Pleasures and Days

by Marcel Proust

  She was thirty; in a single bound he leapt over the shorter or longer time she would remember him and remain faithful. But a time would come… “He says she’s pretty hot-blooded… I want to love, I want to live and I want to be able to walk, I want to follow her everywhere, I want to be handsome, I want her to love me!”

  Just then, he felt afraid; he could hear his wheezy breath; his side hurt, his chest seemed to have caved in to meet his back, he could not breathe the way he wanted, he tried to draw breath but could not. At every second he felt himself breathing and yet not breathing enough. The doctor came. Honoré was simply suffering an attack of nervous asthma. Once the doctor had gone, he felt even sadder; he would have preferred it to be more serious so he could arouse pity. For he felt that even if this was not serious, something else was, and he was slipping away. Now he recalled all the physical sufferings in his life, and was filled with sorrow; those who had most loved him had never pitied him on the pretext that he suffered from nervous disorders. In the terrible months he had spent after his return home with Buivres, when at seven o’clock he got dressed after walking all through the night, his brother, who would wake up for a quarter of an hour on the nights following over-copious dinners, would tell him:

  “You pay too much attention to yourself; there are nights when I can’t sleep either. Anyway, people think they can’t sleep a wink when in fact they always manage to doze off for a bit.”

  It was true that he paid himself too much attention; in the background to his life he could always hear death, which had never left him entirely and which, without altogether destroying his life, kept undermining it, now in one place, now in another. Now his asthma was getting worse, he could not draw breath, his whole chest made a painful effort to breathe in. And he sensed the veil which hides life from us, the death which dwells within us, being drawn apart, and he realized what a terrifying thing it is to breathe, to live.

  Then he found himself carried forward to the time when she would have found consolation, and then – which man would it be? And his jealousy panicked at the uncertainty of the event and its necessity. He could have prevented it while still living, but he could not live, and so?… She would say she was going to enter a convent, then once he was dead she would have second thoughts. No! He preferred not to be deceived twice over: better to know. Who? – Gouvres, Alériouvre, Buivres, Breyves? He could see them all and, teeth clenched tight together, he felt the furious rebellion that at that moment was doubtless twisting his face into an indignant grimace. He managed to calm down. “No,” he thought, “it won’t be that, not a libertine – it must be a man who truly loves her. Why don’t I want it to be some libertine? I’m crazy to ask myself the question, it’s so natural. Because I love her for herself, and want her to be happy. No, it’s not that, I don’t want anyone to arouse her senses, to give her more pleasure than I have given her, or even to give her any pleasure at all. I want someone to give her happiness, or to give her love, but I don’t want anyone to give her pleasure. I am jealous of the other’s pleasure, and of her pleasure. I won’t be jealous of their love. She must get married, she must choose wisely… Even so, it will be sad.”

  Then one of the desires he had had as a small child came back to him – the small child he had been at the age of seven, when he went to bed every evening at eight o’clock. When his mother, instead of staying until midnight in her bedroom which was next to Honoré’s, and then going to bed there, had arranged to go out at eleven and passed the time until then getting dressed, he would beg her to get dressed before dinner and to go away somewhere, anywhere, since he could not stand the idea that, while he was trying to go to sleep, people in his home were getting ready to go out for the evening. And so as to give him pleasure and calm him down, his mother, in the finery of her low-cut evening dress, would come in at eight o’clock to say goodnight before going off to the home of a lady friend to wait until it was time for the ball. And this was the only way on which, on those days – so sad for him – when his mother went to the ball, he could, sorrowful but tranquil, get off to sleep.

  Now, the same prayer that he had addressed to his mother rose to his lips, addressed in turn to Françoise. He would like to have asked her to get married straight away, to be all ready and waiting, so that he could finally get off to sleep for ever, heavy at heart but calm and not in the least worried by what would happen after he had gone to sleep.

  The following days, he tried to speak to Françoise, who, like the doctor himself, did not think he was dying and refused, with a gentle but inflexible firmness, to agree to Honoré’s request.

  They were so much in the habit of telling each other the truth that each of them even told truths that might hurt the other, as if deep down in both of them, in their highly strung and sensitive nature, whose susceptibilities they had to treat with kid gloves, they had sensed the presence of a God, superior and indifferent to all these precautions that are fit only for children; a God who demanded the truth and owed the truth to them. And both of them had – Honoré towards this God deep within Françoise, and Françoise towards this God deep within Honoré – always sensed that they had duties before which the desire not to be pained and not to be offended was forced to yield, and the most sincere lies of tenderness and pity had to give way.

  So when Françoise told Honoré he was going to live, he felt clearly that she believed what she was saying, and he persuaded himself little by little to believe it too.

  “If I have to die, I won’t be jealous when I’m dead; but what about until I’m dead? As long as my body lives, yes! But since it is only the pleasure I’m jealous of, since it’s my body which is jealous, since what I’m jealous of isn’t her heart, isn’t her happiness, which I wish her to have with whoever is most capable of giving it to her; when my body is effaced, when the soul wins out from it, when I am gradually detached from material things as I was one evening when I was really ill, then I won’t be consumed by such a mad desire for the body and I will love the soul all the more: I won’t be jealous. And then I will truly love. I can’t conceive what it will be, now that my body is still full of life and rebelliousness, but I can imagine it to some extent, as at those times when I was holding hands with Françoise and found in a boundless tenderness, free of desire, an appeasement for my sufferings and my jealousy. I will feel great sorrow on leaving her, but the sorrow will be that which in previous days brought me closer to myself, that which an angel came to console within me, the sorrow which revealed to me the mysterious friend of my days of unhappiness, namely my soul – that calm sorrow, thanks to which I will feel more presentable to God, and not the horrible illness which has caused me such pain for so long without elevating my heart, like a throbbing physical pain which degrades and diminishes us. Together with my body, with the desire for her body, I will be delivered from that. Yes, but until then, what will become of me? Weaker, more incapable of resisting her than ever, cut down on my two broken legs, when I want to rush over to her to see that she isn’t where I dreamt she might be, I’ll stay put, unable to move, sniggered at by all those who’ll be able to have a fling with her as much as they like, in front of me, a sick man whom they will no longer fear.”

  On the night of Sunday to Monday, he dreamt he was suffocating, and felt a huge weight on his chest. He begged for mercy, no longer had the strength to shift this great weight; the feeling that it had all been weighing down on him like this for a long, long time was inexplicable to him, he could not tolerate it a second longer, he was choking. Suddenly, he felt himself miraculously relieved of the whole burden which moved farther and farther away, having delivered him for ever. And he said to himself, “I am dead!”

  And, above him, he saw rising up everything that had weighed down for so long on him, suffocating him; he thought at first that it was the image of Gouvres, and then merely his suspicions, then his desires, then that expectant longing that had started as soon as day broke, crying out for the time when he
would see Françoise, then the thought of Françoise. At every minute it changed shape, like a cloud, growing bigger, ever bigger, and now he could no longer understand how this thing which he had thought to be as immense as the world had managed to weigh on him, on the little body of a feeble man like himself, on the poor heart of an ailing man like himself, without him being crushed by it. And he also realized that he had been crushed and that it had been the life of a crushed man that he had led. And this immense thing that had weighed down on his chest with all the force in the world was, he realized, his love.

  Then he repeated to himself, “The life of a crushed man!” and he remembered that when the horse had knocked him down, he had said to himself, “I’m going to be crushed”; he remembered his walk, how that morning he had arranged to go and have lunch with Françoise, and then, via that detour, the thought of his love came back to him. And he said to himself, “Was it my love that was weighing down on me? What could it be if not my love? My character, perhaps? Me? Or else life?” Then he thought, “No, when I die, I will not be delivered from my love, but from my carnal desires, my carnal longings, my jealousy.” Then he said, “My God, let that hour come, let it come quickly, my God, let me know perfect love.”

  On Sunday evening, peritonitis had set in; on the Monday morning, at around ten, he became feverish, wanted Françoise, called out for her, his eyes burning. “I want your eyes to shine too, I want to give you pleasure like I’ve never given you before… I want to give you… so much that it’ll hurt you!” Then all of a sudden he went pale with fury. “I can see perfectly well why you don’t want to, I know perfectly well what you had done to you this morning, and where it was and who did it, and I know he wanted someone to come and fetch me and conceal me behind the door so I could see you, without being able to fling myself on you, since I’ve lost my legs, and wouldn’t be able to stop you, since you’d have felt even more pleasure on seeing me there all the way through; he knows so very well everything that needs to be done to give you pleasure, but I’ll kill you first, first I’ll kill you, and first of all I’ll kill myself! See! I have killed myself!” And he fell back on the pillow, exhausted.

  He gradually calmed down and continued to reflect on whom she might marry after his death, but it was always the images he tried to brush away, that of François de Gouvres, that of Buivres, the images that tortured him, that kept coming back.

  At midday he had received the sacraments. The doctor had said he would not last until the evening. He was losing his strength extremely rapidly, could no longer absorb food, had almost lost his hearing. He remained clear-headed and did not speak, so as not to cause pain to Françoise, who, he could see, was grief-stricken; he tried to imagine how she would be once he was no more, and he would know nothing of her, and she would no longer be able to love him.

  The names he had said mechanically, that very morning, the names of those who would perhaps possess her, started again to stream through his head while his eyes followed a fly that was approaching his finger as if it wanted to touch him, then flew off and kept coming back, though without actually touching him; and when, arousing his attention again after it had drifted off for a while, the name of François de Gouvres came back, and he said that, yes, perhaps he would possess her, while thinking at the same time, “Perhaps the fly is going to touch the sheet? No, not yet,” he suddenly came out of his reverie and thought, “What? The one thing doesn’t seem to me any more important than the other! Will Gouvres possess Françoise? Will the fly touch the sheet? Oh, possessing Françoise is rather more important.” But the precision with which he could see the difference separating these two events showed him that neither of them particularly touched him more than did the other. And he said to himself, “So – they are both matters of such indifference? How sad!” Then he realized that he was only saying “How sad” out of habit, and that having completely changed, he was no longer sad to have changed. A vague smile parted his clenched lips. “There it is,” he reflected, “my pure love for Françoise. I’m not jealous, so I must be very close to death; but it hardly matters – it was necessary for me to feel true love for Françoise at last.”

  But then, looking up, he saw Françoise, in the midst of the servants, the doctor and his two elderly women relatives, who were all there, praying right nearby. And he realized how that love, pure of all egotism and all sensuality – the love he wanted to be so gentle, so vast and so divine within him – cherished the elderly relatives, the servants and the doctor himself as much as it did Françoise, and that since he already felt for her the love of all creatures to which his soul, similar to theirs, now united him, he had no other love for her. He could not even imagine feeling any pain at this, so much was any exclusive love for her, and even the idea of any preference for her, now abolished.

  In tears, at the foot of the bed, she was murmuring the most beautiful words of days gone by: “My country, my brother.” But he, having neither the desire nor the strength to undeceive her, smiled and reflected that his “country” was no longer in her, but in heaven and over all the earth. He repeated in his heart, “my brothers,” and if he gazed at her more than at the others, it was simply out of pity, for the flood of tears that he could see flowing right under his eyes, his eyes that would soon close and already had stopped weeping. But he did not love her any more or any differently than he loved the doctor, or his elderly relatives, or the servants. And that was the end of his jealousy.

  Note on the Text

  This translation is based on the text of Les Plaisirs et les jours contained in the Pléiade edition of Jean Santeuil, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). The translator was able to consult with great profit the fine translation by Louise Varese: Pleasures and Regrets (London: Peter Owen, 1986; tr. first published 1948).

  Notes

  p.3,The grave Hesiod… Helicon: Works and Days is a long poem describing peasant life by the Greek writer Hesiod (fl.c.700 bc). Mount Helicon is a mountain in central Greece associated in Greek mythology with the muses.

  p.3,as the well-known English man of state… not for pleasures: A reference to George Bernard Shaw’s quip: “Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.”

  p.4,the ray of the German doctor: A reference to the discovery of the X-ray in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923).

  p.4,Bernardin de Saint Pierre… Petronius: A reference to Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), the author of the 1787 novel Paul et Virginie about the corruption of youthful innocence, and Petronius Arbiter (c.27–66 ad), the author of the Satyricon, a bawdy and satirical account of Roman life.

  p.4,Madeleine Lemaire: Madeleine Lemaire (1845–1928) was a genre painter who illustrated Pleasures and Days.

  p.5,Willie Heath… 3rd October 1893: Willie Heath (1871–93) was a young English dandy whom Proust had met a few months before his untimely death of dysentery or typhoid fever.

  p.5,From the lap of God… make us love it: From the dedication of Life of Jesus (1863) by Ernest Renan (1823–92).

  p.5,Dumas’s word… after God: A reference to a comment by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–95) about Madeleine Lemaire (see previous note).

  p.5,Robert de Montesquiou: Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac (1855–1921) was a famous Parisian poet and dandy.

  p.5,Vigée: A reference to the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842). The first, de-luxe edition of Pleasures and Days was embellished with watercolours by Madeleine Lemaire, acknowledged by Proust a few lines earlier.

  p.6,Van Dyck: A reference to the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641).

  p.7,opened the window… returned not again: The quotations are from Genesis 8:8–10.

  p.7,vain adornments… carefully gathered: From Act i, Sc.3, 7–9 of the play Phèdre (1677) by Jean Racine (1639–99).

  p.8,death who comes… difficult to accomplish: Slightly misquoted from Book 8, Chapter 1 of Histo
ry of France (1833–67) by Jules Michelet (1798–1874).

  p.9,that true friend, and that illustrious and beloved Master: A reference to Reynaldo Hahn (see other notes).