If, however, I am not surprised not to have asked with whom she was walking down the Champs-Elysées, for I had already seen too many examples of how Time dulls our curiosity, I am a little surprised not to have told Gilberte that before meeting her that day I had sold an antique Chinese vase in order to buy her some flowers. My only consolation during those very sad times that followed was in fact that one day I might be able without embarrassment to tell her of this so tender intention. More than a year afterward, if I saw that a car was in danger of striking mine, my only reason for not wanting to die was to be able to tell this to Gilberte. I consoled myself with the thought, “Let’s not rush things, I’ve all my life ahead of me for that.” And because of that I did not want to lose my life. Now it would have seemed to me unpleasant to recount, almost ridiculous and “compromising.” “Besides,” Gilberte went on, “even on the day that I met you on your doorstep, you were still so like you were at Combray, if only you knew how little you had changed!” I pictured Gilberte again in my memory. I could have drawn the rectangle of light shed by the sun beneath the hawthorns, the spade that the little girl held in her hand, the lingering look that she cast in my direction. Except that, given the crude gesture which accompanied it, I had seen it as a look of contempt, because what I wanted seemed to me to be something of which little girls knew nothing and complied with only in my imagination, during my hours of solitary desire. Even less could I have imagined that, so easily and so swiftly, almost under my grandfather’s nose, one of them might have been so bold as to spell it out.
Thus after so many years I had to touch up the image that I recalled so well, an operation which made me relatively happy by showing me that the uncrossable abyss which I had at that time believed to exist between me and a certain kind of little girl with golden hair was as imaginary as the abyss described by Pascal, and which I found poetical because of the long series of years I needed to cross in order to perform this operation. I felt a renewed pang of desire and regret on thinking of the dungeons of Roussainville. And yet I was pleased, as I realized that the happiness which I had striven with all my might to achieve in those days, and which nothing could ever now restore, had existed elsewhere than in my thoughts, and indeed so near to me in the Roussainville which I talked of so often and which I glimpsed from the toilet scented with iris. And I had had no idea! In short, she had subsumed everything that I had desired on my walks, when I reached the point where I could not bear to go home, as I felt that the trees were on the point of becoming human and parting their limbs. What I had then so feverishly desired, she had almost, if only I had been able to understand and accept it, made me taste while still an adolescent. Even more than I had thought, Gilberte was already at this time fully engaged in the Méséglise way.
And even on the day when I had met her in a doorway, although she was not the Mlle de l’Orgeville whom Robert had met in a house of ill-fame (and how extraordinary it was that the person whom I had asked to enlighten me on this subject was none other than her future husband!), I had not been entirely mistaken as to the significance of her glance, nor as to the kind of woman that she was and now admitted to me that she had been. “All that is so long ago,” she said, “I’ve never thought of anyone but Robert since the day we were engaged. And, you know, those childish pranks are still not what I regret the most.”
Notes
CHAPTER 1: Grieving and Forgetting
1. Helen on the old men of Troy: a reference to Ronsard’s sonnet sequence, Sonnets pour Hélène. See note 2.
2. Notre mal . . . de ses regards: Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène, Book II, LXVII, line 4: “Our ills cannot match one look from her eyes.”
3. Manon: the opera of 1884, adapted from the Abbé Prévost’s eighteenth-century novel Manon Lescaut. Music by Jules Massenet, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille.
4. Hélas . . . au vitrage: “Alas, the bird who seems to flee her plight/Most oft returns at night/To beat against the pane in desperate flight,” sung by Manon in Act III, Scene II, imploring her lover Des Grieux, who is then reconciled with her.
5. Manon . . . de ton cœur: “Manon do answer me!—My soul’s only love,/It was only today that I found how kind was your heart.” Sung by Des Grieux in a duet at the end of Act V, where the dying Manon asks for forgiveness.
6. le Cygne: “The Swan.”
7. Un cygne . . . l’ennui: a stanza from Mallarmé’s sonnet “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”: “A swan of past days recalls it is he/Magnificent but without hope who is freed/For not having sung the realm where to live/When sterile winter’s ennui has shone forth.”
8. Le vierge . . . aujourd’hui: “This virgin, beautiful and lively day.”
9. Dis si . . . de mes chars: “Say if I am not joyous/Thunder and rubies at the axles/To see in this fire-pierced air/Amid scattered realms/As though dying purple the wheel/Of my sole chariot of evening.” (Two stanzas from another sonnet by Mallarmé, “M’introduire dans ton histoire”; both extracts in Roger Fry’s translation, Stéphane Mallarmé, Poems, Chatto and Windus, 1936.)
10. On dit . . . de nous: Jean Racine, Phèdre, Act II, Scene V, where Phèdre admits her incestuous love for her stepson, Hippolyte: “I hear that you must leave, and travel far from us.”
11. Aurais-je . . . de ma gloire: Phèdre: “Could I have lost all care for my good name.”
12. Madame . . . votre époux?: Hippolyte: “Madam, do you forget/That Theseus is my father, and that he is your husband?”
13. Ah cruel . . . entendu!: Phèdre: “Oh, cruel friend, you understood too well!”
14. Tu . . . de nouveaux charmes: Phèdre: “You hated me more, I loved you no less./Your misfortune revived all the charms that you held.”
15. “Jansenist” scruples: “Jansenism” is so called after the Christian doctrine expounded by Jansenius (1585–1638) in his Augustinus of 1628. This doctrine favors grace and predestination rather than free will and good works. In this light, Phèdre would be less responsible for her actions, and less guilty.
16. the Orsay railway station: this Parisian railway station served the south and southwest of France, including Châtelleraut and Touraine.
17. they were going to close down the churches and banish the clergy: an allusion to the legislation passed in 1904 and 1905 in France leading to the separation of Church and State (“Loi sur les Congrégations”).
18. Esther: See The Prisoner, n. 2.
19. Les Écorres . . . the Marie-Antoinette farm: it was fashionable at the time to drive out into the countryside in Normandy and take tea on a farm.
20. “philosopher in the garret”: reference to a novel by Émile Souvestre, Un philosophe sous les toits, journal d’un homme heureux, 1850.
21. Saint-Cloud: one of Marie-Antoinette’s châteaux, where Napoleon and Napoleon III both declared themselves Emperor in their turn (in 1804 and 1852). It was sacked in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war, and demolished in 1891. But its gardens, designed by Le Nôtre, still provided an attractive, and perhaps nostalgic, weekend excursion.
22. ten-to-two: I have homogenized the time of this train, which Proust noted variously as 1.35 (here), and elsewhere as 1.22 or 1.50.
23. . . . “left me cold”: here I have omitted a sentence repeated inadvertently by Proust twice on the same page.
24. Touraine: here Proust actually wrote “Nice,” left over from an earlier draft where Mme Bontemps’s villa was stuated on the Côte d’Azur.
25. the 1870 war: Franco-Prussian war. Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussians at Sedan in 1870. This was traumatic for civilians because of the resulting uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871.
26. Chaumont: cf. note 28, and The Prisoner, n. 3.
27. “Le Secret”: “The Secret,” by Gabriel Fauré, opus 23, no. 3, in D flat, set to a poem by Armand Sylvestre, 1882. The Figaro regularly published such songs.
28. the Duc de Broglie: Albert de Broglie was a historian who wrote Le secret du roi (“The King’s Secret”) in 1878. De Broglie, the grandson of Madame de Staël (whose daughter was called Albertine), was the owner of a château at Chaumont-sur-Loire, where glamorous society events were held at the end of the ninteteenth century.
29. Fabrice del Dongo’s life: Fabrice is the hero of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839.
30. as La Pompadour did for Louis XV: Mme de Pompadour (1721–64) retained influence with Louis XV through such means, after ceasing to be his mistress.
31. Memoirs: the Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755) wrote his Memoirs of life during the reign of Louis XIV.
CHAPTER 2: Mademoiselle de Forcheville
1. Mme du Barry’s desire to impress the king: the Goncourt brothers, in their La Du Barry, recount that Mme du Barry had displayed Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I in her bedroom.
2. . . . which had not been published: from 1903 onwards Proust himself had published a number of articles in the Figaro.
3. Lundis: Sainte-Beuve published his Causeries du lundi from 1851 to 1862. In his Les Nouveaux Lundis, published in 1886, he reproduces the Comtesse de Boigne’s obituary from Le Constitutionnel of 18 May 1866 and recalls her thanks to him in 1863 for his obituary on chancellor Pasquier.
4. Mme de Boigne: in 1907 Mme de Boigne published Les Récits d’une tante: Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne née Osmond, which spurred Proust into writing his anti-Beuvian article in the Figaro, “Journées de lecture,” published posthumously in his Contre Sainte-Beuve.
5. suave mari magno: from the Stoic philospher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. The complete sentence is: “Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,/e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;/non quia vexare quemquamst iucunda voluptas,/sed quibus ipse malis cares quia cernare suave est.” (“What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring! Not that anyone’s afflictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realize from what troubles you yourself are free is joy indeed.” Trans. R. E. Latham, Penguin, 1951.)
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