In love, it is not only the causes of catastrophe which may lie for ever beyond our grasp: just as often we remain in ignorance of the whys and wherefores of sudden outcomes which are happier – such as the one that Gilberte’s letter brought to me – or rather, outcomes which appear to be happy, as there are few truly happy outcomes in the life of a feeling which can generally look for no better reward than a shift in the site of the pain it entails. At times, however, a temporary remission is granted, and for a while one may have the illusion of being cured.
As for the letter itself (on which Françoise refused to recognize the name Gilberte, because the G leaning against an undotted i was so embellished that it looked more like an A, while the last part of the name ran on into a fancy elongated flourish), if it is deemed that a rational explanation is required for the change of heart which it signalled, and which brought me such joy, perhaps it will be said I owed it in part to an incident which I had actually expected would be the sort of thing to damn me for ever in the sight of the Swanns. Not long before, at a moment when Professor Cottard happened to be with me – now that I was following his instructions, my parents had called him in again –, Bloch had come up to see me. The consultation was over and, since Dr Cottard, who was staying to dine with my parents, was sitting with me like any visitor, Bloch too was allowed in. In the course of conversation, Bloch having told how he had heard from someone whom he had met at dinner the previous night, someone who was very close to Mme Swann, that she was very fond of me, I knew I should tell him he was quite certainly mistaken, and thus, in accordance with the scruple which had moved me to speak of the same thing to M. de Norpois, and in case Mme Swann should think I was a liar, have it acknowledged once for all that I did not know her, and had never so much as spoken to her. But I did not have the courage to correct Bloch’s error, because I could see well enough it was a deliberate one, and because I knew that, in inventing something that Mme Swann could never in fact have said, he was trying to show himself in a flattering light by saying another thing which was untrue: that he had dined with a lady who was a friend of Mme Swann’s. However, whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know Mme Swann but would very much like to, had been careful not to mention me to her, Cottard, who was her doctor, having deduced from Bloch’s statement that she knew me very well and liked me, said to himself that, if he told her the next time he saw her that I was a charming fellow and that he knew me well, he would not be pushing me forward but would be putting himself in a good light, two reasons which persuaded him to put in a good word for me with Odette at the first opportunity.
And so that flat opened to me, sending the perfume used by Mme Swann down the stairs to greet me, and welcoming me with an even more fragrant charm, which was the specific and forlorn flavour of the life led by Gilberte. Before long, when I asked the once implacable concierge, now transformed into a benevolent Eumenid, whether I could go upstairs, he took to raising his cap with an auspicious hand which showed my wish was granted. Soon, when I had spent a whole summer afternoon in Gilberte’s room, it fell to me to open the very windows which, from the outside, had once interposed between me and treasures not meant for me a gleaming, haughty and superficial glance, which had seemed like the gaze of the Swanns themselves; yet now I was the one to let some fresh air in or even, if it was her mother’s at-home day, to lean out alongside Gilberte and see the ladies as they arrived, stepping out of a carriage and sometimes glancing up to wave to me, as though thinking I was a nephew of their hostess. At such moments, Gilberte’s plaits would touch my cheek. Her hair seemed to me, in the delicacy of its grain, both natural and supernatural; and in the power of its artful foliations I saw a masterwork crafted from grasses grown in Paradise. If I could have had even the tiniest sample of it, a heavenly herbarium would have been the only fitting repository for it. But since I could not hope to possess a real length of her hair, if I could have had just a photograph of it, how much more precious it would have been than any picture of little flowers drawn by Leonardo! To this end, I made compromising overtures to family friends of the Swanns and even to photographers, which did not get me what I wanted, but made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
Whenever I stepped into the Swanns’ dim ante-room, where the atmosphere thrilled with the perpetual possibility of meeting one or other of Gilberte’s parents, who had for so long prevented me from seeing her, an encounter more awesome but more longed-for than a glimpse of the King would have been at Versailles (and where I would trip over a huge seven-branched coat-stand like the Candlestick in Scripture,28 before effusively greeting a footman who sat in his long grey frock-coat on the firewood chest and whom I mistook in the half-dark for Mme Swann), if she or her husband did happen to cross my path at that moment, my hand was shaken, I was smiled upon and spoken to in an unirritated voice:
‘Good afternoon! Gilberte knows you’re here, does she? Good, good, that’s fine, then.’ Both of her parents, by the way, said ‘Good aft’noon,’ pronouncing afternoon without the middle syllable, which of course, as soon as I was back at home, it became my incessant pastime and pleasure to omit too.
But the most important thing was that the tea-parties to which Gilberte’s girl-friends were invited, and which had for such a long time seemed the most impregnable of the many barriers separating her from me, had now become an opportunity for being with her. To these functions I was summoned, as a still quite recent acquaintance, on a variety of different notepapers. One of them was embossed with a blue poodle over a humorous English motto ending in an exclamation-mark; another was stamped with a ship’s anchor. Once, the monogram G.S., hugely magnified and elongated, was bounded by a rectangle running right down the page from top to bottom; on other occasions, it would be the name Gilberte either scrawled across one corner in golden letters imitating her signature and final flourish, and sheltering under an open umbrella printed in black, or else enclosed inside a motif in the shape of a Chinaman’s hat, on which the name figured in capital letters none of which was individually legible. And as her range of note-papers, though extensive, was not inexhaustible, after a few weeks I would receive an invitation written on the one she had sent first, with the motto Per viam rectam under the helmeted knight on his seal of burnished silver. In those days, I assumed her choice of this one or that one on particular days was determined by certain rites. But now I think she just tried to remember the ones she had already sent, so as to be sure of letting the longest possible time elapse before sending another of the same to any of the recipients, or at least to anyone for whom she did not mind taking a little trouble. Because some of the friends invited to her teas attended different lessons at different times of the afternoon, and had to leave just as others were arriving, on my way up the stairs I could hear the murmur of voices from the ante-room; and this, combined with the emotional disturbance created by the awe-inspiring ceremony which was about to be enacted before me, suddenly severed the links that joined me to my former life and, long before I reached the Swanns’ floor, deprived me of the ability to remember to take off my scarf as soon as I was indoors in the warmth, and to keep an eye on the time so as not to be late home. The staircase itself, entirely of wood and of the style favoured at the time by certain speculative builders who liked imitation Renaissance, so long Odette’s ideal but soon to be abandoned by her, was adorned with a notice saying It is Forbidden to Use the Lift for Coming Down, the like of which had never been seen in the house we lived in; and it impressed me as a thing of such magnificence that I told my parents it was a genuine antique staircase, acquired by M. Swann and brought there by him from somewhere very far away. My respect for the truth was so great that, even if I had known this information to be untrue, I would still have said the same thing, for this was the only way to have my family share the esteem inspired in me by the dignity of the Swanns’ staircase. It was a reasoning akin to that which advises one, when dealing with an ignoramus who cannot see the genius of a great doctor, to say nothing o
f his inability to cure the common cold. But since I was very inobservant, being generally ignorant of the names and species of the most everyday things, knowing only that if they had anything to do with the Swanns they must be quite out of the ordinary, it did not strike me as a certainty that, in assuring my parents of the aesthetic value and distant origin of this staircase, I was telling a lie. Not a certainty; but perhaps a probability, as I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me with the words: ‘I know those kind of houses, and if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Swann just rents a few floors – they were all built by Berlier.’29 He added that he had at one time thought of renting a flat in one of them, but had changed his mind because they were not really comfortable, and the main entrance was badly lit. Thus spake my father; but, knowing instinctively that my mind must make whatever sacrifices might be necessary to the prestige of the Swanns and my own happiness, I exercised the authority of my inner self and, despite what I had just heard, put behind me once and for all, as a true Catholic might shun Renan’s Life of Jesus,30 the corrosive notion that the Swanns’ flat was a perfectly ordinary flat, a flat that we ourselves might have lived in.
So on Gilberte’s afternoon-tea days, I climbed that staircase, step by step, divested already of memory and the power of thought, reduced to a creature of the crudest reflexes, and came at last to the level where the fragrance of Mme Swann’s perfume floated. My mind was full of the majestic chocolate-cake set in the circle of side-plates and little grey damask napkins, required by etiquette and peculiar to the Swanns. But the workings of this regulated and unchanging arrangement, like those of Kant’s necessary universe, seemed to depend on a supreme act of free will. That is, once we were all gathered in Gilberte’s little sitting-room, she would dart a glance at the clock and say:
‘Look here, it’s been hours since lunch-time, dinner’s not till eight, and I’m feeling quite peckish. Would anyone care to join me?’
Whereupon, she would show us through to the dining-room, which was as dim as an Asian temple interior as Rembrandt might have painted it, and was dominated by the architectural splendour of a cake, as cheerful and familiar as it was imposing, which seemed to be standing there as though this day was an ordinary day, just in case Gilberte might have felt a passing urge to demolish its chocolate battlements and lay waste the slopes of its steep, dark ramparts, baked like the bastions of Darius’ palace. The best thing was that, in setting about the destruction of her Ninevite cake-castle, Gilberte was motivated not only by the urges of her own appetite; she inquired also about mine, as she salvaged for me from the crumbling ruins a whole wall varnished and studded with scarlet fruit, in the Oriental style. She even asked me what time my parents dined, as though I knew something about it, as though the emotional upset from which I was suffering could enable any sensation such as lack of appetite or hunger, any notion of dinner or family, to survive in my vacant memory and paralysed stomach. Unfortunately this paralysis was only temporary; and there would come a time when cakes which I consumed without noticing them would have to be digested. But that moment was still in the future; and in the present, Gilberte made ‘my tea’. I drank huge quantities of it, although normally a single cup of tea would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. So it was that my mother had come to remark, ‘It’s a worry – as sure as that boy goes to the Swanns’ he comes home sick.’ But while I was at the Swanns’ I would have been unable to say whether or not it was really tea I was drinking. And even if I had known, I would have gone on drinking it; for even if I had been restored momentarily to proper awareness of the present, this would not have given me back the ability to remember the past or foresee the future. My imagination was incapable of stretching to the remote moment when I might feel tired or think of going to bed.
Not all of Gilberte’s other guests were so tipsy with excitement that making up their minds was impossible. Some of these girls actually declined the offer of tea! At which, Gilberte would say a thing that people said a lot at that time, ‘Well, my tea doesn’t seem to be a great winner, does it?’ Then, in an effort to make the occasion look less ceremonial, she shifted a few of the chairs set at regular intervals about the table, adding, ‘For goodness sake, we look as though we’re at a wedding breakfast! Aren’t servants stupid!’
She nibbled her cake, sitting sideways on an X-shaped seat which stood at an awkward angle to the table. And if Mme Swann, having just seen one of her visitors out – her at-homes were usually on the same days as Gilberte’s tea-parties – should look in quickly, sometimes in blue velvet, often in a dress of black satin covered in white lace, she would say in a tone of surprise, that suggested Gilberte might have had all those little cakes to eat without her mother knowing about it:
‘What’s this! Doesn’t that look scrumptious! It makes my mouth water to see you all sitting here eating cake.
– Well, please join us, Mama, Gilberte would reply.
– You know I can’t, my precious. Whatever would all my ladies say? I’ve still got Mme Trombert, Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps – you know how the visits of dear Mme Bontemps are never very brief, and she’s just arrived. What would these good ladies have to say if I left them in the lurch? But when they’ve gone, if nobody else comes, then I’ll come back and have a nice chat with you all. That would be so much more to my liking! I think I deserve a little rest – I’ve had forty-five visitors today, and of those forty-five at least forty-two have talked about Gérôme’s new painting!31 Then, turning to me as she made ready to return to her ladies, she added, Look, why don’t you drop in one of these days? You could have your cup of tea with Gilberte. She knows how you like it, the way you have it at home in your own little studio.’ She made it sound as though what I was seeking in this world of mystery was something as familiar to me as my own habits (if my supposed liking for tea could be called that; and as for the alleged ‘studio’, I was unclear whether I had one or not). ‘So, when will you come? Tomorrow? We’ll have toast for you that’s as good as you can get at Colombin’s.32 No, you really can’t? Well, you’re a selfish thing!’ She delivered this last statement in tones reminiscent of the mincing tyranny of Mme Verdurin, for Odette, now that she was beginning to have a salon of her own, had started to ape some of that lady’s ways. Since both ‘Colombin’ and the English word ‘toast’ were utterly obscure to me, her promise could not make her house more attractive to me. As for the eulogy she then delivered of our old ‘nurse’, my momentary inability to understand whom she was referring to may appear somewhat stranger, given that the word is now used by everyone, possibly even in Combray. Despite my ignorance of English, I soon grasped that it meant Françoise. Whereas at the Champs-Élysées I had been so anxious about the bad impression Françoise must have made, I now learned from Mme Swann that what had predisposed her and her husband in my favour was everything Gilberte had told them about my ‘nurse’: ‘It’s pretty clear that she’s devoted to you, that she’s just perfect!’ (My opinion of Françoise changed instantly, one effect of which was that it no longer seemed so essential to me to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a hat with a feather in it.) I deduced too, from certain words that Mme Swann spoke about Mme Blatin, whose kindness she praised and whose visits she dreaded, that to have been on friendly terms with the lady would have been of less value to me than I had thought, and would in no way have improved my standing with the Swanns.
Though I had begun, full of this tremulous respect and joy, to explore the enchanted domain which had just given me the freedom of its hitherto forbidden avenues, it was only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The realm in which I was now welcomed was itself encompassed by another even more mysterious one, in which Swann and his wife had their supernatural being, and which, if we chanced to meet, going through the ante-room in our different directions, closed behind them again, as soon as they had shaken my hand. However, soon I too had access to their Inner Sanctum. For instance, if Gilberte was not at home but her parents were, they wo
uld ask who it was at the door; and having been told it was me, they would have me sent in to see them, with the aim of asking me to influence their daughter towards a certain course of action in some matter or other. I remembered the exhaustive, persuasive screed which I had not long since sent to M. Swann, and to which he had never deigned to reply. I was struck by the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart in bringing about the slightest change in people, in reducing a single one of the difficulties which life, left to its own devices and in ways that escape us, manages to resolve so easily. My new status as friend of Gilberte, capable of influencing her for the better, put me in the favourable position of someone who happened to be the school-friend of a king’s son, as well as being always top of the class, and who, because of those fortuitous facts, now has the run of the Palace and private audiences in the Throne-room: with infinite kindness, and as though he was not much occupied with lofty considerations, Swann would usher me into his study and speak to me for an hour about things which my state of emotional turmoil prevented me from understanding a single word of, and to which I could reply only with stammerings, diffident dumbness and sudden daring outbursts of short-winded incoherence; thinking they might interest me, he showed me books and finely wrought objects, the beauty of which, I was prospectively convinced, must infinitely surpass all the holdings of the Louvre and the Bibliothèque nationale, impossible though it was for me to view these. At such moments, the Swanns’ butler would have endeared himself to me had he asked me to hand over my watch, my tie-pin and my boots, or if he had begged me to sign a deed recognizing him as my heir. The state I was in is described perfectly by a fine colloquialism – I didn’t know whether I was coming or going! – the coiner of which is as unknown as the author of the greatest epic poems, but which, like them, and pace the theory of Wolf,33 must have had an originator, one of those modest creative spirits who turn up every now and then to enrich the rest of us with a felicitous expression like ‘putting a name to a face’, but whose own face we can never put a name to. However long I was closeted with Swann, all I ever got from these moments was a feeling of surprise at the utter non-achievement they led to, the total lack of satisfying outcome I derived from the hours spent in the enchanted dwelling. Not that my disappointment came from any deficiency in the masterpieces he showed me, or the impossibility of forcing my distracted eye to focus on them. It was not the intrinsic beauty of these things which made it miraculous for me to be in Swann’s study; it was that, adhering to the things (which could have been the ugliest imaginable), there was the special, sad, thrilling emotion which I had invested in this place for so many years, and of which it was still redolent. Nor was it Mme Swann’s multitude of mirrors, silver brushes and little shrines to Saint Anthony of Padua, painted or sculpted by friends of hers who counted among the finest artists, which filled me with the knowledge of my unworthiness and her own regal graciousness, whenever she received me for a moment in her room, where three beautiful and imposing creatures, her first, her second and her third maids, were smiling and laying out wonderful garments, and to which I wended my way, when the footman in breeches and hose had conveyed to me the injunction that Madame wished to speak to me, along a winding corridor that was remotely perfumed by the precious essences wafting the constant current of their sweet scents all the way from her dressing-room.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 11