In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  This idea of death established itself permanently within me, in the way that love does. Not that I was in love with death, I hated it. But after having contemplated it from time to time, as one does a woman with whom one is not yet in love, the thought of it adhered to the deepest stratum of my brain so completely that I could not think about anything without its first passing through the idea of death, and even if I was doing nothing, remaining in a state of complete repose, the idea of death kept me company as ceaselessly as the idea of my self. I do not think that, on the day when I became half-dead, it was the accidents which characterized that state, the incapacity to descend a staircase, to recall a name, to get up, that had even unconsciously caused this idea of death, the idea that I was already practically dead, so much as that they had both come together and the great mirror of the mind had inevitably reflected a new reality. Yet I did not see how one could pass from the ailments that I had to total death without any warning. But then I thought about other people, about all the people who die every day without the hiatus between their illness and their death seeming at all extraordinary to us. I even thought that it was only because I was seeing them from within (even more than through the illusions of hope) that certain ailments, taken one by one, did not seem fatal, even though I believed that I was dying, just as those who are most convinced that their time has come are nevertheless easily persuaded that their inability to pronounce certain words has nothing at all to do with a stroke or aphasia but stems from a tiredness of the tongue, a nervous state akin to stammering, or exhaustion following a bout of indigestion.

  For myself, what I had to write was something different from a dying man’s farewell, longer, and for more than one person. Longer to write. In the daytime, at best, I could try to sleep. If I worked, it would be only at night. But I would need a good number of nights, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand. And I would be living with the anxiety of not knowing whether the Master of my destiny, less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, when I broke off my story each morning, would stay my death sentence, and permit me to take up the continuation again the following evening. Not that I was claiming in any way to be rewriting the Arabian Nights, any more than the Mémoires of Saint-Simon, both of them books written at night, nor any of the other books that I had loved in the naïvety of my childhood, when I had become as superstitiously attached to them as I would be to my loves, and was unable to imagine without horror any book that was different from them. But, as Elstir found with Chardin, one can remake something one loves only by renouncing it. No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one’s books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.

  It would be a book as long as the Arabian Nights perhaps, but quite different. It is probably true that when one is in love with a work of literature one wants to make something as like it as possible, but one needs to sacrifice one’s love of the moment, think not of one’s own taste, but of a truth which does not ask for your preferences and forbids you to think about them. And only if one follows it will one sometimes find that one has come upon what one abandoned, that, by forgetting them, one has written the Arabian Nights or the Mémoires of Saint-Simon for a new age. But was there still enough time for me? Was it not too late?

  I asked myself not only ‘Is there still enough time?’ but also ‘Am I still in a sufficiently fit condition?’ The illness which, by compelling me, like a severe spiritual adviser, to die to the world, had done me a service for ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’,127 the illness which, after my idleness had protected me from my facility, was now perhaps going to protect me from idleness, had also exhausted my powers and, as I had long observed, particularly at the time when I stopped loving Albertine, my powers of memory. But was not the re-creation through memory of impressions, which then needed to be investigated, illuminated and transformed into intellectual equivalents, one of the preconditions, almost the very essence, of the work of art as I had conceived it just now in the library? Oh, if only I still had the powers that were still intact on the evening which had come back into my mind when I noticed François le Champi! It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother’s face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again…

  Then I suddenly thought that, if I did still have the strength to complete my work, this afternoon party – like certain days long ago at Combray which had influenced me – which had, just today, given me both the idea of my work and the fear of not being able to accomplish it, would be bound to mark it more than anything else with the form that I had sensed long ago in the church at Combray, and which normally remains invisible to us, the form of Time.

  There are, of course, many other errors of the senses, and we have seen how various episodes of this narrative had proved this to me, which falsify our perception of the real appearance of the world. But where necessary, by doing everything I could to give the most exact transcription, I would be able to keep the location of sounds unchanged, to abstain from detaching them from their cause, besides which the intellect situates them only after the event, even though to make the rain sing gently in the middle of the room and to make the bubbling of our tisane fall torrentially in the courtyard ought, after all, to be no more disconcerting than what painters have done so often when they have depicted, very close or very far away, depending on how the laws of perspective, the intensity of colour and our first illusory glance make them appear to us, a sail or a peak, which the rational mind will then relocate, sometimes across enormous distances. I might, even though the error would be more serious, continue the general practice of adding features to the face of a passer-by, although instead of a nose, cheeks and a chin, there should not really be anything except an empty space over which would flicker, at most, the reflection of our desires. And even if I did not have the leisure to prepare, and this was a much more important matter, the hundred masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face, if only because of all the eyes that see it and the different meanings they read into its features, as well as for the same eyes the effect of hope and fear or, on the contrary, of the love and habit which for thirty years can conceal the changes wrought by age; even if I was not in the end proposing, although my relationship with Albertine had been enough to show me that anything else is factitious and untruthful, to represent certain individuals not as outside but as inside us, where their least acts can entail fatal disturbances, and to vary the light of the moral sky, according to the differing pressures of our sensibility or when, disturbing the serene skies of our certainty beneath which an object is so small, the slightest cloud of danger multiplies its size in a moment; if I could not use these changes and many others (the necessity for which, if one intends to depict reality, has become apparent in the course of this narrative) in the transcription of a universe which had to be completely redesigned, at least I would not fail to describe man, within it, as possessing the length not of his body but of his years, and as being obliged, in a task that grows more and more enormous, and which in the end defeats him, to drag them with him whenever he moves.

  Moreover, the fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels, and this universality could only delight me, since this was the truth, the truth suspected by everybody, that it was my task to try to elucidate. Not only does everybody feel that we occupy a place in Time, but the simplest measure it in approx
imately the same way as they measure the place we occupy in space, so that people of no special perspicacity, seeing two men whom they do not know, both with black moustaches, or both clean-shaven, will say that these are two men, one of about twenty and the other of about forty years old. Of course they will often be wrong in their estimate, but the fact that people think it possible at all shows that age is conceived as something measurable. The second man with the black moustache has effectively had twenty years added on to him.

  It was this notion of embodied time, of past years not being separated from us, that it was now my intention to make such a prominent feature in my work, and it was at that very moment of decision, in the hôtel of the Princesse de Guermantes, that I heard that sound of my parents’ footsteps as they led M. Swann to the gate, heard the tinkling of the bell, resilient, ferruginous, inexhaustible, shrill and fresh, which told me that M. Swann had gone and that Mama was on her way upstairs, heard the very sounds themselves, heard them even though they were situated so far away in the past. Then, as I thought of all the events which had to be set in place between the moment when I heard those sounds and this party at the Guermantes’, I was frightened to think that the bell could still be ringing in me without my being able to do anything to alter the shrillness of its tinkling, since, no longer remembering very clearly how it faded away, and wanting to rediscover this, and to listen to it properly, I had to try to block out the sound of the conversations which the masks were holding all around me. In order to try to hear it at closer quarters, I was forced to go back down into myself. It must therefore be that this tinkling was always there, and also, between it and the present moment, the whole of this past, unrolled indefinitely, which I did not know that I was carrying. When it tinkled, I already existed, and for me still to be able to hear the tinkling there must have been no break in continuity, I must not have ceased for a moment, not taken a rest from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, because this moment from long ago still stuck to me, so that I could still find it again, still go back to it, simply by going more deeply back into myself. And it is because they contain in this way every hour of the past that human bodies can do so much damage to those who love them, because they contain so many memories of joys and desires already effaced from their minds, but cruel indeed for anyone who contemplates and projects back through the array of time the cherished body of which he is jealous, so jealous as to wish for its destruction. For, after death, Time leaves the body, and the memories – so indifferent, so pale now – are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture, but in whom they will eventually die, when the desire of a living body is no longer there to support them. The depths of Albertine, whom I saw sleeping, and who was dead.

  I felt a sense of tiredness and fear at the thought that all this length of time had not only uninterruptedly been lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, that it was myself, but also that I had to keep it attached to me at every moment, that it supported me, that I was perched on its vertiginous summit, and that I was unable to move without its collaboration, without taking it with me. The date at which I heard the sound of the garden bell at Combray, so distant and yet still within me, was a benchmark in that vast dimension which I did not know I had. I felt giddy at the sight of so many years below me, yet within me, as if I were miles high.

  I finally understood why the Duc de Guermantes, who had caused me to wonder, seeing him sitting on a chair, how he could have aged so little when he had so many more years than I had below him, had, the moment he rose and tried to stand upright, wavered on trembling legs, like those of some ancient archbishop whose metal crucifix is the only solid thing about him, and towards whom hasten a few strapping young seminarists, and could not move forward without shaking like a leaf, on the scarcely manageable summit of his eighty-three years, as if all men are perched on top of living stilts which never stop growing, sometimes becoming taller than church steeples, until eventually they make walking difficult and dangerous, and down from which, all of a sudden, they fall. (Was this the reason why the faces of men over a certain age were, even to the least aware eyes, so impossible to confuse with those of young men, and were visible only through a sort of cloudy aura of seriousness?) I began to be afraid that the stilts on which I myself was standing had already reached that height, and it did not seem to me that I would for very long have the strength to keep this past attached to me which already stretched so far down. Therefore, if enough time was left to me to complete my work, my first concern would be to describe the people in it, even at the risk of making them seem colossal and unnatural creatures, as occupying a place far larger than the very limited one reserved for them in space, a place in fact almost infinitely extended, since they are in simultaneous contact, like giants immersed in the years, with such distant periods of their lives, between which so many days have taken up their place – in Time.

  THE END

  Notes

  1. Marienbad: a popular spa town in what was then Bohemia. (This passage repeats almost verbatim the description of Legrandin, in The Fugitive pp. 629–30.)

  2. Théodora: wife of the Emperor Justinian, and the eponymous heroine of a play (by Victorien Sardou) in which Sarah Bernhardt had a great success in 1885.

  3. the Faubourg Saint-Germain… Jardin des Plantes: the former is a generic term for aristocratic society; the latter is the Paris zoo.

  4. as Balzac would say: the word Balzac uses is ‘tante’ (aunt); other female family terms were apparently also current in the 1830s and after, depending on the age of the effeminate person in question. See Balzac, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, ed. P. G. Castex (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1977), vol. 6, p. 840 and note.

  5. Fourier: Charles Fourier, utopian theorist (1772–1837), enjoyed something of a vogue at the end of the nineteenth century.

  6. Tobolsk: in Siberia, where Tsar Nicolas and his family were temporarily interned after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

  7. the Goncourts’ Journal: the Journal of the Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, novelists and men of letters, spans the period between 1851 and 1896. The later volumes (such as the one pastiched here) are by Edmond alone, Jules having died in 1870. Partly published between 1887 and 1896, it was only finally published in complete form in 1956.

  8. Blanc… Burty: Charles Blanc, art historian and art critic; Paul de Saint-Victor, man of letters and theatre critic; Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, man of letters, literary critic, ‘the father of modern criticism’; for Proust’s disagreements with his judgments see Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated by John Sturrock (Penguin Books, 1988); Philippe Burty, art critic.

  9. Maîtres d’autrefois: a volume of art criticism by Eugène Fromentin.

  10. hôtel: a large, private town house, often a mansion.

  11. La Fontaine: a fictitious edition, a reference to the eighteenth-century Fermiers Généraux edition of La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers, which the Goncourts greatly admired as an unparalleled example of book production.

  12. La Faustin: one of Edmond Goncourt’s later novels (1882).

  13. the Du Barry: mistress of Louis XV, and an important patron of the arts in the later eighteenth century. (She was guillotined in 1793.)

  14. Jean d’Heurs: a former abbey, the home of Goncourt’s cousins, who kept an excellent kitchen.

  15. Et que… dans la nuit! ‘And that all this should make a star in the heavens!’ Proust misquotes the last line of a poem by Victor Hugo, from his Contemplations: ‘Et que tout cela fasse un astre dans les cieux!’

  16. One of Sainte-Beuve’s prettiest poems: ‘La Fontaine de Boileau. Épitre à Mme la comtesse Molé’.

  17. Cot or Chaplin: Pierre-Auguste Cot and Charles Chaplin were both successful nineteenth-century portrait painters.

  18. the Directory: le Directoire, the form of revolutionary government in France between 1795 and 1799.

  19. Mme T
allien: mistress of Barras, a member of the Directory; a leader of salon society, and a fashion-setter, best known for her introduction of Greek-style dresses.