‘Oh, if you would do that, sir,’ I exclaimed to M. de Norpois when he said he would mention to Gilberte and Mme Swann my admiration for them, ‘if you did mention me to Mme Swann, I would be indebted to you for life – my life would be yours! However, I should just point out that I don’t know Mme Swann and have never been introduced to her.’
This final statement I added only out of a punctilious concern not to be thought to be boasting improperly of an acquaintance to which I could lay no claim. But even as I spoke the words, I could sense there was now no purpose for them to serve. The warmth of my thanks was so chilling in its effect that, from the first syllable, I caught a glimpse of hesitancy and annoyance flitting across the ambassador’s face, and saw in his eyes that cramped, vertical, averted expression (like the obliquely receding line of one side of a figure, in a projection) meant for the invisible listener one carries within, and to whom one addresses a remark that one’s other listener, the person one has been talking to – in this case, me – is not supposed to catch. I realized at once that the words I had uttered, quite inadequate as they were to express the huge rush of gratitude that swept through me, and though it had seemed to me they could not fail to touch M. de Norpois, and must succeed in persuading him to act in a way which would afford him so little trouble while affording me so much joy, were perhaps the very ones (among all the potentially evil words that might have been spoken by people wishing to harm me) which would make him decide not to. And just as when a stranger with whom we have been agreeably exchanging what appear to be shared opinions on passers-by, who we both think are vulgar, suddenly shows the real pathological distance separating us by patting his pocket and saying casually, ‘Mmm, pity I didn’t bring my revolver with me – I could have picked ’em all off,’ so, when he heard me speak these words, M. de Norpois, knowing that nothing was easier or less prized than to be recommended to Mme Swann and to join her circle, but seeing also that for me this represented something of such value that it must be assumed to be out of my reach, decided that the seemingly unexceptionable wish which I had expressed must actually conceal some quite different ulterior motive, a dubious intent or the memory of a faux pas, which must be the reason why no one had ever wished to offend Mme Swann by undertaking to put in a word for me. I realized then that M. de Norpois would never put in such a word, that even if he saw Mme Swann daily for years on end, he would never once mention my name in her hearing. However, a few days after this he did find out from her some information I had asked for and passed it on to me via my father. He had not seen fit to tell her on whose behalf he was seeking the information. She would therefore not learn that I was acquainted with M. de Norpois or that I longed to visit her house. This was perhaps less of a disaster than I thought; for even if she had learned of this longing, it would probably have done little to increase the effect of my being acquainted with M. de Norpois, as this acquaintance was itself of doubtful benefit to me. Since the notion of her own life and house caused no mysterious agitation in Odette’s heart, she did not see the people of her acquaintance, the people who visited her house, as the fabulous beings they were to one who, like me, would have been glad to throw a stone through the Swanns’ front window, if only I could have written on it that I knew M. de Norpois – I was sure that such a message, even if delivered in such a startling fashion, would do more to recommend me to the lady of the house than it would to prejudice her against me. But even if I had been able to comprehend that M. de Norpois’s unaccomplished mission would in any event have been useless, or that it might actually have biassed the Swanns against me, even if M. de Norpois had been willing to comply with my request, I would never have had the courage to withdraw it and forgo the ecstasy, however baneful its consequences might be for me, of knowing that my name and person were, just for a moment, in the presence of Gilberte, inside her unknown house and life.
After M. de Norpois’s departure, my father glanced at the evening paper, while I sat thinking over my experience of La Berma. The pleasure I had taken in seeing her act was so far from the pleasure I had been looking forward to, and was in such acute need of sustenance, that it immediately assimilated whatever might nourish it, such as the qualities M. de Norpois had identified in her acting, which my mind had absorbed as easily as a parched meadow soaks up water. My father now handed me the newspaper, pointing to a review of the matinée: ‘The performance of Phèdre given today before an enthusiastic audience, distinguished by the presence of the foremost personalities in the world of the arts and criticism, afforded Mme Berma in the title part the opportunity to score a triumph than which, in the whole course of her illustrious career, she has rarely had a greater. We shall have more, much more, to say on another occasion about this production, which marks a veritable milestone in the theatre. Suffice it for the moment to note that the best qualified judges are as one in pronouncing that such an interpretation will stand not only as a landmark in our appreciation of the character of Phèdre, one of the greatest and the most searching parts ever produced by Racine, but also as the finest, highest achievement in the realm of art that any of us have been privileged to witness in this day and age.’ This new concept of ‘the finest, highest achievement in the realm of art’ had no sooner entered my mind than it located the imperfect enjoyment I had had at the theatre, and added to it a little of what it lacked; this made such a heady mixture that I exclaimed, ‘What a great artiste she is!’ It may be thought I was not altogether sincere. Think, however, of so many writers who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with a piece they have just written, may read a eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or who may think of some other great artist whom they have dreamed of equalling, who hum to themselves a phrase of Beethoven’s for instance, comparing the sadness of it to the mood they have tried to capture in their prose, and are then so carried away by that perception of genius that they let it affect the way they read their own piece, no longer seeing it as they first saw it, but going so far as to hazard an act of faith in the value of it, by telling themselves, ‘It’s not bad, you know!’ without realizing that the sum total which determines their ultimate satisfaction includes the memory of Chateaubriand’s brilliant pages, which they have assimilated to their own but which, of course, they did not write. Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fame, each of them looking forward to an after-life which he knows is inconceivable) and the desire for a reassuring oblivion, when their better judgment reminds them of the faults which they might otherwise have to expiate after death; or think of the travellers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore – think of them before deciding whether, given the promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us, a single one of those which afford us our greatest happiness has not begun life by parasitically attaching itself to a foreign idea with which it happened to come into contact, and by drawing from it much of the power of pleasing which it once lacked.
My mother did not seem very happy that my father had given up all thought of a diplomatic career for me. I think she lived in the hope of seeing my nervous susceptibility subjected to the discipline of an ordered way of life, and that her real regret was not so much that I was abandoning diplomacy as that I was taking up literature. ‘Oh, look, give over,’ my father exclaimed. ‘The main thing is to enjoy what one does in life. He’s not a child any more, he knows what he likes, he’s probably not going to change, he’s old enough to know what’ll make him happy in life.’ These words of my father’s, though they granted me the freedom to be happy or not in life, made me very unhappy that evening. At each one of his unexpected moments of indulgence towards me, I had always wanted to kiss him on his florid cheeks, just above the beard-line; and the on
ly thing that ever restrained me was the fear of annoying him. On this occasion, rather as an author, to whom his own conceptions seem to have little value, because he cannot think of them as separate from himself, may be alarmed at seeing his publishers putting themselves to the trouble of selecting an appropriate paper for them and setting them in a type-face which he may think too fine, I began to doubt whether my desire to write was a thing of sufficient importance for my father to lavish such kindness upon it. But it was especially what he said about my likings probably never changing, and what would make me happy in life, that planted two dreadful suspicions in my mind. The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed. The second, which was really only a variant of the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter. Theoretically we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old people’s home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past. When my father said, ‘He’s not a child any more, he’s not going to change his mind, etc.,’ he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: ‘He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside. He has eventually settled down there for good, etc.’
My father, in an attempt to forestall any criticism we might have to make about his guest, said to my mother:
‘I must say old Norpois was rather “old hat”, as you two say. When he said it would “not have been seemly” to ask a question of the Comte de Paris, I was afraid you might burst out laughing.
– Not at all, my mother replied. I’m full of admiration for a man of his calibre and his age who hasn’t lost that simple touch. All it shows is a fundamental honesty and good breeding.
– But of course! And that doesn’t prevent him from being acute and intelligent either, as I know from my dealings with him at the Select Committee, where he’s quite different from how he was here tonight,’ my father said, very pleased to see that Mama appreciated M. de Norpois, and trying to persuade her that he was even more admirable than she thought, for cordiality magnifies merit as gladly as pettiness minimizes it. ‘How did he put it again: “One never knows, with princes …”?
– Yes, that was it. I thought it was very clever when I heard it. Anyone can see he’s a man with a broad experience of life.
– Isn’t it remarkable that he dined at the Swanns’, though? And that the people he met there are really quite normal, I mean civil service types. Where on earth can Mme Swann have dug up people like that, I wonder?
– Did you notice the mischievous way he phrased his remark about “a house at which most of the guests appear to be … men”?’
Both of them tried to imitate M. de Norpois’s delivery of this comment, as though it had been a line spoken by Bressant or Thiron in L’Aventurière or Le Gendre de M. Poirier.17 But the person who most enjoyed one of M. de Norpois’s obiter dicta was Françoise: years later, she could still not ‘keep a straight face’ if you reminded her that she had once been called ‘a chef of superlative quality’, an accolade which my mother had relayed to her down in the kitchen, as the Minister for War passes on the congratulations of a visiting Head of State after the review of the troops. (I had been down to the kitchen before her, having earlier extracted from Françoise, the bloodthirsty pacifist, a promise not to inflict too much pain on the rabbit she had had to kill and wishing to know how it had met its death. Françoise assured me that everything had gone off perfectly, very quickly: ‘I never seen any animal like that. It just died without as much as saying a word. Maybe it was dumb …’ Unversed in the speech-habits of animals, I suggested that perhaps rabbits do not screech quite like chickens. ‘Oh, what a thing to say! Françoise gasped in indignation at such ignorance. As if a rabbit wouldn’t screech as loud as a chicken! They’ve actually got much louder voices!’) Françoise accepted M. de Norpois’s compliments with all the simple pride, the joyous and (albeit momentarily) intelligent look of the artist listening to talk of his art. My mother had once sent her to certain celebrated restaurants to see how they did the cooking. I was as pleased to hear Françoise call some of the most famous ones ‘just feeding places’ as I had once been to learn that, with respect to actors, the reputed order of their merits was different from the real one. ‘The ambassador insisted,’ my mother said, ‘that one can’t get cold beef or soufflés like yours anywhere!’ Françoise agreed with this, as though accepting in all modesty a simple statement of fact, and without being in the slightest impressed by the title of ambassador. She said of M. de Norpois, with the fellow-feeling due to somebody who had thought she was a chef, ‘He’s a good old chap, just like me.’ She had of course tried to catch a glimpse of him as he arrived; but, knowing that Mama detested any spying at doors or windows, and being convinced that, if she did try to look out for him, the other servants or else the concierge and his wife would ‘tell on her’ (Françoise lived surrounded by ‘backbitings’ and ‘tell-talings’, which in her imagination played the same unchanging sinister role as others believe is played by the machinations of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had been satisfied to risk a glance at him through the kitchen hatch ‘so as her upstairs wouldn’t have a bone to pick’; and in that summary glimpse of M. de Norpois she had concluded he was ‘the spit of M. Legrandin’ because of his ‘nimbliness’ (and despite the fact that the two men had not a single feature in common). ‘But look, my mother asked her, how do you explain that nobody can make beef jelly like you – when you feel like it, that is? – Well now, I don’t know as I know how that becomes about, Madame,’ replied Françoise, who made no clear distinction between the verbs come, in some of its usages, and become. This was the truth, of course, at least in part, as Françoise was no more able (or willing) to reveal the mystery behind the superiority of her jellies and custards than a fine fashionable lady would have been to divulge the secret of her elegance in dress, or a great prima donna the secret of her singing. Such explanations never reveal much in any case; and the same held true for our cook’s recipes. ‘They always cook everything in too much of a hurry, she said of the famous restaurateurs whose establishments she had visited. And they don’t do the things together, like. I mean, the beef has got to turn into a sort of sponge, so it soaks up all the gravy. Though I must say there was one of them cafés where I thought they knew a thing or two about cooking. Mind you, I’m not saying they could manage my jelly, but it was done nice and slow, nice and gentle, like, and the soufflés had plenty of cream in. – Was that at the Henry?’ asked my father, who had just come in and who had a high opinion of the restaurant in the place Gaillon, where he and his colleagues dined at regular intervals. ‘Oh no, sir, Françoise replied, concealing her deep disdain in a mild tone. I was talking about a little restaurant. At that Henry’s, it’s all very good of course, but it’s not really a restaurant, is it? More like a … soup-kitchen! – Do you mean Weber’s,18 then? – Oh no, sir! I’m talking about a good restaurant! Weber’s is in the rue Royale and it’s not a real restaurant, it’s only a flashy big café. And I’m sure they don’t
even serve you properly. I don’t think they’ve even got table-cloths! They just bring it along and plunk it down in front of you, just like that. – Was it Cirro’s? – Well now, Françoise said smiling, I’m pretty sure that as far as cookery, what they go in for is ladies of virtue. (To Françoise, ‘virtue’ meant ‘easy virtue’.) Well, I mean, it’s for the young ones, isn’t it?’ In her views of famous chefs, we could see that, for all her air of simplicity, Françoise was as devastating a ‘colleague’ as the most envious and self-centred actress towards her peers. But we felt she had a proper sense of her art and a respect for tradition when she added, ‘No, it was a restaurant where the cooking looked nice, like right and proper, home cooking sort of thing. But still a big sort of a place. You should see the business they do, the money they make, the pennies they rake in! (The economical Françoise always spoke in pennies, leaving the golden louis to the bankrupt.) You know, Madame, up on the big boulevards, along on the right there, set back a little bit …’ The restaurant of which she was speaking with such fair-mindedness mingled with pride and nonchalance turned out to be the Café Anglais!19
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 8