In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  “A great deal more easily from a book,” Morel assured M. de Charlus, “for it’s impossible to make head or tail of the lessons.”

  “Then why don’t you study it in my house, where you would be far more comfortable?” M. de Charlus might have answered, but took care not to do so, knowing that at once, preserving only the same essential element that the evening hours must be set apart, the imaginary algebra course would change to obligatory lessons in dancing or drawing. In this M. de Charlus could see that he was mistaken, partially at least, for Morel often spent his time at the Baron’s in solving equations. M. de Charlus did raise the objection that algebra could be of little use to a violinist. Morel replied that it was a distraction which helped him to pass the time and to combat his neurasthenia. No doubt M. de Charlus might have made inquiries, have tried to find out what actually were these mysterious and inescapable algebra lessons that were given only at night. But M. de Charlus was too caught up in the toils of his own social life to be able to unravel the tangled skein of Morel’s occupations. The visits he received or paid, the time he spent at his club, the dinner-parties, the evenings at the theatre, prevented him from thinking about the problem, or for that matter about the malevolence, at once violent and underhand, to which (it was reported) Morel had been wont to give vent and which he had at the same time sought to conceal in the successive circles, the different towns through which he had passed, and where people still spoke of him with a shudder, with bated breath, never daring to say anything about him.

  It was unfortunately one of the outbursts of this neurotic venom that I was destined to hear that day when, rising from the piano, I went down to the courtyard to meet Albertine, who had still not arrived. As I passed by Jupien’s shop, in which Morel and the girl who, I supposed, was shortly to become his wife were alone together, Morel was screaming at the top of his voice, thereby revealing an accent that I hardly recognised as his, a coarse peasant accent, suppressed as a rule, and very strange indeed. His words were no less strange, and faulty from the point of view of the French language, but his knowledge of everything was imperfect. “Will you get out of here, grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue,” he repeated to the poor girl who at first had clearly not understood what he meant, and now, trembling and indignant, stood motionless before him.7 “Didn’t I tell you to get out of here, grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue. Go and fetch your uncle till I tell him what you are, you whore.” Just at that moment the voice of Jupien, who was returning home with one of his friends, was heard in the courtyard, and as I knew that Morel was an utter coward, I decided that it was unnecessary to add my forces to those of Jupien and his friend, who in another moment would have entered the shop, and retired upstairs again to avoid Morel, who, for all his having pretended (probably in order to frighten and subjugate the girl by a piece of blackmail based perhaps on nothing at all) to be so anxious that Jupien should be fetched, made haste to depart as soon as he heard him in the courtyard. The words I have set down here are nothing, and would not explain why my heart was beating as I went upstairs. These scenes which we witness from time to time in our lives acquire an incalculable element of potency from what soldiers call, in speaking of a military offensive, the advantage of surprise, and however agreeably I might be soothed by the knowledge that Albertine, instead of remaining at the Trocadéro, was coming home to me, I still heard ringing in my ears those words ten times repeated: “Grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue,” which had so upset me.

  Gradually my agitation subsided. Albertine was on her way home. I would hear her ring the bell in a moment. I felt that my life was no longer even what it could have been, and that to have a woman in the house like this with whom quite naturally, when she returned home, I would go out, to the adornment of whose person the energy and activity of my being were to be more and more diverted, made of me as it were a bough that has blossomed, but is weighed down by the abundant fruit into which all its reserves of strength have passed. In contrast to the anxiety that I had been feeling only an hour earlier, the calm induced in me by the prospect of Albertine’s return was even vaster than that which I had felt in the morning before she left the house. Anticipating the future, of which my mistress’s docility made me to all intents and purposes master, more resistant, as though it were filled and stabilised by the imminent, importunate, inevitable, gentle presence, it was the calm (dispensing us from the obligation to seek our happiness in ourselves) that is born of family feeling and domestic bliss. Familial and domestic: such was again, no less than the feeling which had brought me such peace while I was waiting for Albertine, that which I experienced later when I drove out with her. She took off her glove for a moment, either to touch my hand, or to dazzle me by letting me see on her little finger, next to the ring that Mme Bontemps had given her, another upon which was displayed the large and liquid surface of a bright sheet of ruby.

  “What, another new ring, Albertine! Your aunt is generous!”

  “No, I didn’t get this from my aunt,” she said with a laugh. “I bought it myself, since thanks to you I can save up ever so much money. I don’t even know whose it was before. A visitor who was short of money left it with the proprietor of a hotel where I stayed at Le Mans. He didn’t know what to do with it, and would have sold it for much less than it was worth. But it was still far too dear for me. Now that, thanks to you, I’m becoming a smart lady, I wrote to ask him if he still had it. And here it is.”

  “That makes a great many rings, Albertine. Where will you put the one that I am going to give you? Anyhow, this one’s very pretty. I can’t quite make out what that is carved round the ruby, it looks like a man’s grinning face. But my eyesight isn’t good enough.”

  “Even if it was better than it is it wouldn’t get you very far. I can’t make it out either.”

  In the past it had often happened to me, on reading a book of memoirs or a novel in which a man is always going out with a woman, or having tea with her, to long to be able to do likewise. I had thought sometimes that I had succeeded in doing so, as for instance when I took Saint-Loup’s mistress out, to go to dine with her. But however much I summoned to my assistance the idea that I was at that moment actually impersonating the character I had envied in the novel, this idea assured me that I ought to find pleasure in Rachel’s company and yet afforded me none. For, whenever we attempt to imitate something that has really existed, we forget that this something was brought about not by the desire to imitate but by an unconscious force which itself is also real; but this unique impression, which all my longing to taste a delicate pleasure by going out with Rachel had failed to give me, I was now experiencing, without having looked for it in the slightest, but for quite other reasons, reasons that were sincere and profound; to take a single instance, for the reason that my jealousy prevented me from losing sight of Albertine, and, the moment I was able to leave the house, from letting her go anywhere without me. I was experiencing it only now because our knowledge is not of the external objects which we want to observe, but of involuntary sensations, because in the past, though a woman might indeed be sitting in the same carriage as myself, she was not really by my side as long as she was not continually re-created there by a need for her such as I felt for Albertine, as long as the constant caress of my gaze did not incessantly restore to her those tints that need to be perpetually refreshed, as long as my senses, appeased perhaps but still freshly remembering, were not aware of the savour and substance beneath those colours, as long as, combined with the senses and with the imagination that exalts them, jealousy was not maintaining that woman in a state of equilibrium at my side by a compensated attraction as powerful as the law of gravity.

  Our motor-car sped along the boulevards and the avenues, whose rows of houses, a pink congelation of sunshine and cold, reminded me of my visits to Mme Swann in the soft light of her chrysanthemums, before it was time to ring for the lamps. I had barely time to make out, being separated from them by the glass of the car a
s effectively as I should have been by that of my bedroom window, a young fruit-seller, or a dairymaid, standing in the doorway of her shop, illuminated by the sunshine like a heroine whom my desire was sufficient to launch upon exquisite adventures, on the threshold of a romance which I should never know. For I could not ask Albertine to let me stop, and already the young women whose features my eyes had barely distinguished, and whose fresh complexions they had barely caressed, were no longer visible in the golden haze in which they were bathed. The emotion that gripped me when I caught sight of a wine-merchant’s girl at her cash-desk or a laundress chatting in the street was the emotion that we feel on recognising a goddess. Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth. And when, in composing a mythological scene, painters have engaged to pose as Venus or Ceres young women of the people following the humblest callings, so far from committing sacrilege they have merely added or restored to them the quality, the divine attributes of which they had been stripped.

  “What did you think of the Trocadéro, you little gadabout?”

  “I’m jolly glad I came away from it to go out with you. It’s by Davioud, I believe.”

  “But how learned my little Albertine is becoming! It is indeed by Davioud, but I’d forgotten.”

  “While you’re asleep I read your books, you old lazybones. As a building it’s pretty lousy, isn’t it?”

  “I say, little one, you’re changing so fast and becoming so intelligent” (this was true, but even had it not been true I was not sorry that she should have the satisfaction, failing others, of saying to herself that at least the time she spent in my house was not being entirely wasted) “that I don’t mind telling you things which would generally be regarded as false but which correspond to a truth that I’m searching for. You know what is meant by impressionism?”

  “Of course!”

  “Very well then, this is what I mean: you remember the church at Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse which Elstir disliked because it was new? Isn’t it rather a denial of his own impressionism when he abstracts such buildings from the global impression in which they’re included, brings them out of the light in which they’re dissolved and scrutinises their intrinsic merit like an archaeologist? When he paints, haven’t a hospital, a school, a poster on a hoarding the same value as a matchless cathedral which stands by their side in a single indivisible image? Remember how the façade was baked by the sun, how that carved frieze of saints at Marcouville floated on the sea of light. What does it matter that a building is new, if it appears old, or even if it doesn’t? All the poetry that the old quarters contain has been squeezed out to the last drop, but if you look at some of the houses that have been built lately for well-to-do tradesmen in the new districts, where the stone is all freshly cut and still too white, don’t they seem to rend the torrid midday air of July, at the hour when the shopkeepers go home to lunch in the suburbs, with a cry as sharp and acidulous as the smell of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the darkened dining-room, where the prismatic glass knife-rests throw off a multicoloured light as beautiful as the windows of Chartres?”

  “How wonderful you are! If I ever do become clever, it will be entirely owing to you.”

  “Why, on a fine day, tear your eyes away from the Trocadéro, whose giraffe-neck towers remind one of the Charter-house of Pavia?”

  “It reminded me also, standing up like that on its knoll, of a Mantegna that you have, I think it’s of St Sebastian, where in the background there’s a terraced city where you’d swear you’d find the Trocadéro.”

  “There, you see! But how did you come across the Mantegna reproduction? You’re absolutely staggering.”

  We had now reached a more plebeian neighbourhood, and the installation of an ancillary Venus behind each counter made it as it were a suburban altar at the foot of which I would gladly have spent the rest of my life. As one does on the eve of a premature death, I drew up a mental list of the pleasures of which I was deprived by the fact that Albertine had put a full stop to my freedom. At Passy it was in the middle of the street itself, so crowded were the footways, that some girls, their arms encircling one another’s waists, enthralled me with their smiles. I had not time to distinguish them clearly, but it is unlikely that I was overrating their charms; in any crowd, after all, in any crowd of young people, it is not unusual to come upon the effigy of a noble profile. So that these assembled masses on public holidays are as precious to the voluptuary as is to the archaeologist the disordered jumble of a site whose excavation will bring ancient medals to light. We arrived at the Bois. I reflected that, if Albertine had not come out with me, I might at this moment, in the enclosure of the Champs-Elysées, have been hearing the Wagnerian storm set all the tackle of the orchestra groaning, draw into its frenzy, like a light spindrift, the tune of the shepherd’s pipe which I had just been playing to myself, set it flying, mould it, distort it, divide it, sweep it away in an ever-increasing whirlwind. I was determined, at any rate, that our drive should be short and that we should return home early, for, without having mentioned it to Albertine, I had decided to go that evening to the Verdurins’. They had recently sent me an invitation which I had flung into the waste-paper basket with all the rest. But I had changed my mind as far as this evening was concerned, for I meant to try to find out who Albertine might have been hoping to meet there in the afternoon. To tell the truth, I had reached that stage in my relations with Albertine when, if everything remains the same, if things go on normally, a woman no longer serves any purpose for one except as a transitional stage before another woman. She still retains a corner in one’s heart, but a very small corner; one is impatient to go out every evening in search of unknown women, especially unknown women who are known to her and can tell one about her life. Herself, after all, we have possessed, and exhausted everything that she has consented to yield to us of herself. Her life is still herself, but precisely that part of her which we do not know, the things about which we have questioned her in vain and which we shall be able to gather from fresh lips.

  If my life with Albertine was to prevent me from going to Venice, from travelling, at least I might this afternoon, had I been alone, have been making the acquaintance of the young midinettes scattered about in the sunlight of this fine Sunday, in the sum total of whose beauty I gave a considerable place to the unknown life that animated them. Are they not, those eyes one sees, shot through with a look behind which we do not know what images, memories, expectations, disdains lie concealed, and from which we cannot separate them? Will not that life, which is that of the woman passing by, impart a different value, according to what it is, to the frown on that forehead, the dilating of those nostrils? Albertine’s presence debarred me from approaching them, and perhaps thus ceasing to desire them. The man who would maintain in himself the desire to go on living and a belief in something more delicious than the things of daily life, must go out driving; for the streets, the avenues, are full of goddesses. But the goddesses do not allow us to approach them. Here and there, among the trees, at the entrance to some cafe, a waitress was watching like a nymph on the edge of a sacred grove, while beyond her three girls were seated by the sweeping arc of their bicycles that were stacked beside them, like three immortals leaning against the clouds or the fabulous coursers upon which they perform their mythological journeys. I noticed that, whenever Albertine looked for a moment at these girls with deep attentiveness, she at once turned round towards me. But I was not unduly troubled, either by the intensity of this contemplation, or by its brevity which was compensated by that intensity; indeed, as to the latter, it often happened that Albertine, whether from exhaustion, or because it was an attentive person’s way of looking at other people, would gaze thus in a sort of brown study either at my father or at Françoise; and as for the rapidity with which she turned to look at me, it might be due to the fact that Albertine, knowing my suspicions, might wish, even if they were unjustified, to avoid laying herself open to them. This attention, more
over, which would have seemed to me criminal on Albertine’s part (and quite as much so if it had been directed at young men), I myself fastened upon all the midinettes without thinking it reprehensible for a moment, almost deciding indeed that it was reprehensible of Albertine to prevent me, by her presence, from stopping the car and going to join them. We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so. And this contrast between what concerns oneself on the one hand, and on the other the person one loves, is not confined only to desire, but extends also to lying. What is more usual than a lie, whether it is a question of masking the daily weaknesses of a constitution which we wish to be thought strong, of concealing a vice, or of going off, without offending other people, to the thing that we prefer? It is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the one that is most widely used. Yet this is the thing that we actually propose to banish from the life of the person we love; we watch for it, scent it, detest it everywhere. It distresses us, it is sufficient to bring about a rupture, it seems to us to conceal the gravest misdemeanours, except when it conceals them so effectively that we do not suspect their existence. A strange state, this, in which we are so inordinately sensitive to a pathogenic agent whose universal proliferation makes it inoffensive to other people and so baneful to the wretch who finds that he is no longer immune to it!

  The life of these pretty girls (since, because of my long periods of reclusion, I so rarely met any) appeared to me, as to everyone in whom ease of fulfilment has not deadened the power of imagining, a thing as different from anything that I knew, and as desirable, as the most marvellous cities that travel holds in store for us.

  The disappointment I had felt with the women I had known, or in the cities I had visited, did not prevent me from falling for the attraction of others or from believing in their reality. Hence, just as seeing Venice—Venice, for which this spring weather filled me also with longing, and which marriage with Albertine would prevent me from knowing—seeing Venice in a diorama which Ski would perhaps have declared to be more beautiful in tone than the place itself, would to me have been no substitute for the journey to Venice the length of which, determined without my having any hand in it, seemed to me an indispensable preliminary, so in the same way, however pretty she might be, the midinette whom a procuress had artificially provided for me could not possibly be a substitute for the gangling girl who was passing at this moment under the trees, laughing with a friend. Even if the girl I found in the house of assignation were prettier than this one, it could not be the same thing, because we do not look at the eyes of a girl we do not know as we would look at little chunks of opal or agate. We know that the little ray that colours them or the diamond dust that makes them sparkle is all that we can see of a mind, a will, a memory in which is contained the family home that we do not know, the intimate friends whom we envy. The enterprise of gaining possession of all this, of something so difficult, so recalcitrant, is what gives its attraction to that gaze far more than its merely physical beauty (which may serve to explain why the same young man can awaken a whole romance in the imagination of a woman who has heard somebody say that he is the Prince of Wales but pays no further attention to him after learning that she is mistaken). To find the midinette in the house of assignation is to find her emptied of that unknown life which permeates her and which we aspire to possess with her; it is to approach a pair of eyes that have indeed become mere precious stones, a nose whose wrinkling is as devoid of meaning as that of a flower. No, concerning the unknown midinette who was passing at that moment, it seemed to me as indispensable, if I wished to continue to believe in her reality, to face up to her resistance by adapting my mode of approach, challenging a rebuff, returning to the charge, obtaining an assignation, waiting for her outside her place of work, getting to know, episode by episode, everything that constituted the girl’s life, experiencing whatever was represented for her by the pleasure I was seeking, and traversing the distance which her different habits, her special mode of life, set between me and the attention, the favour I wished to reach and win over—all this seemed to me as indispensable as making a long journey by train if I wished to believe in the reality of Pisa and not see it simply as a panoramic show in a World Fair. But these very similarities between desire and travel made me vow to myself that one day I would grasp a little more closely the nature of this force, invisible but as powerful as any belief or, in the world of physics, as atmospheric pressure, which exalted cities and women to such a height so long as I did not know them, and, slipping away from beneath them as soon as I had approached them, made them at once collapse and fall flat on to the dead level of the most commonplace reality.