And, finally, this new order designed by the invisible seamstress showed me that if we may wish that the actions of a person who has hurt us up to now were not sincere, they are followed by a clarity against which our wishes are powerless and to which, rather than to them, we must address ourselves in asking what that person’s actions will be tomorrow.
These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. “It’s true,” my love answered, “there’s nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won’t change.” And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one.
I always had within reach of my hand a map of Paris which, because one could distinguish on it the street where M. and Mme. Swann lived, seemed to me to contain a treasure. And for pleasure, out of a sort of chivalrous loyalty also, apropos of anything at all, I would say the name of that street, until my father would ask, not being, as were my mother and grandmother, fully informed about my love:
“Now why do you talk about that street all the time, there’s nothing extraordinary about it, it’s a very pleasant street to live on because it’s two steps from the Bois, but there are ten others quite like it.”
I contrived at every turn to make my parents say the name Swann; of course I repeated it to myself in my own mind incessantly; but I also needed to hear the delicious sound of it and to have someone else play me this music the silent reading of which was not enough. The name Swann, which I had known for such a long time, was for me also, now, as happens for certain aphasics with the most everyday words, a new name. It was always present in my mind and yet my mind could not grow accustomed to it. I took it apart, I spelled it, its orthography was a surprise to me. And at the same time that it had ceased to be familiar, it had ceased to appear innocent. The joy I felt at hearing it I believed was so guilty that it seemed to me others guessed my thoughts and changed the conversation if I tried to lead it there. I resorted to subjects that still touched upon Gilberte, I recited the same words endlessly, and although I knew they were only words—words spoken far away from her, which she could not hear, words without potency that repeated what was, but could not modify it—yet it seemed to me that by dint of thus feeling, handling everything that touched Gilberte I would perhaps make something happy emerge from it. I told my parents again that Gilberte liked her governess very much, as if that proposition enunciated for the hundredth time were at last going to result in the sudden entrance of Gilberte, coming to live with us forever. I resumed my praise of the old lady who read Les Débats (I had hinted to my parents that she was an ambassadress or perhaps a royal highness) and I continued to celebrate her beauty, her magnificence, her nobility, until the day I said that from what I had heard Gilberte call her, her name must be Mme. Blatin.
“Oh, now I know who she is!” exclaimed my mother while I felt myself blushing from shame. “On guard! On guard! as your poor grandfather would have said. So she’s the one you find so beautiful! Why, she’s horrible and always has been. She’s the widow of an usher. You don’t remember when you were little the lengths I went to to avoid her at the gymnastics class where, though she didn’t know me, she would come up to me and try to talk with the excuse of wanting to tell me you were ‘too nice looking for a boy.’ She always had a mania for getting to know people and she must indeed be rather mad as I always thought, if she really knows Mme. Swann. For though her background is quite common, at least there was never anything said against her so far as I know. But she always had to cultivate a new acquaintance. She’s horrible, frightfully vulgar, and a troublemaker into the bargain.”
As for Swann, in order to try to resemble him, I would spend all my time at the table pulling on my nose and rubbing my eyes. My father would say: “The child has no sense, he’ll make himself quite hideous.” I would especially have liked to be as bald as Swann. He seemed to me a person so extraordinary that I found it amazing that people I knew actually knew him too and that the chance events of an ordinary day might bring one face-to-face with him. And one time, my mother, in the course of telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, about the errands she had run that afternoon, merely by saying: “Speaking of which, guess who I ran into in Trois Quartiers,29 at the umbrella counter: Swann,” caused the center of her story, so very dry for me, to blossom with a mysterious flower. What a delectable melancholy pleasure, to learn that that very afternoon, profiling his supernatural form against the crowd, Swann had gone to buy an umbrella! Among the great and tiny events, equally unimportant, this one alone awoke in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was perpetually stirred. My father said I was not interested in anything because I did not listen when they talked about the political consequences that might follow from the visit of King Theodosius, at this moment the guest of France and, it was claimed, its ally. But how keenly, on the other hand, I wanted to know if Swann was wearing his traveling cape!
“Did you say hello to each other?” I asked.
“Why, naturally,” answered my mother, who always seemed to be afraid that, were she to admit there was any coolness between them and Swann, people would have tried to bring about a reconciliation closer than she wished, because of Mme. Swann, whom she did not want to know. “It was he who came up and spoke to me, I didn’t see him.”
“Then you haven’t quarreled?”
“Quarreled? Now what makes you think we might have quarreled?” she answered briskly, as if I had assaulted the fiction of her good relations with Swann and tried to effect a “rapprochement.”
“He might be cross with you for not inviting him anymore.”
“One isn’t obliged to invite everyone; does he invite me? I don’t know his wife.”
“But at Combray he used to come.”
“Well, yes! He came at Combray, and now in Paris he has other things to do and so have I. But I promise you we didn’t look in the least like two people who had quarreled. We stood there together for a moment because they hadn’t yet brought him his parcel. He asked after you, he told me you played with his daughter,” added my mother, stunning me with the prodigious fact that I existed in Swann’s mind, even more, that I existed there in so complete a manner that, when I trembled with love there before him in the Champs-Élysées, he knew my name, who my mother was, and could amalgamate around my qualifications as playmate of his daughter certain facts about my grandparents, their family, the place where we lived, certain details of our past life which were perhaps unknown even to me. But my mother did not seem to have found any particular charm in that counter at Trois Quartiers where she had represented for Swann, at the moment when he saw her, a definite person with whom he had memories in common that had inspired the impulse to approach her, the gesture of greeting her.
Nor did she or my father either seem to find, in talking about Swann’s grandparents, about the title of honorary stockbroker, a pleasure that surpassed all others. My imagination had singled out and sanctified one particular family from within the social Paris just as it had from within the Paris of stone one particular house whose carriage entrance it had sculpted and whose windows it had made precious. But I was the only one who could see these ornaments. In the same way that my father and mother regarded the house that Swann lived in as similar to the other houses built at the same time in the neighborhood of the Bois, so Swann’s family seemed to them of the same sort as many other families of stockbrokers. They judged it more favorably or less depending on the degree to which it shared in merits common to the rest of the universe and did not se
e in it anything unique. On the contrary, what they appreciated in it they encountered to an equal, or higher, degree elsewhere. And so, after having agreed that the house was well situated, they would talk about another that was better situated, but that had nothing to do with Gilberte, or about financiers a cut above her grandfather; and if they had seemed for a moment to be of the same opinion as me, it was because of a misunderstanding that would soon be dispelled. For, in order to perceive in everything that surrounded Gilberte an indefinable quality analogous in the world of emotions to what infrared may be in the world of colors, my parents would have needed that supplementary and ephemeral sense with which I had been endowed by love.
On the days when Gilberte had let me know she would not be coming to the Champs-Élysées, I would try to go for a walk that brought me a little closer to her. Sometimes I would lead Françoise on a pilgrimage before the house where the Swanns lived. I would make her repeat endlessly what, through the governess, she had learned relating to Mme. Swann. “It seems she puts a good deal of trust in her medals. You won’t find her going off on a trip if she’s heard an owl hooting, or something ticking like a clock inside the wall, or if she’s seen a cat at midnight, or if the wood furniture creaks. Oh, yes! She’s a person of great faith!” I was so in love with Gilberte that if, along the way, I saw their old butler walking a dog, my emotion would force me to stop, I would stare at his white whiskers with eyes full of passion. Françoise would say:
“What’s wrong with you?”
Then we would continue on our way until we reached their carriage entrance, where a concierge different from any other concierge, and steeped even to the braid of his livery in the same painful charm I had felt in the name Gilberte, seemed to know that I was one of those people whom a primordial unworthiness would prohibit forever from penetrating into the mysterious life that he was charged with guarding and on which the windows of the entresol seemed conscious of being closed, resembling far less, between the stately fall of their muslin curtains, any other windows than they did Gilberte’s own eyes. At other times, we would go down the boulevards and I would take up a position at the corner of the rue Duphot; I had been told that here one could often see Swann going past on his way to the dentist; and my imagination so differentiated Gilberte’s father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of the real world introduced into it such magic, that, even before I reached the Madeleine, I was moved at the thought of approaching a street where I might suddenly encounter that supernatural apparition.
But most often—when I was not going to see Gilberte—since I had learned that Mme. Swann went for a walk almost every day in the allée des Acacias, around the Grand Lac, and in the allée de la Reine-Marguerite,30 I would steer Françoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. For me it was like those zoological gardens in which one sees diverse flora and contrasting landscapes brought together in one place; where, after a hill, one finds a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a ditch, a hill, a marsh, but knows they are there only to provide the frolicking of the hippopotamus, zebras, crocodiles, albino rabbits, bears, and heron with an appropriate environment or a picturesque setting; the Bois too, equally complex, bringing together as it does diverse enclosed little worlds—first a farm planted with red trees, American oaks, like an agricultural estate in Virginia, then a stand of firs at the edge of the lake, or a forest from which would rise suddenly in her supple fur, with the lovely eyes of an animal, some woman walking quickly—it was the Garden of Woman; and—like the Alley of the Myrtles in The Aeneid31—planted for their sake with trees of a single species, the allée des Acacias was a favorite spot of the most famous Beauties. Just as, from a long way off, the top of the rock from which it will dive into the water thrills the children who know they are about to see the sea lion, so, well before reaching the allée des Acacias, first their fragrance, which, radiating all around, allowed one to sense from a distance the approach and the singularity of a powerful, soft, vegetative entity, then, when I drew near, the glimpsed crest of their greenery, light and childishly graceful, with its easy elegance, its coquettish cut, its thin material, on which hundreds of flowers had swooped down like vibratile winged colonies of precious parasites, and, finally, even their name, feminine, indolent, and sweet—all of this made my heart pound, but with a worldly desire, like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of the beautiful guests whom the usher announces as they enter the ballroom. I had been told that in the avenue I would see certain fashionable women who, even though they were not all married, were habitually mentioned along with Mme. Swann, but most often by their professional name; their new name, when they had one, was only a sort of incognito which those who wanted to talk about them took care to remove in order to make themselves understood. Thinking that Beauty—in the order of feminine elegance—was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which these women had been initiated, and that they had the power to bring it into being, I accepted in advance as a revelation the vision of their clothes, their carriages and horses, a thousand details deep within which I placed my belief as in an interior soul which gave the cohesiveness of a masterpiece to that ephemeral and shifting tableau. But it was Mme. Swann whom I wanted to see, and I waited for her to pass, as moved as if she were Gilberte, whose parents, steeped like all that surrounded her in her charm, excited in me as much love as she did, indeed a disturbance that was even more painful (because their point of contact with her was that domestic part of her life which was forbidden to me), and lastly (because I soon knew, as will be seen, that they did not like my playing with her) that feeling of veneration which we always have for those who wield unrestrained power to do us harm.
I assigned the first place to simplicity, in the order of aesthetic merits and social grandeur, when I saw Mme. Swann on foot, wearing a cloth polonaise, on her head a little toque trimmed with a pheasant wing, a bouquet of violets at her bodice, hurrying down the allée des Acacias as if it were merely the shortest way to return home and answering with a wink the gentlemen in carriages who, recognizing her figure from far away, bowed to her and said to themselves that no one was as smart. But in place of simplicity, it was ostentation that I put on the highest rank, if, after I had forced Françoise, who was exhausted and said her legs were “folding up,” to walk back and forth for an hour, at last I would see, emerging from the avenue that comes from the Porte Dauphine—the picture for me of royal dignity, of a sovereign’s arrival, an impression such as no real queen has since been able to give me, because my notion of their power was less vague and more founded upon experience—borne along by two flying fiery horses as slender and smoothly turned as in the drawings of Constantin Guys,32 carrying an enormous coachman settled on his seat and wrapped in furs like a Cossack, next to a little groom who recalled the “tiger” of “the late Baudenord”33 I would see—or rather I would feel it imprint its form on my heart with a neat and exhausting wound—a matchless victoria, in its design a little high and with allusions to the old forms showing through its “dernier cri” opulence, in the depths of which Mme. Swann lay back carelessly, her hair now blond with a single gray lock and girded with a thin band of flowers, most often violets, from which descended long veils, in her hand a mauve parasol, on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I saw only the beneficence of a monarch and in which there was, more than anything else, a cocotte’s provocativeness, and which she inclined gently on the people who bowed to her. That smile in reality said to some of them: “I remember it very well—it was exquisite!”; to others: “How I would have loved to! What bad luck!”; to others: “Why yes, if you like! I’ll stay in line for a moment longer and cut out as soon as I can.” When strangers passed, she would still allow an idle smile to linger around her lips, as though it were turned toward the expectation or the memory of a friend, which made people say: “How beautiful she is!” And for certain men only she had a smile that was sour, stiff, reticent, and cold, and meant: “Yes, you beast, I know you have the tongue of a viper, t
hat you can’t keep from talking! But do I care about you? Do I?” Coquelin34 went past holding forth among a group of attentive friends, and with his hand gave a broad theatrical hello to the people in the carriages. But I was thinking only about Mme. Swann and I pretended I had not seen her yet, for I knew that once she drew level with the Tir aux Pigeons35 she would tell her coachman to cut out of the line and stop so that she could come back down the avenue on foot. And on the days when I felt I had the courage to pass close to her, I would drag Françoise in that direction. At a certain moment, in fact, in the footpath, walking toward us, I would see Mme. Swann letting the long train of her mauve dress spread out behind her, clothed, as the common people imagine queens, in fabrics and rich finery that other women did not wear, lowering her eyes now and then to the handle of her parasol, paying little attention to the people passing, as if her great business and her goal were to take some exercise, without thinking that she was being observed and that all heads were turned toward her. But now and then when she had looked back to call her greyhound, she would imperceptibly cast a circular gaze around her.
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