Fearing that the conversation might turn away from the subject of the Swanns, I now broached the subject of the Comte de Paris,13 to ask M. de Norpois whether he was not a friend of Swann’s. ‘Absolutely,’ M. de Norpois replied, turning towards me and staring at my modest person through the blue of his eyes, in which his great capacity for intellectual toil and his powers of assimilation could be seen floating as though in their natural element. Then he added, turning back to address my father, ‘And if I may say so, without overstepping the bounds of the respect which I profess for His Highness – albeit I do not entertain personal relations with him of a sort which would conflict with my position, however unofficial it is – I permit myself to retail to you a rather choice little incident which, as recently as four years ago, took place in a small railway-station in a certain country of Central Europe, where His Highness had occasion to set eyes on Mme Swann. Now of course, no one in his entourage saw fit to ask His Highness what he thought of her. Such a thing would not have been seemly. But when the vagaries of conversation happened subsequently to bring up her name, His Highness appeared not averse to letting it be divined, by means of certain signs, you understand, which though they may verge on the imperceptible, are withal quite unambiguous, that his impression of the lady had been far from, in a word, unfavourable.
– But it would surely have been quite out of the question, my father said, to present her to the Comte de Paris?
– Well now, who can say? M. de Norpois replied. One never knows, with princes! Some of the most illustrious, some of those who are most adept at having rendered unto themselves what must be rendered, are also on occasion those who ride roughshod over even the most inviolable decrees of public opinion, if in so doing they can reward certain good and faithful servants. And what’s certain is that the Comte de Paris has always noted with the greatest good-will the devotion evinced by Swann, who is also, be it remembered, a fellow of fine wit.
– And what was your own impression, Excellency?’ asked my mother, as much from politeness as from curiosity.
M. de Norpois’s reply, delivered with all the energy of the old connoisseur, was at variance with the moderation with which he was accustomed to express himself:
‘Absolutely first-rate!’
Then, knowing that owning up to having been strongly impressed by a woman, as long as one announces it in a waggish manner, is consistent with a highly regarded notion of table-talk, the old diplomat laughed quietly to himself for a few moments, bringing water to his blue eyes and a little quiver to nostrils finely veined with red, and added:
‘Why, she is quite, quite charming!
– And was there a writer by the name of Bergotte at the dinner, sir?’ I asked, in a diffident attempt to keep the conversation focussed on the Swanns.
‘Yes, Bergotte was there,’ M. de Norpois replied, inclining a courteous head towards me, as though in his good-will towards my father he attached real importance to anything connected with him, including the questions of a boy as young as myself, who was unaccustomed to be shown such deference by men as old as himself. ‘Do you know him?’ he added, gazing at me with the bright eyes which Bismarck admired for their acuity.
‘My son doesn’t know Bergotte, said my mother. But he admires him very much.
– Well now, I’m afraid that’s not a view I can share, M. de Norpois said (and when I realized that the thing I set far above myself, the one thing I saw as the highest in the world, was the least of his admirations, the doubts this planted in my mind about my own intelligence were much more crippling than those which usually assailed me). Bergotte is what I call a flute-player. It must of course be admitted that he tootles on his flute quite mellifluously, albeit with more than a modicum of mincing mannerism and affectation. But when all’s said and done, tootling is what it is, and tootling does not amount to a great deal. His works are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one could call a framework. There’s never any action in ’em, well, hardly any, and especially no scope. It’s their base which is their weak point – or rather, they have no base. In this day and age, when the increasing complexity of modern life leaves one barely any time for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone a profound recasting, and may well be on the point of undergoing another which may prove to be even more profound, when so many new and threatening problems are cropping up on all sides, you will allow that one may fairly claim the right to expect that a writer might aspire to be something higher than a glib wit, whose futile hair-splittings on the relative merits of merely formal matters distract us from the fact that we may be overrun at any moment by a double wave of barbarians, those from within and those from without! Now, I know that to speak thus is to utter blasphemies against the sacrosanct school of what certain gentlemen call Art for Art’s Sake – but in our day and age there are more urgent tasks than stringing jingles of words together. I must admit that Bergotte’s jingles can at times be quite pretty, but all in all they add up to something which is pretty jejune, pretty precious – and pretty unmasculine, if you ask me! Now that I’m aware of your quite excessive admiration for Bergotte, I can appreciate better that little thing you showed me before dinner, about which, by the way, the less said the better – I owe it to you to say so, for did you not say yourself, quite openly, that it was mere childish scribbling? (It was true, I had said so – but I had not meant it.) All sins shall be forgiven, especially the sins of our youth, what? Many another man could own up to something similar. You’re not the only young fellow who has ever fancied himself as a poet. But in that piece you showed me, one can detect Bergotte’s pernicious influence. Now, clearly, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that it contained none of his better qualities, he being a past master in the art of a certain phrase-making – though one should add, mind you, that it’s a shallow art – and you being a boy who cannot be expected to have grasped even the rudiments of that. Still, young as you are, it’s exactly the same defect, the aberration of stringing together a few fine-sounding words, and not finding any substance to put into them until afterwards. That’s what’s known as putting the cart before the horse. And even in Bergotte’s own stuff, all these finicking futilities, all that rancid and insubstantial Mandarin manner that he goes in for, none of that is to my taste. Nowadays, a chap sets off a few verbal fireworks and everyone acclaims him as a genius. But masterpieces aren’t as easy to come by as that! Among all of Bergotte’s stuff, I should have to say he hasn’t got to his credit a single novel that aspires to anything above the mundane, one of those books that one keeps in a special place on the shelf – not one, if you ask me, in the man’s whole output. Though, mind you, in his case it must be said that the work is a cut above the man himself. Believe you me, he’s the perfect illustration of the idea of that clever fellow who once said that the only acquaintance one should have with writers is through their books.14 I defy you to find an individual who is more unlike his books than Bergotte – he’s so pretentious, so solemn, so uncongenial! At times he’s vulgar, at other times he talks like a book – not like one of his own books, mind you, but like a boring book, for say what you like, at least his aren’t boring. If ever there was a mind that was woolly and convoluted, it’s his! He’s what an earlier generation was wont to call a trader in fustian. And the things he says are made even more displeasing by the way he speaks. Much the same thing was said of Alfred de Vigny by Loménie – or was it Sainte-Beuve?15 But unlike Vigny, Bergotte has never written anything of the calibre of Cinq-Mars or Le Cachet rouge, whole passages of which deserve to figure in any self-respecting anthology.’
I was devastated by what M. de Norpois had said about the piece I had given to him to read; and, at the thought of the difficulties I encountered whenever I tried to write an essay, or even just engage in some consecutive thinking, I became once more acutely aware of my own intellectual poverty and of the fact that I had no gift for writing. It was true that once upon a time in Combray certain impressions of humble things, o
r a page of Bergotte, had moved me to thoughts and feelings which seemed important and valuable. But it was those very thoughts and feelings that my prose poem expressed; and there could be no doubt that a mere mirage had misled me into thinking something was good in it, whereas M. de Norpois, who was no fool, had seen through it at a glance. What he had done was inform me of the microscopic insignificance of myself when judged by an outside expert, who was not only objective, but also highly intelligent and well disposed to me. I felt deflated and dumbfounded; and just as my mind, like a fluid whose only dimensions are those of the container into which it is poured, had once expanded so as to fill the vast vessel of my genius, so now it shrank and fitted exactly into the exiguous confines of the mediocrity to which M. de Norpois had suddenly consigned it.
‘The bringing together of Bergotte and myself, M. de Norpois said to my father, did have its potentially prickly side – though even prickles, of course, may tickle the fancy, if I may say so. You see, some years back, during my time as ambassador in Vienna, Bergotte turned up there on his travels. He was introduced to me by the Princess Metternich, subsequently signed the book at the embassy and let it be known that he wished to be invited to the ambassador’s table. Now, I being the representative abroad of France, and he being a man whose writings do honour in some measure to our country (to be quite accurate, an inconsiderable measure), I should have been quite prepared to forget the poor opinion I have formed of his private life. However, he was not travelling alone; and what’s more, he insisted on not being invited without his … travelling companion. I believe I can honestly lay claim to being no more of a prude than the next man; and being a bachelor, I might have been able to open the doors of the Embassy a little wider than if I had been a husband and father. None the less, I avouch that there is a degree of ignominy at which I draw the line, and which is made even more revolting by the high moral tone, or rather the frankly moralistic tone, which he adopts in print. For the books are just chock-full of incessant analysis (which, between you and me, is actually quite sickly), with agonizing scruples and morbid remorse and a veritable deluge of preachifying over the merest peccadilloes – and we all know what that’s worth! – when all the time, in his private life, the man behaves with the most out-and-out cynicism and lack of conscience. So, to cut a long story short, I did not commit myself. And when the Princess gave me a reminder about it, she got no more satisfaction. With the result that I must suppose I am in no very good odour with the gentleman in question; and I can only wonder whether he greatly appreciated Swann’s delicacy in inviting him and myself at the same time – unless, of course, it was Bergotte himself who suggested it. No way of knowing, though, as the man’s ill. That’s the real explanation – indeed, it’s his only excuse.
– And was Mme Swann’s daughter present at the dinner, sir?’ I asked, glad to be able to broach this matter as we went through to the drawing-room, and thus conceal my excitement more easily than I might have at the table, sitting up there in full view.
M. de Norpois seemed for a moment to search his memory:
‘Ah, yes. A young lady of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, I do recall her being presented to me before dinner as the daughter of Mine Host. I must say, though, that I saw little of her and she went off to bed at an early hour. Or perhaps she went out to the house of a friend, I’m afraid I can’t remember. But look here, I see you are very well informed about the house of Swann.
– I play with Mlle Swann at the Champs-Élysées. I think she’s lovely.
– Ahah! Yes, I see how the land lies! Well, yes, I must tell you I thought she was charming. Mind you, I do feel it incumbent upon me to say that I doubt whether she will ever have the looks of her mother – if I may so put it without in any way intending to wound your own feelings.
– I prefer Mlle Swann’s face, but I also admire her mother very much. I go for walks in the Bois just in the hope of seeing her pass by.
– Really? Well, I must tell them! They’ll be delighted!’
As he spoke these words and for a few seconds longer, M. de Norpois was in the position of anyone else who, on hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his respectable family firm of stockbrokers, of his fine house, assumed that I would speak in identical terms of any other equally intelligent man, of other just as respectable stockbrokers, of any other fine house; he was at the stage when the sane man has not quite realized that the man he is chatting with is insane. Also, he was perfectly aware that it is natural to enjoy the sight of pretty women, and that when a man speaks warmly of a pretty woman it is good form to pretend to believe he is in love with her, to share a little joke with him about it, and promise to put in a good word for him. But when he said he would mention me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like one of the gods of Olympus taking on the fluidity of a breath of air, or rather the appearance of the old man impersonated by Minerva, to be an invisible visitor to the salon of Mme Swann, there to capture her attention, be thought about by her, earn her gratitude for my admiration, and stand revealed as the friend of an important man, a worthy future guest at her house, someone who could be admitted to her family circle) I was suddenly so overcome by tender feelings for this important man, who was going to exercise on my behalf the great prestige he must enjoy in the eyes of Mme Swann, that I had to restrain myself from kissing his soft hands, so white and wrinkled that they looked as though they had spent too long steeped in water. I thought no one noticed how close I came to doing this. But it is difficult for any of us to gauge the scale on which others register our acts and words; for fear of seeing ourselves as over-important, and by magnifying hugely the dimensions to which other people’s memories must stretch if they are to cover a lifetime, we imagine that all the peripheral aspects of our speech and gestures make little imprint in the consciousness of the people we talk to, let alone stay in their memory. It is this sort of assumption which makes criminals retrospectively emend statements they have made, in the belief that no one will ever be able to compare the new variant with an older version. However, it is quite possible that, even in relation to the immemorial march of humanity, the newspaper columnist’s philosophy that everything passes away into oblivion may be less reliable than the opposite prediction, that all things will last. In a newspaper, in which the author of the leading article, a moralist commenting on some event, a masterpiece, or more likely just a songstress who has ‘had her hour of fame’, laments, ‘But who will remember any of this ten years from now?’, page three of the very same issue will carry an account of a session at the Academy of Antiquities concerning something which is of less intrinsic importance, a piece of doggerel, say, dating from the time of the Pharaohs, yet which is still known in its entirety. In a short human lifespan, of course, things may not happen quite like that. Nevertheless, some years later when I was a guest at a house, where among the other guests M. de Norpois seemed to be my surest ally, since he was not only a friend of my father’s and an indulgent man, well disposed to our family, but also inclined by profession and nature to be discreet, I was told after he left that he had spoken of an incident long ago ‘when I had been on the point of kissing his hand’. This not only made me blush to the roots of my hair; it also astounded me with the knowledge that both the ambassador’s way of speaking of me and the very stuff of his memory were very different from what I would have expected. This piece of gossip, by enlightening me on the make-up of human consciousness, and its unexpected potential for absent-mindedness and presence of mind, for memory and forgetfulness, was as much a wonder and a revelation to me as it had been to read in a book by Maspero, the Egyptologist, that the exact names of the huntsmen invited by Assurbanipal16 to his battues, ten centuries before Christ, were known to us.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 7