Pleasures and Days
Pleasures and Days
Marcel Proust
Translated by Andrew Brown
Foreword by A.N. Wilson
ALMA CLASSICS
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Pleasures and Days first published in French in 1896
This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2004
This edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2013
Translation and Introduction © Andrew Brown
Foreword © A.N. Wilson
Notes © Alma Classics, 2013
Cover image © Tess Fine
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn: 978-1-84749-317-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Pleasures and Days
Preface
To My Friend Willie Heath
The Death of Baldassare Silvande
Violante, Or High Society
Fragments From Italian Comedy
Bouvard and Pécuchet on Society and Music
Mme de Breyves’s Melancholy Summer Vacation
Portraits of Painters and Musicians*
The Confession of a Young Woman
A Dinner in Town
Nostalgia – Daydreams under Changing Skies
The End of Jealousy
Note on the Text
Notes
Alma Classics
Foreword
Marcel Proust had completed the stories, poems and fragments in this volume before he was twenty-two years old. He wrote them in the intervals of being a bored and unwilling law student who would rather read Ruskin than jurisprudence, and who, rather than revise for exams, would prefer to cultivate artists and grandes dames. Indifferent to his legal studies, he pursued his social life with the dedication of an academic anthropologist or natural historian. Just as the youthful Darwin had painstakingly observed the minute gradations of finches’ beaks in the Galápagos Islands – an observation which would eventually turn into the most earth-changing scientific theory ever propounded – so the young Proust, noting how a certain social species might turn up now in a great salon, now in an artist’s studio, and again in a low dive – had begun the process of accumulating knowledge which would produce the greatest masterpiece of French fiction: In Search of Lost Time.
What will immediately strike any reader of this volume of short stories is how surely, and from the first, Proust knew his theme. The death of the eponymous hero in the first story is so – what other word can one use? – Proustian. As the young nobleman lies back on the pillows, there comes to him on the evening air the sound of a church bell from a distant village, and it brings to him the involuntary recollection of those times, during childhood, when his mother came to kiss him goodnight, slipping into his bedroom before she herself retired to sleep, and how, knowing that he was restless, she would warm his feet with her hands. If not actually the experience of the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, such a memory, at such a moment, reverberates with Proustian association. So, also, do at least two other of the story’s leitmotivs, the Platonic adoration felt by the Viscount for the Duchess, which seems to foreshadow young Marcel’s love for the Duchesse de Guermantes; and – much more vividly – the theme of the foreseen death, intruding itself into the trivial calendars of human appointments and diversions.
The little boy, Alexis, in this early story, is given a horse each year for his birthday. If his uncle is truly mortally ill, will he live long enough to give the youth the promised carriage to go with these horses on his sixteenth birthday? A signal comes, on Alexis’s fourteenth birthday, that the uncle’s death is near, since he offers him a carriage as well as a second horse. The boy knows that the man is thinking, “as otherwise you’d risk never having the carriage at all”.
The question of whether the Duchess of Bohemia will or will not attend a ball after his death, or whether she will stay away as a mark of mourning and respect, looms larger in the young Viscount’s mind than mortality itself. All this tragicomedy is of a piece with the man who would one day write that scene about the Duchesse de Guermantes’s red shoes, which is not merely one of the high points of the novel, but also, arguably, one of the greatest scenes ever devised by any writer. In the juvenile scene, the callousness of the Duchesse is of a Firbankian brittleness: “nothing would ever console me, in all eternity”, not because of her admirer’s death, but “if I didn’t go to that ball”.
One of the recurrent themes in this volume is Proust’s empathy with Van Dyck, “prince of tranquil gestures”, about whom he wrote a poem. “You triumph […] / In all the lovely things that will soon die”. He sees in the seventeenth-century Court painter the model of the type of artist he will himself become. Just as Van Dyck immortalized the generation who were defeated in the English Civil War, so Proust’s Long Gallery of canvas holds in immortal imagination the transitory lives of those whose way of life – and, in many cases, actual existence – was eliminated by the First World War.
Perhaps the Van Dyck poem reflects elements of Proust’s friendship with Jacques-Émile Blanche, then a young painter and a keen frequenter, like Proust himself, of the salons of the rich and fashionable. Blanche was a much less skilful painter than Proust was a writer, but to visit the gallery at Rouen and see his paintings of the friends he had in common with the novelist is to be visited by a frisson of recognition. If not our old friends in their rounded perfection, here are recognizable sketches for portraits which would on the canvases of the master Proust become Robert de Saint-Loup and Mme Verdurin and the Baron de Charlus.
As in the Search, there are recurring characters and themes throughout the volume. Presumably the callous Duchess so beloved of the Viscount in the first story is the same as the country bumpkin Violante in the second. She meets a young Englishman on the hunting field and he despises her simplicity. She discovers how ridiculously easy it is to penetrate “society” and how empty are the rewards of social success. There both is and isn’t irony in Proust’s use, as chapter headings, of epigrams from Thomas à Kempis. If he had followed the counsels of The Imitation of Christ – “Be afraid of contact with young or worldly persons. Never have any desire to appear before the great” – we should have had no Search. Nevertheless, when he reaches the end of his chronicle, Marcel, like a ideal monk, is confined to his cell, and contemplates the lives of the faubourgs with the purest contemptus mundi.
Purest? No. For the abiding fascination of snobbery – and Proust is Grand High Priest of snobs – is that snobs are not necessarily more trivial than the unworldly. “Your soul is indeed, in Tolstoy’s turn of phrase, a deep dark forest. But the trees in it are of a particular species – they are genealogical trees. People say you’re a vain woman? But for you the universe is not empty, but full of armorial bearings.” As Proust observes in his notes “To a Snobbish Woman”, the dedicated social climber is steeped in history. The new friends acquired by the snob come accompanied by a great gallery of their a
ncestors’ portraiture. In mastering the names of all the aristocrats sitting at her table, the hostess has also learnt the names of the chivalry of France, assembled on medieval battlefields. This perception will mature into one of the central reveries of Proust’s masterpiece as he gazes at the Guermantes heraldic stained glass in the Combray parish church, watching the sun stream through it onto the wedding guests and illuminate the pimple on the face of his beloved Duchesse.
Proust, as well as being a great storyteller, is also a sage. There are more wise maxims in Proust’s pages than in La Rochefoucauld, and as many wise pensées as in Pascal. It is remarkable that even in these early stories he had developed this faculty. “The libertine’s desire to take a virgin is still a form of the eternal homage paid by love to innocence.” Or, “Women incarnate beauty without understanding it.” (Discuss!) Or, “The abuse of alcohol and women is the very condition of their inspiration, if not of their genius.”
His critical faculties are as sharp in youth as in maturity too: witness the witty exchanges about music in ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet on Society and Music’. When one speaker points out that Saint-Saëns lacks content and Massenet form, the tennis ball is very firmly whacked back over the net: “That’s the reason why the one educates us and the other delights us, but without elevating us.”
Proust dedicated his little book to Willie Heath, a young English dandy whom he encountered in the Bois de Boulogne in the spring of 1893 and who died some months later. In what amounts to an artistic manifesto, Proust dismissed the fragments in his book as the empty froth on a life which had been agitated but which was now settled down (aged twenty-four!). He promises to wait until the day when the surface of life’s water is so calm and limpid that the muses themselves can admire their reflections, and see their own smiles and dances. This promise, broadly speaking, was kept.
– A.N. Wilson
Introduction
The best commentary on Proust’s first published work, Pleasures and Days, can be found in his mature masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, more precisely at the end of The Guermantes Way. The last ten or so pages of this volume (like many of Proust’s cadences) is a set piece of great formal sophistication and thematic richness. A prolonged moment of social comedy is interwoven with the darker theme of illness and death. The narrator has come to see M. and Mme de Guermantes, partly in order to find out whether he really has been invited to a reception at the home of the Princesse de Guermantes; and while he waits in a staircase for them to return home from Cannes, he contemplates the lovely roofscape of Paris – the chimneys, all pink and red, make him think of tulips, and the windows across the courtyard frame their occupants like Dutch paintings. While waiting, he also makes an observation of crucial importance for his understanding of life, the revelation of which to the reader he leaves until later. When the Duc de Guermantes arrives, he is (as so often) bluffly jovial but at the same time edgy, partly because he knows that his cousin is dying – and if news of his death arrives, the Duc will be forced to relinquish the various pleasures that await him later the same day, including a fancy-dress ball where he will appear as Louis XI, and a rendezvous with his mistress. His wife the Duchesse is getting dressed to go out, and while he waits, he converses with the narrator: their discussion reveals the prejudices and obsessions of the aristocratic caste that has all the “titles” but none of the real power enjoyed by its ancestors. Charles Swann arrives; an elegant member of the upper bourgeoisie, and something of a mentor to the narrator, he has managed by his intelligence, charm, sensitivity and artistic connoisseurship to gain access to the ranks of the aristocracy in spite of the fact that he is Jewish (we are in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair and the text refers several times to the way this has split French society). The narrator is shocked to see how ill Swann looks. Eventually, the Duchesse appears in an elegant red dress for the evening’s outing; Swann and the narrator share their admiration for her beauty. After some further chit-chat about artistic matters, as the Duc is starting to show his impatience to head off to dinner, the Duchesse tells Swann of a planned spring holiday in Italy and Sicily: how wonderful it would be if he could accompany them as an artistic guide! Swann demurs, the Duchesse insists; eventually, with the greatest reluctance, Swann tells the Duchesse that the reason he can’t go with them is that he will by then be dead – the doctors have told him he has only a few months to live, and may indeed die at any minute. The Duchesse gazes at him with her melancholy blue eyes. Just as the Duc shrugs off the imminent demise of his cousin, lest it interrupt his pleasures, so the Duchesse, with slightly more compunction, simply doesn’t know how to cope with the stark alternative of showing pity for the dying Swann or being late for dinner. She hesitates. The Duc gets irritated and claims that their hostess, Mme de Sainte-Euverte, hates people to be late: the Duchesse, continuing to dither, starts to climb into the waiting carriage, whereupon the Duc notices that she is still wearing her black shoes, which clash with that gorgeous red dress. Completely ignoring what he has just said about the need for punctuality, he insists that she go upstairs and fetch her red shoes – what does it matter if they are late! And then, sensing that his fussing over the shoes might seem rather ill judged, he hurries Swann and the narrator away, again resorting to bland denial of the inconvenient facts of impending mortality as he cheerfully tells Swann not to listen to the doctors, who are donkeys. “You’re as strong as the Pont-Neuf! You’ll bury the lot of us!”
All the preoccupations of this passage can be traced back to Pleasures and Days. The narrator’s musings over the roofs of Paris, his love of floral metaphor, his interest in reading art (especially Dutch art) into life (hence the “picturesque” qualities of his description), the tendency to a kind of prose poetry, are already evident in the Pleasures, especially in the sequence called ‘Nostalgia’. The discovery he makes while waiting in the staircase involves – as we will read at the beginning of the next volume, Sodom and Gomorrah – the revelation of the whole underworld of homosexuality that is to play an increasingly important part in the Search; and while the theme of sexual inversion is only briefly alluded to in Pleasures and Days (the apparently lesbian advance in ‘Violante’, for instance), sexuality itself – insistent, hothoused, nervy, obsessive – is everywhere: in ‘The Confession of a Young Woman’, the heroine’s wayward desires lead to her mother’s death and her own protracted suicide (the mise-en-scène is quite clumsy and melodramatic, but Proust is already struggling to express an idea onto which the Search would train its spotlights: that the peculiar guilt attendant on sexuality is linked, in his view, with the profanation of the mother). Throughout Pleasures and Days there is no love that is not pathological, not least because of the paranoid intensity of the characters’ jealousy. It is not so much that people are jealous because they are in love: they are in love because they are jealous (they only realize that they are in love, really and truly and catastrophically, when jealousy’s little green claws start to dig into their hearts) – love is an epiphenomenon of a deeper possessiveness: this is the painful lesson learnt by Baldassare Silvande, and Françoise de Breyves, and Honoré in ‘The End of Jealousy’. The passage I have described from The Guermantes Way is not specifically concerned with this most Proustian of emotions, but it does hold up to unremitting examination what might be called social jealousy – otherwise known as snobbery. The Duc de Guermantes is obsessed by matters of aristocratic precedence that can have only the most trivial impact in the “real” world of modernity, but there is hardly a character in Proust who is not touched by this vice, and Pleasures and Days is already mercilessly analysing the hold of snobbery over the lives of its characters, most notably in the vignettes (often inspired by those observers of life at the Court of Louis XIV, La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld) of ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’. It is true that the Pleasures often focus on these themes (lyrical evocation, sexuality, jealousy, snobbery) one at a time, whereas the Search shows how interrelated they are. But already some
of the earlier texts display the dynamic interplay between and within them, just as they demonstrate a dialectical appreciation of the way that characters often have the strengths of their weaknesses, and learn what virtues they may have through vice. Thus, while jealousy in some ways binds us to a life of suffering, the lessons it teaches may begin to offer us secret (and painfully acquired) strategies of detachment. Conversely, while many of the epigrams to the Pleasures, from The Imitation of Christ and other edifying texts, admonish us to seek precisely this detachment, to flee world, flesh and devil, the texts themselves suggest again that it may be attachment taken to its paroxysm that can best start to emancipate us from those very same temptations. There can be no songs of authentic innocence without experience. None of the characters in the Pleasures succeed in heeding the voice of conscience, the summons to an authentic solitude – all long country walks and fireside meditations; each of them succumb to “mondanité”, the worldliness of social existence. But through this worldliness (the gossip, the malice, the jaded cynicism) they learn things that no amount of Emersonian self-reliance would have taught them. Proust’s early text proclaims a detachment and autonomy that have to be learnt the hard way, by living life to the full, undergoing experiences in the world that might seem to be pleasurable but have their own strange ascesis (from the deserts of love to the ordinary rituals of everyday social life: at the end of the extract from the Search I mentioned above, the Duchesse reflects that sometimes she’d rather just die than have to go out to dinner – and one can see why). Again, snobbery is dreadful, but what is worse is to try and pretend that you are not a snob (a denial that, again, almost all of Proust’s characters make at one time or another – it is a guilty secret on a par with homosexuality). Furthermore, as the ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’ show, people labour to achieve their snobbish ends with the same resourcefulness as an artist, and they learn as much about the world through their often comic endeavours as the jealous person does through being brought face to face with the radical unknowability of the loved one. The world comes alive (in a perverse way, no doubt, but still very intensely) when you are a snob: like the artist and the jealous lover, the snob lives for details – for a pair of red shoes, in the case of the Duchesse.
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