had, long ago, received her most terrible humiliation. Rachel had gradually, not forgotten, but forgiven, but the singular prestige which the Duchesse had, in her eyes, thereby received could never be effaced. The conversation from which I was wanting to distract Gilberte’s attention was interrupted, anyway, because the mistress of the house came looking for the actress as it was time for the recitation, and a few moments later, having left the Duchesse, she appeared on the platform.

  Meanwhile, at the other end of Paris, a very different spectacle was taking place. La Berma, as I said, had invited a few people to come and take tea in honour of her son and daughter-in-law.110 But the guests were in no hurry to arrive. Having learned that Rachel was reciting poetry at the Princesse de Guermantes’s (which deeply scandalized La Berma, the great artist who still regarded Rachel as a tart who had been allowed to appear in dramas in which she, La Berma, was playing the leading role, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses she wore on stage – and scandalized her the more because there was a rumour current in Paris that, although the invitations were in the name of the Princesse de Guermantes, it was Rachel who in reality was the hostess in the Princesse’s house), La Berma had written for a second time insistently to a few loyal friends, asking them not to miss her tea-party, for she knew that they were also friends of Mme de Guermantes, whom they had known when she was Mme Verdurin. Now the hours were passing and nobody arrived at La Berma’s. Bloch, on being asked whether he wanted to come, had artlessly replied: ‘No, I’d rather go to the Princesse de Guermantes’s.’ Unfortunately, this was what everybody else had privately decided to do. La Berma, suffering from a fatal illness which meant that she saw only very few people, had seen her condition worsen when, to pay for the luxury her daughter needed and which her son-in-law, idle and with poor health, was unable to provide, she had returned to acting. She knew that she was shortening her life, but she wanted to give pleasure to her daughter, to whom she gave her large fees, and to her son-in-law, whom she hated but flattered, for knowing how her daughter adored him, she was afraid that if she failed to please him he might, out of spite, prevent her from seeing her daughter. This daughter, secretly loved by the doctor who attended her husband, had let herself be persuaded that these performances of Phèdre were not dangerous to her mother. She had in a sense forced the doctor to tell her this, in that she had retained nothing else but this from his reply, or from his objections, which had made no impression on her; and in fact the doctor had said that he could not see any great risk in La Berma’s performances. He had said this out of a feeling that he would thereby be pleasing the young woman he loved, and perhaps also out of ignorance, and because he also knew that the disease was, in any case, incurable, and that we are happy to resign ourselves to cutting short the suffering of somebody who is ill when that which is fated to cut it short benefits us, and perhaps also out of some stupid idea that it would please La Berma and was therefore bound to be good for her, a stupid idea which may have seemed justified when, having been given a box by La Berma’s children, and having left all his patients for the occasion, he had found her as overflowing with life on the stage as she seemed close to death when she was at home. And in fact our habits do to a very great extent allow us, allow even our organs, to adapt to an existence which would seem at first sight to be quite impossible. Who has not seen an elderly riding-master with a weak heart go through a whole range of acrobatics which one would not have believed his heart could sustain for a minute? La Berma was no less of an old stalwart of the stage, to the demands of which her organs were so perfectly adapted that she was able, by husbanding her energies with a caution invisible to the public, to give the illusion of good health disturbed only by a purely nervous and imaginary ailment. After the scene in which she declares herself to Hippolyte, La Berma may well have been aware of nothing but the dreadful night she was about to have, but her admirers applauded her with all their might, declaring her more beautiful than ever. She went back home in terrible pain, but glad that she was able to bring her daughter the large banknotes which, in the girlish way of an actress brought up on the boards, she still used to stuff into her stockings, whence she would proudly produce them in the hope of a smile and a kiss. Sadly, all these banknotes merely enabled new embellishments to their hôtel, adjacent to the mother’s: whence incessant hammering, which interrupted the sleep of which the great actress was in such great need. In accordance with changes in fashion, and to conform to the taste of M. de X——or Mme de Y——whom they hoped to entertain, they made alterations to every room. And La Berma, sensing that sleep, which alone could ease her pain, had fled, resigned herself to not sleeping again, although not without a secret contempt for these refinements which were hastening her death and making her last days so excruciating. This, in part at least, was no doubt why she despised them, a natural vengeance upon whatever harms us and that we are powerless to prevent. But it is also because being aware of the genius that was in her, having learned very early in life the meaninglessness of these edicts of fashion, she had herself remained faithful to the tradition she had always respected, of which she was the incarnation, which led her to judge things and people as she had done thirty years earlier, and for instance to judge Rachel not as the fashionable actress she was today, but as the little tart she had once known. La Berma was not actually any better than her daughter, who had got from her, by heredity and the contagious effects of example that an all too natural admiration made the more efficacious, her selfishness, her pitiless mockery, her unconscious cruelty. Save that all this La Berma had sacrificed to her daughter and thus been freed from it herself. Moreover, even if the daughter had not had workmen in her house all the time, she would still have worn out her mother, as the thoughtless and ferocious attractive powers of youth wear out age and illness, which exhaust themselves trying to keep up with it. Every day there was another lunch party, and people would have thought La Berma selfish to have deprived her daughter of them, or even not to have been present at lunches where the prestige of the famous mother’s company was relied upon to mitigate the difficulty of attracting recalcitrant recent acquaintances to the house. They would ‘promise’ her to the same acquaintances for a party away from home, just to be civil. And the poor mother, gravely occupied with her private converse with the death installed within her, would be obliged to get up early, and go out. Worse still, as this was the time when Réjane,111 at the dazzling peak of her talent, was giving performances abroad which were enormously successful, the son-in-law decided that La Berma must not let herself be eclipsed, wanted the family to pick up some
of the same abundant glory, and forced La Berma on tours where she had to be given injections of morphine which, because of the state of her kidneys, might easily have caused her death. The same appeal of smartness, of social prestige, of life, had worked on the day of the Princesse de Guermantes’s party like a suction-pump to attract, as if with some pneumatic machine, all La Berma’s most loyal friends so that, in consequence and by contrast, there was absolute, deathlike emptiness in her house. One young man, uncertain whether La Berma’s party might not also be a glittering affair, had come. When La Berma saw the appointed time pass, and realized that everybody had abandoned her, she ordered tea to be served, and they sat down at the table, but rather as if it were a funeral repast. Nothing about La Berma’s face any longer recalled the face whose photograph had disturbed me so much one evening in mid-Lent.112 La Berma, as people say, had death written all over her face. This time she really did look like one of the marble figures in the Erechtheum.113 Her hardened arteries were already semi-petrified, the long sculptural ribbons visibly stretching across her cheeks, with a mineral rigidity. The dying eyes seemed relatively alive by contrast with this terrible ossified mask, and gleamed palely like a snake asleep in a heap of stones. But the young man, who had sat down at the table out of politeness, could hardly keep his eyes off the clock, drawn as he was by the glittering party at the Guermantes’.

  La Berma did not utter a word of reproach about the friends who had abandoned her, and who naïvely hoped that she would not notice that they had gone to the Guermantes’. She merely murmured: ‘A Rachel giving a party in the Princesse de Guermantes’s house. It could only happen in Paris.’ And, silently and with a solemn slowness, she ate forbidden cakes, as if taking part in some funerary ritual. The ‘tea-party’ was all the more gloomy as the son-in-law was furious that Rachel, whom he and his wife knew very well, had not invited them. His anguish was intensified when the young guest had told him that he knew Rachel so well that if he left at once for the Guermantes’ he could ask her, even at this late stage, to invite the shallow couple. But La Berma’s daughter was too well aware what a very low estimation her mother had of Rachel, and knew that she would make her die of despair if she solicited an invitation from that former tart. So she had told the young man and her husband that it was quite impossible. But she got her own back throughout the tea by making expressive little facial gestures indicative of the desire for pleasure and of annoyance at being deprived of it by her spoil-sport of a mother. The latter pretended not to notice her daughter’s sulky expression, and from time to time addressed a few amiable words, in a dying voice, to the young man, the sole guest to have come. But soon the blast of air which was sweeping everything towards the Guermantes, and which had swept me there myself, was too strong, and he rose and left, leaving Phèdre, or death, it was not very clear any longer which of the two it was, with her daughter and her son-in-law, to finish eating the funeral cakes.

  We were interrupted by the voice of the actress gradually becoming audible. This was a clever ploy on her part, for it presupposed that the poetry which the actress was in the process of speaking was part of a whole that existed prior to this recitation, and that we were only hearing a fragment of it, as if the artist, on her way along a road, had happened for a few moments to be within our earshot.

  The announcement of poems that almost everybody knew had met with approval. But when people saw the actress, before she began, gazing in all directions, wild-eyed and questioning, raising her hands in the air in supplication and almost groaning out each word, they all started to feel embarrassed, almost shocked, by this display of feeling. Nobody had imagined that the recital of poetry could be anything like that. Gradually, people become accustomed to it, that is to say they forget the original sensation of unease, they sift out the good, they compare different methods of recitation in their minds, in order to tell themselves: this is better, this is less good. But the first time, in the same way as when, in a simple case, one sees the barrister step forward, raise a robed arm and begin declaiming in an ominous voice, nobody dares look at their neighbours. Because to begin with one thinks it is grotesque, but then it seems it might be wonderful, and one waits to make up one’s mind.

  Nevertheless, the audience was amazed when they saw this woman, before she had uttered a single sound, bend her knees, stretch out her arms to cradle some invisible body, become knock-kneed and then suddenly, in order to speak lines which were very well known, adopt an imploring tone of voice. Everybody looked at one another, not quite knowing what expression to assume, a few ill-mannered young people stifled giggles, each person cast furtive glances at his neighbour, the sort that at smart dinner-parties, when there is a new implement in front of you, a lobster-fork, a sugar-grater, etc., whose purpose and use you do not know, you cast at some more authoritative guest who, you hope, will be served before you are and thus give you the opportunity to copy what they do. You do the same, too, when somebody quotes a line of poetry you do not know, but which you want to look as if you do know, when, as if pausing to permit somebody to enter a door first, you allow another, better-informed person, as if it were a favour, to have the pleasure of saying where it comes from. In this way, while they listened to the actress, everyone waited, heads lowered and eyes enquiring, for other people to take the initiative by laughing, or criticizing, or weeping, or applauding.

  Mme de Forcheville, who had returned expressly from Guermantes, whence the Duchesse had been almost expelled, had adopted a taut, attentive, almost pained expression, either to show that she was a connoisseur and not merely there for social reasons, or as a form of hostility towards people less well versed in literature who might have talked to her about other things, or else by the exertion of her whole being to discover whether she ‘liked’ or did not like a piece, or perhaps because, while finding one ‘interesting’, she certainly did not ‘like’ the manner in which certain lines were spoken. It might seem that this attitude would have been better adopted by the Princesse de Guermantes. But as this was taking place in her house, and as, having become as miserly as she was rich, she had decided to give Rachel nothing but five roses, she was acting as a claque. She was whipping up enthusiasm and creating favourable impressions by constantly giving voice to exclamations of delight. Here alone her Verdurin nature could still be seen, for she seemed to be listening to the poems for her own pleasure, to have wanted someone to come and speak them to her and her alone, while it was only by chance that there should have happened to be five hundred people there, her friends, whom she had allowed to come as it were secretly to witness her private pleasure.

  Meanwhile I observed, without any gratification of my vanity, for she was old and ugly, that the actress was giving me the eye, though in a somewhat restrained manner. During the whole of the recitation she allowed a repressed but penetrating smile to flicker in her eyes as if it were the first sign of an acquiescence she might have wished to see coming from me. At the same time, some elderly ladies, not used to poetry recitals, were saying to their neighbours: ‘Did you see that?’ alluding to the actress’s solemn, tragic gestures, not knowing what to make of them. The Duchesse de Guermantes sensed the slight wavering and ensured a victory by exclaiming: ‘Wonderful!’ right in the middle of a poem which she thought had perhaps just ended. More than one guest was then anxious to accentuate this exclamation with a look of approbation and a nod of the head, less perhaps to show their understanding of the performance than to show off their relationship with the Duchesse. When the poem was finished, as we were near the actress I heard her thank Mme de Guermantes, and at the same time, taking advantage of the fact that I was standing beside the Duchesse, she turned to me with some gracious greeting. I realized then that this was somebody whom I ought to recognize, and that unlike the passionate glances of M. de Vaugoubert’s son, which I had mistaken for the greeting of a person who thought I was somebody else, what I had taken as a look of desire on the part of the actress was merely a reserved attempt to get me to rec
ognize her and greet her. I responded with a bow and a smile. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t recognize me, the reciter said to the Duchesse. – Of course I do, I said confidently, I recognize you perfectly. – Who am I, then?’ I had absolutely no idea who she was, and my position was becoming awkward. Fortunately for me, while, during the loveliest lines of La Fontaine, this woman reciting them with so much assurance had been thinking mainly, either out of kindness or stupidity, about the difficulty of saying good-afternoon to me, during the same lovely lines Bloch’s thoughts had been exclusively occupied with making preparations, as soon as the poetry ended, to dash forward as if attempting an escape from some beleaguered position, treading on the feet, if not the bodies, of his neighbours, to come and congratulate the reciter, either out of a misplaced sense of duty or else out of a desire for ostentation. ‘Isn’t it funny to see Rachel here!’ he whispered in my ear. The magic name instantly shattered the enchantment which had given Saint-Loup’s mistress the unknown form of this disgusting old woman. As soon as I knew who she was I recognized her perfectly. ‘That was wonderful,’ he said to Rachel, and having spoken these simple words, his desire satisfied, he went back and had so much difficulty and made so much noise regaining his place that Rachel had to wait more than five minutes before reciting her second poem. When she had finished this one, ‘Les Deux Pigeons’, Mme de Morienval came up to Mme de Saint-Loup, whom she knew to be very well-read, while not remembering that she also had her father’s subtle and sarcastic wit: ‘That’s the La Fontaine fable, isn’t it?’ she asked, thinking she recognized it but not being absolutely certain, for she did not know La Fontaine’s fables well at all, and indeed believed them to be childish things, not for recitation in fashionable society. To have had a success like that, the artist must surely have been doing a pastiche of the fables of La Fontaine, the dear good woman thought. Now Gilberte unintentionally strengthened her in that idea for, not liking Rachel, and wanting to say that there was almost nothing left of the fables after a delivery like hers, she said so in that over-subtle manner which had been her father’s, and which used to leave unsophisticated people in doubt as to what he meant: ‘It was a quarter the invention of the performer, a quarter complete lunacy, a quarter made no sense at all, and the rest was La Fontaine,’ which enabled Mme de Morienval to continue to believe that what they had just heard was not ‘Les Deux Pigeons’ by La Fontaine, but a new version, a quarter of which at the most was by La Fontaine, which news, owing to these people’s extraordinary ignorance, came as a surprise to nobody.