Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  From his books, I imagined Bergotte to be a frail, disappointed old man who had lost several of his children and never recovered. And so I would read, I would sing his prose to myself, more dolce, more lento24 perhaps than it was written, and the simplest sentence spoke to me with a more tender intonation. Above all else I loved his philosophy, I had pledged myself to it for life. It made me impatient to reach the age when I would enter secondary school and enroll in the class called Philosophy. But I did not want to do anything else there but live according to Bergotte’s ideas exclusively, and, had I been told that the metaphysicians to whom I would be devoting myself by then would not resemble him at all, I would have felt the despair of a lover who wants his love to be lifelong and to whom one talks about the other mistresses he will have later.

  One Sunday, as I was reading in the garden, I was disturbed by Swann, who had come to see my parents.

  “What are you reading? May I look? Well, well! Bergotte! Now, who told you about his books?” I said it was Bloch.

  “Ah, yes! The boy I saw here once, who looks so much like the portrait of Mohammed II by Bellini.25 Oh, it’s quite striking! He has the same circumflex eyebrows, the same curved nose, the same jutting cheekbones. When he has a goatee, he’ll be the same person. Well, he has good taste, in any case, because Bergotte is quite enchanting.” And seeing how much I appeared to admire Bergotte, Swann, who never talked about the people he knew, out of kindness made an exception and said to me:

  “I know him very well. If you would like him to write a few words in the front of your book, I could ask him.”

  I did not dare accept his offer, but asked Swann some questions about Bergotte. “Could you tell me which is his favorite actor?”

  “Actor? I don’t know. But I do know that he doesn’t consider any man on the stage equal to La Berma; he puts her above everyone else. Have you seen her?”

  “No, monsieur, my parents don’t allow me to go to the theatre.”

  “That’s unfortunate. You ought to ask them. La Berma in Phèdre, in Le Cid,26 is only an actress, you might say, but you know, I’m not much of a believer in the ‘hierarchy!’ of the arts” (and I noticed, as had often struck me in his conversations with my grandmother’s sisters, that when he talked about serious things, when he used an expression that seemed to imply an opinion about an important subject, he took care to isolate it in a tone of voice that was particularly mechanical and ironic, as though he had put it between quotation marks, seeming not to want to take responsibility for it, as though saying “hierarchy, you know, as it is called by silly people?” But then if it was so silly, why did he say hierarchy?). A moment later, he added: “It will give you as noble a vision as any masterpiece, I don’t know, really . . . as”—and he began to laugh—“the Queens of Chartres!”27 Until then his horror of ever expressing a serious opinion had seemed to me a thing that must be elegant and Parisian and that was the opposite of the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother’s sisters; and I also suspected that it was a form of wit in the social circles in which Swann moved, where, reacting against the lyricism of earlier generations, they went to an extreme in rehabilitating those small, precise facts formerly reputed to be vulgar, and proscribed “fine phrases.” But now I found something shocking in this attitude of Swann’s toward things. It appeared that he dared not have an opinion and was at his ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information. But if that was the case, he did not realize that to postulate that the accuracy of these details was important was to profess an opinion. I thought again of that dinner at which I was so sad because Mama would not be coming up to my room and at which he had said that the balls given by the Princesse de Léon were of no importance whatsoever. But it was to just that sort of pleasure that he devoted his life. I found all this contradictory. For what other lifetime was he reserving the moment when he would at last say seriously what he thought of things, formulate opinions that he did not have to put between quotation marks, and no longer indulge with punctilious politeness in occupations which he declared at the same time to be ridiculous? I also noticed in the way Swann talked to me about Bergotte something that was, on the other hand, not peculiar to him, but shared at the time by all the writer’s admirers, by my mother’s friend, by Dr. du Boulbon. Like Swann, they said about Bergotte: “He’s quite enchanting, so individual, he has his own way of saying things which is a little overly elaborate, but so pleasing. You don’t need to see the signature, you know right away that it’s by him.” But none of them would have gone so far as to say: “He’s a great writer, he has a great talent.” They did not even say he had talent. They did not say it because they did not know it. We are very slow to recognize in the particular features of a new writer the model that is labeled “great talent” in our museum of general ideas. Precisely because these features are new, we do not think they fully resemble what we call talent. Instead, we talk about originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realize that all of this is, in fact, talent.

  “Are there any books by Bergotte in which he talks about La Berma?” I asked M. Swann.

  “I think so, in his slim little volume on Racine, but it must be out of print. There may have been a reissue, though. I’ll find out. I can also ask Bergotte anything you like; there isn’t a week in the whole year when he doesn’t come to dinner at our house. He’s my daughter’s greatest friend. They go off together visiting old towns, cathedrals, castles.”

  Since I had no notion of social hierarchy, for a long time the fact that my father found it impossible for us to associate with Mme. and Mlle. Swann had had the effect above all, by making me imagine a great distance between them and us, of giving them prestige in my eyes. I was sorry my mother did not dye her hair and redden her lips as I had heard our neighbor Mme. Sazerat say that Mme. Swann did in order to please, not her husband, but M. de Charlus, and I thought we must be an object of scorn to her, which distressed me most of all because of Mlle. Swann, who, from what I had been told, was such a pretty little girl and about whom I often dreamed, giving her each time the same arbitrary and charming face. But when I learned that day that Mlle. Swann was a creature of so rare a condition, bathing as though in her natural element in the midst of such privileges, that when she asked her parents if anyone was coming to dinner, she would be answered by those syllables filled with light, by the name of that golden dinner guest who was for her only an old friend of the family: Bergotte; that for her the intimate talk at the table, the equivalent for me of my great-aunt’s conversation, would be Bergotte’s words on all the subjects he had not been able to broach in his books, and on which I would have liked to hear him pronounce his oracles; and that, lastly, when she went to visit other towns, he would walk along next to her, unknown and glorious, like the Gods who descended among mortals; then I was conscious both of the worth of a creature like Mlle. Swann and also of how crude and ignorant I would appear to her, and I felt so keenly the sweetness and the impossibility of my being her friend that I was filled with both desire and despair. Most often, now, when I thought of her, I would see her in front of a cathedral porch, explaining to me what the statues signified and, with a smile that said good things about me, introducing me as her friend to Bergotte. And always the charm of all those ideas awakened in me by the cathedrals, the charm of the hills of Île-de-France and the plains of Normandy, cast its glimmers over the picture I was forming of Mlle. Swann: this was what it meant to be on the point of falling in love with her. Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest. Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face; they think that under the breastplate they are kissing a different heart, adventurous and sweet; and a yo
ung sovereign, a crown prince, may make the most flattering conquests in the foreign countries he visits without needing the regular profile that would perhaps be indispensable to a stockbroker.

  While I read in the garden, something my great-aunt would not have understood my doing except on a Sunday, a day when it is forbidden to occupy oneself with anything serious and when she did not sew (on a weekday, she would have said to me, “What? Still amusing yourself with a book? This isn’t Sunday, you know,” endowing the word amusement with the meaning of childishness and waste of time), my aunt Léonie would gossip with Françoise, waiting until it was time for Eulalie. She would announce that she had just seen Mme. Goupil go by “without an umbrella, in that silk dress she had made for her at Châteaudun. If she has far to go before Vespers, she could very well get it properly drenched.”

  “Maybe, maybe” (meaning maybe not), said Françoise so as not to rule out absolutely the possibility of a more favorable alternative.

  “Oh dear,” said my aunt, striking her forehead, “that reminds me I never found out if she arrived at church after the Elevation. I will have to remember to ask Eulalie . . . Françoise, just look at that black cloud behind the steeple, and that pitiful sunlight on the slates. It’s sure to rain before the day is done. It couldn’t possibly stay like this, it was too hot. And the sooner the better, because until the storm breaks, my Vichy water won’t go down,” added my aunt, in whose mind her desire to hasten the descent of her Vichy water was infinitely more important than her fear of seeing Mme. Goupil ruin her dress.

  “Maybe, maybe.”

  “And the fact is, when it rains on the square there isn’t much shelter. What, three o’clock?” my aunt cried out suddenly, turning pale. “Why, my goodness, Vespers has begun and I’ve forgotten my pepsin! Now I know why my Vichy water was lying on my stomach.”

  And swooping down on a missal bound in violet velvet, with gilt clasps, from which, in her haste, she let escape a few of those pictures edged with a band of yellowing paper lace that mark the pages of the feast days, my aunt, while swallowing her drops, began reading the sacred texts as fast as she could, her comprehension of them slightly obscured by her uncertainty as to whether the pepsin, taken so long after the Vichy water, would still be able to catch up with it and make it go down. “Three o’clock! It’s unbelievable how the time passes!”

  A little tap against the windowpane, as though something had struck it, followed by a copious light spill, as of grains of sand dropping from a window above, then the spill extending, becoming regular, finding a rhythm, turning fluid, resonant, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

  “Well, now, Françoise! What did I tell you? How it’s coming down! But I think I heard the bell at the garden gate: go and see who could be outside in such weather.”

  Françoise returned:

  “It was Mme. Amédée” (my grandmother). “She said she was going for a little walk. And yet it’s raining hard.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” said my aunt, lifting her eyes to the heavens. “I’ve always said that her way of thinking is different from everyone else’s. I’d rather it be her than me outdoors just now.”

  “Mme. Amédée is always as different as she can be from everyone else,” said Françoise gently, refraining until she should be alone with the other servants from saying that she believed my grandmother was a little “touched.”

  “Now, see? The Benediction is over! Eulalie won’t be coming,” sighed my aunt; “the weather must have frightened her away.”

  “But it’s not five o’clock, Madame Octave, it’s only half-past four.”

  “Only half-past four? And I had to raise the little curtains to get a wretched glimmer of daylight. At half-past four! One week before the Rogations! Oh, my poor Françoise, the Good Lord must be sorely vexed with us. The world is going too far these days! As my poor Octave used to say, we have forgotten the Good Lord too often and he’s taking his revenge.”

  A bright flush enlivened my aunt’s cheeks; it was Eulalie. Unfortunately, scarcely had she been shown in before Françoise returned and, with a smile that was meant to indicate her participation in the joy she was sure her words would give my aunt, articulating the syllables to show that, despite her use of the indirect style, she was reporting, good servant that she was, the very words the visitor had condescended to use:

  “M. le Curé would be delighted, enchanted, if Mme. Octave is not resting and could see him. M. le Curé does not wish to disturb. M. le Curé is downstairs; I told him to go into the parlor.”

  In fact, the curé’s visits did not give my aunt as much pleasure as Françoise supposed, and the air of jubilation with which Françoise thought she must illuminate her face each time she had to announce him did not entirely correspond to the invalid’s feelings. The curé (an excellent man with whom I am sorry I did not have more conversations, for if he understood nothing about the arts, he did know many etymologies), being in the habit of enlightening distinguished visitors with information about the church (he even intended to write a book about the parish of Combray), fatigued her with endless explanations that were in fact always the same. But when his visit came at the very same time as Eulalie’s, it became frankly unpleasant for my aunt. She would have preferred to make the most of Eulalie and not have all her company at once. But she did not dare decline to see the curé and only made a sign to Eulalie not to leave at the same time, so that she could keep her there by herself for a little while after he was gone.

  “Monsieur le Curé, what’s this they’ve been telling me, that a painter has set up his easel in your church and is copying a window? I must say, old as I am, I’ve never in my life heard of such a thing! What is the world coming to? And the ugliest part of the church, too!”