The first occasion when M. de Norpois came to dinner, at a time when I was still playing at the Champs-Élysées, has stayed in my memory because that very afternoon I had at last been to see La Berma, in a matinée performance of Phèdre; and also because, in chatting with M. de Norpois, I realized suddenly and in a new way how different were the feelings aroused in me by everything connected to Gilberte Swann and her parents from the feelings aroused by the same family in all other people.
One day my mother, who had presumably noticed my dejection at the imminence of the New Year holidays, during which, as Gilberte herself had told me, it would be impossible for me to see her, said to me, ‘If you’re still so keen on seeing La Berma, I think your father might allow you to go. Grandma could take you.’
It was because M. de Norpois had urged my father, who till then had been quite opposed to my wasting my time and possibly even falling ill just for the sake of what he called, giving umbrage to my grandmother, ‘stuff and nonsense’, to let me go and see La Berma, as it would be something for a young man to remember, that he had almost come to see the outing to the theatre, now that it was advised by the ambassador, as a sort of prescribed activity among certain others deemed vaguely essential for anyone hoping to achieve a brilliant career. My grandmother, who had forgone on my behalf the benefit which she believed I would have derived from seeing La Berma, and who saw this great sacrifice as justified in the interest of my health, was astonished to learn that, at a single word from M. de Norpois, this interest turned out to be of no significance. Rationalist that she was, she placed invincible trust in the regimen of fresh air and early bedtimes which had been prescribed for me; and, seeing my intended departure from it as a disaster, she said sadly to my father, ‘How irresponsible you can be.’ To which he barked, ‘What! You mean you don’t want him to go now? Well, that’s rich! You were the one who kept saying how much good it would do him!’
My father’s ambitions for me had been altered by M. de Norpois in another particular, of much greater importance to me. My father had always looked forward to seeing me enter the diplomatic corps; and I could not bear the thought that, even if I was to remain in Paris for a while attached to the Ministry, I must risk being packed off one day to serve as an ambassador in capital cities where Gilberte would never live. I would have preferred to take up again the literary ambitions which I had once cherished, then given up, during my walks along the Guermantes way. But my father had constantly opposed the idea of my embarking upon a career in writing, which he saw as far inferior to diplomacy, even denying that it could count as a career, until the day when M. de Norpois, who rather looked down on the newer generation of diplomats, assured him that it was perfectly possible for a writer to enjoy as much esteem, and to exercise as much influence, as any diplomat, while retaining more independence.
‘Well, who’d have believed it!’ my father said. ‘Old Norpois’s got nothing against the idea that you might make a career in literature.’ Being himself quite influential, he believed there was nothing which could not be sorted out and favourably resolved by a chat between important men. ‘I’ll bring him home to dinner one of these nights after a session at the Select Committee. You can have a chat with him and he’ll be able to form some opinion of you. So just write something nice that you can show him. He’s a great friend of the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, you know. He could get you in there, he could look after it for you, he’s a pretty sharp old chap. I must say, he doesn’t sound greatly enamoured of the diplomatic career nowadays.’
The blissful prospect of not being parted from Gilberte made me eager, but not able, to write a fine piece that could be shown to M. de Norpois. From sheer boredom, the pen dropped from my hand after a few preliminary pages; and I dissolved in tears of rage at the thought that I would never have any talent, that I was not gifted, that I could not even turn M. de Norpois’s imminent visit to the advantage of remaining for ever in Paris. The only thing that cheered me a little was the knowledge that I was going to be allowed to see La Berma. But, just as the only storms I longed to see were those which raged along the wildest shores, so I wished to see the great actress only in one of those classical parts in which Swann had assured me she rose to the sublime. When our wish to be touched by nature or art is prompted by the hope of a grandiose revelation, we are loth to let it be replaced by lesser impressions, which might mislead us as to the true value of Beauty. La Berma in Racine’s Andromaque or Phèdre, in Les Caprices de Marianne by Musset, these were the stirring things that I had gloated on in imagination. I knew that if I could ever hear La Berma deliver the speech beginning:
On dit qu’un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous,
Seigneur, etc.2
my delight would be the same as when I could step out of a gondola, to stand in front of the Titian in the Frari or the Carpaccios in San Giorgio dei Schiavoni. My acquaintance with these lines of Racine’s was in black and white, as mere print on the pages of books; but now my heart beat faster at the thought that I would soon see them in the warm sunny glow shed on them by the Golden Voice. A Carpaccio in Venice, La Berma in Phèdre, were master-works of pictorial or dramatic art; and the glamour that surrounded them gave them such vital force, and made them so indivisible into their parts, that if I had had to look at Carpaccios in a room at the Louvre, or see La Berma in a play that I had never heard of, I would never have felt that delight of amazement at being face to face at last with the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams. Also, in my expectation that La Berma’s acting would give me a revelation about nobility and grief, I had the impression that everything great and true in her acting was bound to become greater and truer if she put it into a work of genuine worth, instead of embroidering Truth and Beauty on the coarse cloth of some valueless vulgarity.
In any case, seeing her in a new play would make it difficult for me to appreciate her skill and diction, as I would be unable to distinguish between the unfamiliar text and all the intonations and gestures which, although she had added them, would seem to belong inseparably to it; whereas the classical texts which I knew by heart were like broad surfaces, already designated and prepared, awaiting only the fluent frescoes that La Berma would lavish upon them and the unconstrained appreciation with which I would greet the inexhaustible felicities of her inspiration. Unfortunately, she had abandoned the classical stage and its repertoire years before, and was now the star and mainstay of a more popular theatre; and however often I went to look at the posters, the only plays they ever advertised were recent ones, tailor-made for her by modish authors. Then one morning, as I scanned the Morris column for the matinées being given during the first week in January, I saw for the first time a programme which, after a presumably insignificant curtain-raiser, the title of which seemed opaque because it was full of the proceedings of a plot which was unknown to me, promised as the final item on the programme Mme Berma in two acts of Phèdre; and for the following matinées, it specified Dumas’s Le Demi-Monde and Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne, titles which to my eye, like Phèdre, were transparent, full of nothing but illumination, because the works were so well known to me, glowing through and through with the smile of Art. They seemed to add nobility to La Berma herself, once I had read in the newspapers, after the programmes for these matinées, a mention that it was she herself who had decided to make a public appearance once again in some of her time-honoured parts. Clearly, the artiste knew that in certain roles there is an interest which outlasts the novelty of their first appearances, or the success of their revivals, and that her own interpretation made them into museum-pieces, which it might be instructive to display again to a generation who had once admired her in them, or to reveal to another which had not. By having Phèdre advertised among other plays which were intended only to while away an evening, its title neither printed in special characters nor occupying more space than the others, she gave it a touch of the understatement used by a hostess who, as she introduces you to your f
ellow guests just as you are all about to go in to dinner, includes among the names which are merely names, and in the same tone of voice in which she has announced all the others, ‘M. Anatole France’.
My doctor, the one who had forbidden me all travel, advised my parents against letting me go to the theatre: afterwards and possibly for a long time, I would be sure to be ill; the net result for me would be more pain than pleasure. I might have been dissuaded by such a fear, if what I expected from the matinée had been a mere pleasure which could be cancelled by the counter-balance of subsequent pain. But what I did expect from it – as from the journeys I had longed to make to Balbec and Venice – was something far beyond a pleasure: it was access to truths which dwelt in a realer world than I did, truths which, once glimpsed, could never be taken from me by any of the nugatory incidents making up my futile existence, however painful they might be to my body. Any pleasure to be had from the performance seemed to me no more than the possibly inevitable form which the glimpsing of these truths must take; and this was enough for me to hope the predicted sickness would hold off until the end of the matinée, so that the pleasure might not be jeopardized or vitiated. I badgered my parents, who, since the doctor’s pronouncement, no longer wanted me to go to see Phèdre. I kept reciting the speech
On dit qu’un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous …
trying to put all possible intonations into it, the better to enjoy the unexpected one that La Berma would be sure to employ. By day and by night my mind was haunted by the knowledge of the divine Beauty which her acting would be bound to reveal, hidden like the Holy of Holies by the impenetrable veil, behind which I imagined it in constantly changing guises, according to whichever of Bergotte’s images recurred to my mind from his little study of Racine, which Gilberte had managed to find for me: ‘her noble plasticity’, ‘the white garb of Christian penitence’, ‘her Jansenist pallor’, ‘this Princess of Clèves and of Troezen’, ‘this Mycenæan melodrama’, ‘a Delphic symbol’, ‘a solar myth’; and it was the reckless severity of my parents which was to decide whether or not in this mind of mine, where her altar was perpetually lit, the perfections of the Goddess would stand unveiled for ever at the very spot where now stood her invisible form. With my gaze fixed on the unimaginable figure, I had to struggle all day long against the obstacles raised by my family. Then, once these obstacles had fallen and once my mother, despite the fact that the matinée was on the very day of the Select Committee session after which my father was to bring M. de Norpois home to dinner, had said to me, ‘Look, we don’t want you to be sad. If you really think you’ll enjoy it so much, you’d better go,’ now that it was up to me to decide on the outing to the theatre which had previously been forbidden, now that I was free of the need to make sure it should cease to be impossible, I began to wonder whether it was desirable, whether reasons other than my parents’ prohibition should not perhaps make me choose to stay at home. For one thing, having hated their cruelty to me, I now loved them so much for their kindness that the idea of saddening them saddened me; the point of existence seemed no longer to be the seeking for truth, but the finding of fondness; and life as a good or a bad thing could only be judged by whether my parents were happy or unhappy. ‘If you’re going to worry about it,’ I said to my mother, ‘I’d really rather not go.’ She, however, did her best to scotch the notion that she might be unhappy, saying that it could spoil my enjoyment of Phèdre, which had been their main consideration in changing their minds about the outing. But now that I seemed to be under an obligation to enjoy myself, I found it rather irksome. What if I did fall ill afterwards? Would I get better by the end of the holidays, and be able to go back to the Champs-Élysées as soon as Gilberte returned? In the hope of deciding which to choose, I weighed against all these reasons the veiled invisibility of La Berma’s perfections. On one side of the scales, I put ‘knowing Mama’s worrying, me not being able to go to the Champs-Élysées’; and on the other, ‘her Jansenist pallor’ and the ‘solar myth’. But the words themselves gradually grew darker in my mind, and lost all weight and meaning for me; my hesitations became so painful that the only reason I could have had now for choosing to go to the theatre would have been to put an end to them, to be rid of them for good. And by going so as to cut short my sufferings, rather than to seek perfection and derive intellectual benefit, I would have been going not to the gentle Goddess once imagined, but to some implacable, faceless, nameless Divinity who had surreptitiously taken the other’s place behind the veil. Then all at once everything changed, and my longing to see La Berma act was revived by something that made me look forward to the matinée with joy and impatience. As though turned into a stylite, I had gone to my Morris column, a daily activity which of late had become very painful, and there I had seen the first detailed poster for Phèdre itself, still damp with paste, which, though the other members of the cast offered nothing that could help me decide whether to go or not to go, did give to one of the rewards of my contending urges a more concrete form, and a kind of imminence that made it seem on the very point of becoming a reality: as the poster showed the date not of the day when I stood there reading it, but of the day when the matinée would be performed, and even the time when the curtain would rise, I was suddenly inspired by the happy thought that, on that day, at that very hour, I would be sitting in my seat ready to see La Berma; and in the fear that there might not be time now for my parents to book two good seats for my grandmother and myself, I ran all the way home, full of the magic of the words which had displaced ‘her Jansenist pallor’ and the ‘solar myth’ in my imagination: Ladies wearing hats may not sit in the stalls. The doors will be closed at two o’clock sharp.
This first matinée was, alas, a great disappointment. My father had suggested giving my grandmother and myself a lift to the theatre, which was on his way to the Select Committee. As he left the house, he said to my mother, ‘You’ll make sure it’s a nice dinner tonight, won’t you? Remember, Norpois’s coming home with me.’ She had not forgotten. Since the day before, Françoise, glad to be practising the cook’s art for which she had a definite gift, inspired by the coming of a new guest, and knowing she was required to compose, in accordance with methods known only to herself, a dish of beef in aspic, had been living in a flurry of artistic creativity. Like Michelangelo spending eight months in the mountains of Carrara, selecting the most perfect blocks of marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II, Françoise, who attached extreme importance to the inherent quality of the materials out of which her masterpieces were to be wrought, had been down to Les Halles in person more than once to choose the finest slabs of rump steak, the best shin of beef and calf’s foot. She threw herself so strenuously into this pursuit that my mother, seeing our old servant turn red in the face, feared that, as the sculptor of the Medici tombs had sickened in the quarries at Pietrasanta, she might make herself ill from overwork. The day before, Françoise had sent down to the oven of the local baker what she called ‘a Nev York ham’, looking like pink marble inside its coating of breadcrumbs. In the belief that the language was poorer than it is, and her own ears less reliable than they were, the first time Françoise had heard of ‘York ham’, she must have deduced that the lexicon could not possibly be so abundant as to allow for both York and New York, that she had misheard and that the right name was the one she already knew. Hence, ever since, the name of York was always preceded, for Françoise’s ears and eyes, by the word New, which she pronounced ‘Nev’. So it was with total sincerity that she would say to her scullery-maid, ‘Go down to Olida’s and get some ham. Ma’am particularly said she wants the Nev York.’ On the day in question, while Françoise’s state of mind was the burning certainty of the great creators, my own was the thankless anxiety of the seeker after truth. To be sure, right up until the moment when I saw La Berma act, I enjoyed the day. I enjoyed it in the little garden outside the theatre, where two hours later, the gas-lamps, once lit, would cover the leafless horse-chestnuts in a metallic sheen and
illuminate the details of their branches; I enjoyed it in the foyer, faced with the box-office staff, whose selection, promotion and fate all depended on the great artiste whose word was law in that theatre, in which there was an obscure succession of temporary and purely nominal managers; I enjoyed it as they took our tickets without a glance at us, in their anxiety to be sure that each and every requirement of Mme Berma’s had been definitely made known to the new employees, that the hired clappers must never applaud her, that windows had to stay open till she was on stage, but that every single door must then be closed, that a pitcher of hot water must be concealed near her, so as to keep down the dust – and sure enough, any moment now her carriage and long-maned pair would draw up in front of the theatre, she would step down wrapped in her furs, favour those who greeted her with a moody wave of the hand, then send one of her ladies-in-waiting to check that her friends had been allotted the proper stage-box, to see that the house temperature was right, find out who was in the best boxes tonight, inspect the attendants, for the theatre and the audience were no more than an outer garment which she put on, the medium of greater or lesser conductivity through which her talent had to pass. I even enjoyed it inside the auditorium; since learning that all the spectators looked at the same stage, unlike what my childish imagination had long pictured, I had supposed that so many people must make it as difficult for each of them to see as it is when one stands among a crowd; but now I realized that, because of the layout of the theatre, which is in a way symbolic of perception itself, each person has the impression of being at the centre; and this explained why Françoise, having been treated to a seat in the gods at a melodrama, had told us hers had been the best seat in the house and that, instead of feeling remote from the stage, she had been intimidated by the proximity of the curtain, which had seemed a mysterious living thing. I enjoyed it even more when, from behind the curtain, I began to hear sounds as vague and strange as those heard from inside the shell of an egg when a chick is about to emerge; they soon grew louder, until suddenly, from that world which our eye could not penetrate but which could see us, they became three portentous strokes,3 clearly intended for us and as thrilling as a message from Mars. The curtain having risen, my enjoyment continued at the sight of a writing-table and a fireplace, both of them quite nondescript actually, which obviously meant that any individuals who might come in would not be actors turning up to speak lines, like some I had once seen at a party, but just people in their own home, engaged in living a day of their lives, on which I happened to be eavesdropping. My pleasure was interrupted by a moment’s unease: just as I was looking forward to the beginning of the play, a couple of bad-tempered men came walking across the stage, raising their voices enough for everyone in that thousand-strong audience to make out every word, whereas when two customers start scuffling and shouting in a small café, you have to ask the waiter what they are saying; but at that same instant, in my surprise that everyone else was paying polite attention to them, all sitting submerged in unanimous silence, the surface of which was now and then broken by a ripple of laughter, I realized that this rude pair of intruders were the actors, and that the short play called a curtain-raiser had just begun. It was followed by an interval which went on for so long that the audience, having come back in, began to express their impatience by stamping their feet on the floor. I was alarmed at this; for, just as when I read in a report of a trial that a man of courage and honour was to jeopardize his own interests by giving evidence in defence of an innocent man,4 I dreaded the thought that people might not treat him well, that his act might not be properly acknowledged, that he might not be handsomely rewarded and that in his disgust he might even join the forces of injustice; so, equating genius with virtue, I was afraid that La Berma might take umbrage at the bad manners of such an uncouth audience (among whom I would have much preferred her to be able to recognize and draw comfort from a few celebrities whose good judgment she valued) and express her displeasure and disdain for them by acting badly. I gazed about me as though to implore these stamping savages not to trample underfoot the fragile, precious impression which had brought me there. The final vestiges of my enjoyment lasted until the opening scenes of the performance of Phèdre. The character of Phèdre does not appear in those early scenes of Act II; and yet no sooner had the curtain gone up, and the red velvet of another curtain had been partly opened, so as to double the depth of the stage, as was done in all the star’s performances, than there entered upstage an actress who looked and sounded exactly as I had been led to believe La Berma would. They must have changed the cast! All my careful study of the part of Theseus’s wife was pointless! But then a second actress engaged in a dialogue with the first one – I must have been mistaken in thinking she was La Berma, as this new-comer looked even more like the star and came much closer to her diction! Both of them now enhanced their speeches with noble gestures – which were clear and recognizably relevant to the text, as they lifted the folds of their fine robes – and with ingenious intonations, fraught with passion or irony, which showed me shades and depths in lines which I had read at home without paying enough attention to what they meant. Then suddenly a woman appeared between the parted curtains of the inner sanctum, standing there as though within a frame, and instantly – from the fear that filled me, much more acute than any La Berma might have felt, at the prospect of someone opening a window, spoiling her delivery of a line by rustling a programme, upsetting her by applauding her fellow actors, or by not applauding her enough, and from the effort of concentration, also greater than hers, which forced me from that moment on to sense the auditorium, the audience, the actors, the play and even my own person as nothing but an acoustical medium, of importance only insofar as it might enrich the modulations of that voice – I realized that the pair of actresses whom I had been admiring for some minutes past bore not the slightest resemblance to the one I was there to see and hear. But at the same time, all my enjoyment had dissipated: however hard I strained towards her with my eyes, ears and mind, so as not to miss a single scrap of the incentives she would offer me to admire her, I could not manage to find any. I could not even perceive in her diction or use of movement, as I had with the other actresses, any sensitivity of tone or delicacy of gesture. I sat there and listened to her as I might have read Phèdre, or as though at that moment Phèdre herself was saying the things I was hearing, without La Berma’s talent seeming to add anything at all to them. I wished I could arrest and hold motionless before me each of her intonations, freeze each of the changing expressions on her face, so as to study them in depth and find out what was beautiful in them; at least I tried, by using all my mental agility, by having my whole attention at the ready and focussed on a line just before its delivery, not to waste in preliminaries any iota of the time taken by each word or gesture, in the hope of being able, by sheer intensity of attention, to absorb each of them as I might have done if I had been able to hold them before me for hours on end. But the time they occupied was so short! My ear had barely registered each sound when it was replaced by the following one. In one scene, where La Berma stands still for a moment against a backdrop of the sea, with one arm raised to face level, and her whole figure given a greenish tint by an effect of the lighting, the audience had no sooner burst into applause than she had changed position and the tableau I wished I could study closely had disappeared. I told my grandmother I could not see very well and she lent me her opera-glasses. But when you believe in the reality of things, using an artificial means to see them better is not quite the same as feeling closer to them. I felt it was not La Berma that I was seeing, but only an enlarged picture of her. I put the glasses down – but what if the image received by the naked eye was no more accurate, given that it was an image reduced by distance? Which was the true Berma? When she reached Phèdre’s declaration of desire for Hippolyte, a part I had been specially looking forward to, because the diction of Oenone and Aricie kept revealing unsuspected subtleties in parts which were not as fine as it
, I was sure her intonations would be more striking than any I had contrived to imagine while reading the play at home: but she did not even rise to the effects that the other two actresses would have managed; she blurred the whole speech into a toneless recitative, blunting the keen edges of contrasts which any semi-competent performer, even a girl in a school production, could hardly have failed to bring out; and she gabbled through it at such speed that it was not until she reached the closing line that my mind became aware of the deliberate monotone in which she had delivered the opening ones.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 3