She told me with particular pride about her afternoon gatherings where every day X—— and Y—— would be present. For she had acquired the notion, common to all the women with ‘salons’ whom in the past she used to despise (though these days she denied this), that real superiority, the sign of election as she saw it, was to have ‘all the men’ at one’s house. If I chanced to say that some great lady with a salon had spoken ill of Mme Howland, when she was still alive, the Duchesse burst out laughing at my naïvety: ‘Of course she did, she had all the men coming to her and that woman was trying to lure them away.’
‘Don’t you think, I said to the Duchesse, that it might be distressing for Mme de Saint-Loup to have to listen, as she just has, to her husband’s former mistress?’ I saw forming itself in Mme de Guermantes’s face the blank expression behind which an oblique process of thought links what one has just heard to some rather unpleasant thoughts. An unexpressed process of thought, admittedly, but not all the serious things we say receive a verbal or a written response. Only a fool asks ten times in vain for a reply to a letter which was a mistake and which should never have been written; for letters like that only ever receive a response in the form of deeds, while the woman you imagined was merely slow in replying to your letters, addresses you as Monsieur when you next meet, instead of calling you by your first name. There was nothing of an unpleasant nature about my allusion to the relationship between Saint-Loup and Rachel, and at most it might annoy her for a moment by reminding her that I had been Robert’s friend and perhaps his confidant on the subject of the rebuff that Rachel’s performance at the Duchesse’s party had resulted in. But she did not persist in those thoughts, the stormy expression vanished, and Mme de Guermantes replied to my question about Mme de Saint-Loup: ‘If you ask me, I don’t think it matters to her at all, Gilberte never loved her husband. She is a dreadful little thing. She loved the social position, the name, being my niece, and getting out of the gutter where she belonged, but since then she seems to have been doing her best to get back into it. I tell you, it distressed me very much for poor Robert’s sake, because he may not have been a genius, but he could see it very well, and a whole lot of other things too. I shouldn’t say anything because she is my niece, after all, and I don’t have any positive proof that she was unfaithful to him, but there were an awful lot of stories. No, I’m wrong, there was one I do know about, with an officer from Méséglise, Robert wanted to challenge him. It was because of all that that Robert joined up, the war seemed liked a deliverance from his family worries; if you want to know what I think, he wasn’t killed, he got himself killed. She never showed the slightest grief, she even astonished me by the unusually cynical way she affected indifference, which upset me a great deal because I was very fond of poor Robert. This may surprise you, because people don’t know me very well, but I still often think about him; I never forget anyone. He never spoke to me about it, but he understood that I guessed everything. But just think about it, if she had loved her husband even a little bit, could she endure to be in the same drawing-room, unperturbed, as the woman with whom he had been so desperately in love for so many years? You could say for ever, even, because I’m quite certain it never stopped, even during the war. Heavens, she’d have had her by the throat!’ exclaimed the Duchesse, forgetting that she herself, by arranging for Rachel to be invited and thereby making possible the scene she deemed to be inevitable if Gilberte had loved Robert, was perhaps acting cruelly. ‘No, you know, she concluded, she is a slut.’ Such an expression from Mme de Guermantes was rendered possible by her descent from the pleasant social circles of the Guermantes to socializing with actresses, and also because she grafted it on to an eighteenth-century manner which she thought full of vitality, and then also because she thought she could do whatever she liked. But the word itself was the product of the hatred she felt for Gilberte, by a need to hit her, if not physically then in effigy. At the same time, the Duchesse thought by this to justify the whole of her behaviour towards Gilberte, or rather against her, in society and within the family, where Robert’s interests and his estate were concerned.
But as sometimes one’s judgments receive apparent justification from facts of which one was unaware and could not have imagined, Gilberte, who had no doubt inherited some of the characteristics of her mother’s family (and it may well be this accommodating attitude which I had unconsciously relied upon when I asked her to introduce me to very young girls), after some thought, from the request I had made, and doubtless so that the profit would stay in the family, drew a conclusion bolder than any I could have imagined. She said: ‘If you’ll allow me, I’m going to go and find my daughter to introduce to you. She is over there chatting to the Mortemart boy and other young things of no interest. I’m sure she’ll be a nice friend for you.’
I asked her if Robert had been happy about having a daughter: ‘Oh, he was very proud of her. Though of course given his tastes, Gilberte went on naïvely, I think he would have preferred a boy.’ This daughter, whose name and fortune might have given her mother hope that she would marry a royal prince and crown the whole work of social ascendance begun by Swann and his wife, later chose to marry an obscure literary figure, for she was devoid of snobbery, and brought her family down to a level below that from which it had started. It was therefore extremely difficult to make subsequent generations believe that the parents of this obscure couple had held such an elevated position in society. The names of Swann and Odette de Crécy were miraculously revived to enable people to tell you that you were wrong, and that there was nothing so very extraordinary about the family; and people in the end thought that Mlle de Saint-Loup had made the best marriage she could, that her grandfather’s with Odette de Crécy (he having no standing) had been made in a vain attempt to better himself, whereas on the contrary, at least from the point of view of love, his marriage had inspired theories like those which in the eighteenth century drove great aristocrats, under the spell of Rousseau, and other forerunners of the Revolution, to live a life of nature and to abandon their privileges.
My astonishment at her words and my pleasure at hearing them were rapidly replaced, as Mme de Saint-Loup disappeared in the direction of another sitting-room, by the idea of Past Time, which was also, in its way, prompted, without my having even seen her, by Mlle de Saint-Loup. Was she not, as indeed most human beings are, like one of those ‘stars’ in forests, cross-roads where roads converge which have come, as they do in our lives, from the most diverse starting-points? They were numerous enough, in my case, the roads leading to Mlle de Saint-Loup and radiating out again from her. Above all it was the two great ‘ways’ which had led to her, along which I had had so many walks and so many dreams – through her father, Robert de Saint-Loup, the Guermantes way, through her mother, Gilberte, the Méséglise way which was the ‘way by Swann’s’. One, through the little girl’s mother and the Champs-Élysées, led me to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to the Méséglise way; the other, through her father, to my afternoons at Balbec, where I could visualize him close to the sunlit sea. Already some connecting roads were establishing themselves between these two main routes. For the actual Balbec, where I had met Saint-Loup, was a place that I had so much wanted to go to very largely because of what Swann had told me about the churches there, especially about the Persian church, and then again, through Robert de Saint-Loup, the nephew of the Duchesse de Guermantes, I came back, in Combray once more, to the Guermantes way. But there were still many other points in my life to which Mlle de Saint-Loup led, to the lady in pink, who was her grandmother and whom I had met at my great-uncle’s house. A new connecting road here, because this great-uncle’s manservant, who let me in that day and who later, through the gift of a photograph, enabled me to identify the Lady in Pink, was the father of the young man whom not only M. de Charlus but the father of Mlle de Saint-Loup himself had been in love with, on whose account he had made her mother so unhappy. And was it not the grandfather of Mlle de Saint-Loup, Swann, who had
first mentioned the music of Vinteuil to me, just as it was Gilberte who had first spoken to me of Albertine? And it was by talking about the music of Vinteuil to Albertine that I had discovered who her great friend was and thus had begun that part of my life with her which led to her death and caused me so much pain. And it was also Mlle de Saint-Loup’s father who had set off to try to make Albertine come back. And even to my whole life in society, whether in Paris in the drawing-rooms of Swann or the Guermantes, or at the opposite extreme with the Verdurins, thus bringing into line, alongside the two ways of Combray, the Champs-Élysées and the beautiful terrace of La Raspelière. In fact, what individuals have we known who, if we want to tell the story of our friendship with them, do not oblige us to set them successively in a series of quite different places in our lives? A life of Saint-Loup as portrayed by me would unfold in every sort of setting and involve the whole of my life, even those parts of it where he was least familiar, like my grandmother or like Albertine. And the Verdurins, even though at the opposite end of the scale, were connected to Odette through her past, and to Robert de Saint-Loup through Charlie; and think of the part played in their house by Vinteuil’s music! Finally, Swann had been in love with Legrandin’s sister, who in turn had known M. de Charlus, whose ward the young Cambremer had married. If it were only a matter of our hearts, the poet would have been right to speak of the ‘mysterious threads’ that are broken by life.123 But it is even more true to say that life is ceaselessly weaving these threads between individuals and between events, that it interweaves them, doubles them, to make the weave thicker, to such an extent finally that between the least significant point in our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us in fact a choice about which connection to make.
One might say that, if I tried not to make use of it unconsciously but to remember what it had been, there was not a single one of the things which were useful to us at that moment that had not been a living thing, something for us alive with its own life, subsequently transformed for our use into simple industrial raw material. My introduction to Mlle de Saint-Loup was about to take place in Mme Verdurin’s house: spellbound, I thought over all the journeys I had made with the Albertine for whom I was going to ask Mlle de Saint-Loup to be a substitute – in the little tram, to Doville, to visit Mme Verdurin, the same Mme Verdurin who had brought together in love, and then forced apart, long before my love affair with Albertine, the grandfather and grandmother of Mlle de Saint-Loup – ! All round us were paintings by Elstir, the man who had introduced me to Albertine. And just to meld all my pasts together, Mme Verdurin, like Gilberte, had married a Guermantes.
It would not be possible to recount our relationship, even with a person we hardly knew, without recreating a succession of the most diverse settings of our life. So each individual – and I was one of these individuals myself – became a measure of duration for me each time he completed a revolution not just around himself, but around other people, and in particular by the successive positions he occupied in relation to me. And no doubt all these different planes, in relation to which Time, as I had just grasped in the course of this party, arranged my life, by giving me the idea that in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the flat psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space, added a new beauty to the resurrections that had taken place in my memory while I was lost in my thoughts alone in the library, since memory, by bringing the past into the present without making any changes to it, just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time through which a life is given reality.
I saw Gilberte coming towards me. Saint-Loup’s marriage, and the thoughts which had preoccupied me then and were still the same this morning, were as fresh in my mind as if they were yesterday’s, so I was astonished to see beside her a young girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a visible measure of the distance I had not wanted to see. Time, colourless and intangible, had been materialized in her so that I could, so to speak, see it and touch it, it had shaped her into a master-work, while at the same time on me, alas, it had merely done its work. Yet here was Mlle de Saint-Loup, in front of me. She had deep-set, piercing eyes and her delightful nose was slightly prominent, like a beak, and curved, not at all perhaps like Swann’s, but more like Saint-Loup’s. The spirit of that Guermantes had disappeared; but the enchanting head and piercing eyes of a bird in flight had taken up a new position on the shoulders of Mlle de Saint-Loup, likely for a long time to arouse dreams and reveries in those who had known her father.
I was struck by the way that her nose, constructed on the template of her mother’s and grandmother’s, stopped precisely at that perfect horizontal line beneath it, sublimely though perhaps a fraction late. Such an individual feature, even if it was the only one visible, would have made one statue recognizable among thousands of others, and I marvelled that nature should have returned at the appointed time to the granddaughter, as to the mother and to the grandmother, like a great and original sculptor, to perform this powerful and decisive stroke of the chisel. I thought she was very beautiful: still full of hopes, laughing, formed out of the very years that I had lost, she looked like my youth.
Finally, this idea of Time was valuable to me for one other reason, it was a spur, it told me that it was time to start, if I wanted to achieve what I had sometimes sensed during the course of my life, in brief flashes, on the Guermantes way, in my carriage-rides with Mme de Villeparisis, which had made me feel that life was worth living. How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him! To give some idea of it, one would have to go to the most elevated and divergent arts for comparisons; for this writer, who would also need to show the contrasting aspects of each character to create depth, would have to prepare his book scrupulously, perpetually regrouping his forces as in an offensive, and putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries, the explanations for which are probably to be found only in other worlds, while our occasional inklings of them are what, in life and in art, move us most deeply. In books of this scope, there are parts which have never had time to be more than sketched in and which will probably never be finished because of the very extent of the architect’s plan. Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished! One feeds a book like that, one strengthens its weak parts, one looks after it, but eventually it grows up, it marks our tomb, and protects it from rumours and, for a time, from oblivion. But to return to myself, I was thinking about my book in more modest terms, and it would even be a mistake to say that I was thinking of those who would read it as my readers. For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses of the sort the optician at Combray used to offer his customers; my book, but a books thanks to which I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves. With the result that I would not ask them to praise me or to denigrate me, only to tell me if it was right, if the words they were reading in themselves were really the ones I had written (possible divergences in this regard not necessarily always originating, it should be said, in my having been wrong, but sometimes in the fact that the reader’s eyes might not be of a type for which my book was suitable as an aid for self-reading). And as every few moments I changed the comparison by which I could best and most materially represent the task on which I was embarking, I thought that at my big deal table, watched by Françoise, who, in the way that all unpretentious people who live alongside us do, had an intuitive understanding of my tas
k (and I had sufficiently forgotten Albertine to have forgiven Françoise for any harm she had done her), I would work next to her, and work almost in the same way as her (at least in the way she used to in the past: she was now so old she could hardly see at all); for, pinning a supplementary page in place here and there, I should construct my book, I don’t dare say, ambitiously, as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making. When I did not have all of what Françoise called my manuscribbles within reach, and could not find just the one that I wanted, Françoise would sympathize with my annoyance, as she always used to be saying how she could not sew if she did not have the right number thread and the proper buttons. And then through being so close to my life, she had developed a kind of instinctive understanding of literary work, more accurate than that of many intelligent people, let alone fools. Once, for example, when I had done my article for the Figaro, when the old butler, with the kind of commiseration which always slightly exaggerates the laborious nature of any alien task, like people who say: ‘How it must tire you to sneeze like that,’ expressed his pity for writers by saying: ‘What a headache that must be,’ Françoise, by contrast, sensed my happiness and respected my work. The only thing that angered her was when I told Bloch about the contents of my article in advance, as she was afraid he would write it first, and would say: ‘You’re too trusting, those people are all copifiers.’ And indeedBloch did often give himself a retrospective alibi every time I had sketched out something he liked the sound of, by saying: ‘That’s a coincidence, I’ve just written something very similar myself, I must read it to you.’ (He could not have read it to me then, but he would go and write it that evening.)
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