In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  These invitations to tea, to those events which had once caused me the sadness of seeing Gilberte leave me to go home early, were not the only way in which I was now included in her life. M. and Mme Swann allowed me to be part of Gilberte’s outings with her mother, either a carriage drive or a matinée at the theatre, which had prevented her from coming to the Champs-Élysées and so deprived me of her on those days when I hung about alone on the lawns or near the merry-go-round; not only did I have my place in her parents’ landau but I was the one they asked whether I preferred to go to a play, a dancing lesson at the house of one of Gilberte’s friends, a social gathering at the house of one of the Swanns’ own friends (what Mme Swann called in her English a little ‘meeting’) or to see the Tombs of the Kings at Saint-Denis.

  On days when I was going out with the Swanns, I was also invited to what Mme Swann called ‘the lunch’. As the Swanns’ invitation was for half-past twelve and my parents lunched at a quarter-past eleven, it was after they had left the table that I would set off for the Swanns’ luxurious district, which was rather deserted at any hour of the day but especially so at this time when everybody else was indoors. Even on frosty days in winter, if it was fine, adjusting from time to time the knot in my magnificent tie from Charvet’s, and making sure the gloss on my patent-leather boots remained unsullied, I loitered about the broad avenues, in the hope that it would soon be twenty-seven minutes past twelve. From a distance, I could see the leafless trees in the Swanns’ little front garden, sparkling in the sunshine as though white with frost. There were only two of these trees; but the untoward hour made it a novel spectacle for me. Such pleasures from the natural world, sharpened for me by the departure from habit and even by hunger, were mixed with the overwhelming prospect of lunch at Mme Swann’s; this prospect, though it dominated those other pleasures, did not diminish them; it exploited them, turned them into fashionable accessories. So although that time of day, when I did not normally notice fine weather, cold air and winter light, gave me the feeling of having just discovered them, they also felt like a mere preface to the eggs Béchamel, a sort of patina, an icy pink glaze added to the outside of that mysterious sanctum, the house where Mme Swann lived, inside which all would be warmth, perfumes and flowers.

  By half-past twelve, I would have plucked up the courage to enter the house which, like a great Christmas stocking, seemed to promise supernatural delights. The French word Noël, by the way, was never heard from the lips of Mme Swann or Gilberte. They had replaced it by the English word and spoke of le pudding de Christmas, of the présents de Christmas which they had been given, of going away (which gave me an unbearable pang) pour Christmas. At home, it would have been beneath my dignity to speak of Noël; and I went about talking of le Christmas, in the teeth of my father’s ridicule.

  Once inside, my sole encounter at first was with a footman, who walked me through a series of spacious drawing-rooms, before putting me into a little one, which was uninhabited and was beginning to bask in the blue afternoon from its windows; there I was left in the company of orchids, roses and violets which, like people who stand waiting beside you but do not know you, did not break the silence, which their individuality as live things only made the more striking, while they looked shiveringly glad of the warmth of a fire of glowing coals, preciously laid behind a pane of clear crystal, in a trough of white marble, into which now and then crumbled its dangerous rubies.

  Having sat down, I jumped up each time I heard the door open – but it was just a second footman, then a third; and the only outcome of these pointlessly thrilling toings and froings was a few coals added to the fire or a drop of water to the vases. The footmen went away and I was left alone again, behind the closed door that Mme Swann was bound to come and open soon. I would have been in less trepidation in an enchanter’s cavern than in this little ante-room with its fire, which might, I felt, have been working Klingsor’s magic transmutations.40 At the sound of more footsteps, I sat where I was, it must be just another footman – it was M. Swann! ‘My dear fellow, what’s this! All by yourself? Ah, that wife of mine, you know, she’s never been very good at knowing what time it is. Ten to one already. Getting later every day. You mark my words – she’ll come drifting in here, thinking she’s got plenty of time to spare.’ Since he was still subject to neuro-arthritis and had become rather ridiculous, the fact of having such an unpunctual wife, who came home inordinately late from the Bois de Boulogne, wasted hours at her dressmaker’s and was never in time for lunch, worried Swann for his stomach but flattered his self-esteem.

  He would show me his latest acquisitions and explain their interesting features; but in the heat of such a moment, on an unusually empty stomach, my mind, though agitated, was a vacuum, and though I was capable of talking, I was incapable of hearing. And anyway, for me the main thing about the works he owned was that they lived with him and belonged to this thrilling time just before lunch. Even if the Mona Lisa had figured among them, it would not have given me more joy than one of Mme Swann’s tea-gowns or her bottles of smelling-salts.

  I sat waiting, either alone or with Swann, but often with Gilberte, who came in to sit with us. I was sure that the arrival of Mme Swann, foreshadowed by so many majestic entrances, would have to be a stupendous event. I expected it at each creak of a floorboard. But our expectations are always higher than the tallest cathedral, the mightiest wave in a storm, the highest leap of a dancer; and after all these liveried footmen, whose comings and goings were like those of extras on the stage preparing the climactic coming of the Queen, but thereby making it something of an anticlimax, when Mme Swann did slip in, wearing her short otter-skin coat, her veil lowered over her nose which glowed from the cold outside, she broke all the promises that the wait had made to my imagination.

  However, if she had spent all morning at home, she would come into the drawing-room wearing a tea-gown in a light shade of crêpe de Chine, which to my eye was more sophisticated than any evening gown.

  On certain days, the Swanns would decide to stay at home all afternoon. So, as we had been so late having lunch, I could watch the sunlight quickly dwindle up the wall of the little garden, drawing with it the end of this day, which earlier had seemed to me destined to be different from other days. And despite the lamps of all shapes and sizes, glowing on their appointed altars all about the room, brought in by the servants and set on sideboards, teapoys, corner shelves, little low tables, as though for the enactment of some mysterious rite, our conversation produced nothing out of the ordinary, and I would go off home, taking with me that feeling of having been let down which children often experience after Midnight Mass.

  However, that disappointment was really only in the mind. I was usually radiant with joy in the Swanns’ house, for if Gilberte had not yet joined us, she might come in at any moment and for hours on end let me enjoy her words, her attentive gaze and smile, as I had first seen them at Combray. The greatest of my displeasures was a touch of mild jealousy if she disappeared, as she quite often did, up an inner staircase leading to large rooms on the floor above. Unable to leave the drawing-room, like an actress’s lover who has his seat in the stalls, but can only imagine the disquieting things that may be happening in the wings or the green-room, I sat with Swann and, in a voice which was not without a trace of anxiety, asked cunningly disguised questions about that other part of the house. He explained that the room where she sometimes went was the linen-room, offered to show it to me and promised that, whenever she had to go there, he would make sure she took me with her. With these words and the relief they brought me, he suddenly bridged for me one of those dreadful chasms within the heart, which put such a distance between us and the woman we love. It was a moment when I believed my affection for him was even stronger than my affection for Gilberte. For Swann was the master of his daughter, and it was he who gave her to me; whereas, left to her own devices, she could at times withhold herself from me; I did not have the direct power over her that I could exercise indire
ctly through him. And since I loved her, I could only ever see her through the confused desire for more of her, which when you are with the person you love, deprives you of the feeling of loving.

  Mostly, though, we did not stay in; we went for a drive. Sometimes, before going to change, Mme Swann would sit down at the piano. The fingers of her lovely hands, emerging from the sleeves of her tea-gown in crêpe de Chine, pink, white or at times in brighter colours, wandered on the keyboard with that wistfulness of which her eyes were so full, and her heart so empty. It was on one of those days that she happened to play the part of the Vinteuil sonata with the little phrase that Swann had once loved so much. Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression ‘hearing something for the first time’ is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What is missing the first time is probably not understanding, but memory. Our memory-span, relative to the complexity of the impressions which assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal, as short-lived as the memory of a sleeping man who has a thousand thoughts which he instantly forgets, or the memory of a man in his dotage, who cannot retain for more than a minute anything he has been told. Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does gradually gather in the mind; and with pieces of music heard only two or three times, one is like the schoolboy who, though he has read over his lesson a few times before falling asleep, is convinced he still does not know it, but can then recite it word for word when he wakes up the following morning. Except that, in my case, I had heard nothing of the sonata until that moment; and whereas Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, it was as ungraspable to my perception as someone’s name that you try to remember, when the mind retrieves nothing but a vacuum, into which, without your assistance, an hour after you stop thinking about them, the complete set of syllables that you have been vainly groping about for suddenly leaps. Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first. So not only was I wrong in my belief that, since Mme Swann had played over for me the most celebrated phrase, the work had nothing more to reveal to me (the result of which was that, for a long time afterwards, showing all the stupidity of those who expect that their first sight of Saint Mark’s in Venice will afford them no surprise, because they have seen the shape of its domes in photographs, I made no further attempt to listen to it); but more importantly, even after I had listened to the whole sonata from beginning to end, it was still almost entirely invisible to me, like those indistinct fragments of a building which are all one can make out in the misty distance. Therein lies the source of the melancholy that accompanies our discovery of such works, as of all things which can come to fruition only through time. By the time I had come to have access to the most secret parts of Vinteuil’s sonata, everything in it which I had noticed and preferred at first was already beginning to be lost to me, carried away by habit out of the reach of my sensibility. Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirety – it was an image of life. But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first. In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts which most resemble other works with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase which, because its shape had been too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one which comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it. This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece which is really new. This is why the man of genius, wishing to avoid the discontents of being unrecognized in his own day, may persuade himself that, since his contemporaries lack the necessary hindsight, works written for posterity should be read only by posterity, rather as there are certain paintings which should not be looked at too close up. However, any craven urge to avoid being misjudged is pointless, as misjudgment is unavoidable. What makes it difficult for a work of genius to be admired at once is the fact that its creator is out of the ordinary, that hardly anyone is like him. It is his work itself which, by fertilizing the rare spirits capable of appreciating it, will make them grow and multiply. It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12, 13, 14 and 15) which, over fifty years, created and expanded the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. What is known as posterity is the work’s own posterity. The creator of the work of genius must make no compromises with, must take no account of, other geniuses who may at the same period be following their own course towards creating for the future a more aware public, which will reward other geniuses but not himself; the work has to create its own posterity. So if this work were to be held back, in the hope of its being known only to posterity, it would be greeted not by posterity, but by an assembly of its contemporaries who simply happened to be living fifty years later. Which is why the artist who wishes his work to find its own way must do what Vinteuil had done, and launch it as far as possible towards the unknown depths of the distant future. There lies the masterpiece’s true element; and yet, though poor judges can make the mistake of taking no account of the time to come, better judges can at times be tempted by the perilous precaution of taking too much account of it. It is no doubt easy to suffer from an illusion analogous to the one which cancels the differences between all things when seen on a distant horizon, and to entertain the notion that all the revolutions which have ever taken place in painting or music actually had in common a respect for certain rules, and that whatever is right under our nose – Impressionism, dissonance for dissonance’s sake, the exclusive use of the Chinese scale, Cubism, Futurism – shows a flagrant dissimilarity with everything that has gone before. However, when we look at what has gone before, we fail to reflect that a long-drawn-out process of assimilation has turned it all into a substance which, though it is varied, we see as homogeneous, in which Hugo rubs shoulders with Molière. Imagine a youth reading a horoscope forecasting his own middle age, with all the preposterous incongruities he would see in it, in his ignorance of the years to come and the changes they must bring about in him. However, not all horoscopes turn out to be true; and the obligation to take into account the factor of the future, when devising the sum of a work of art’s beauties, must affect our judgment with something as unpredictable, and therefore as devoid of real interest, as any other prophecy which is never fulfilled, an outcome which implies no intellectual mediocrity in the prophet, since whatever it is that gives or denies existence to the possible may not necessarily lie within the scope of the genius. It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or aeroplanes had a future, as it is possible to be an acute psychologist, yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be fore
seen by someone much less gifted.

  Though I did not understand the sonata, I was delighted to hear Mme Swann play. Her touch on the keyboard, like her tea-gown, like her perfume drifting down the stairs, like her coats, like her chrysanthemums, seemed to me to belong to a mysterious and individual whole, that existed in a world far above the one in which the mind can analyse talent. ‘That sonata of Vinteuil’s is nice, isn’t it? Swann said to me. That moment of nightfall under the trees, when the violin arpeggios make everything feel cool. You must admit, it’s very pretty. It’s captured the whole static quality of moonlight, which is moonlight’s most basic quality. It’s not surprising that a sunlight-treatment such as my wife is taking at the moment should act on the muscles, given that moonlight prevents leaves from moving. That’s what’s so neatly caught by that little phrase – the Bois de Boulogne in a catatonic trance. It’s even more striking by the seaside, because then you’ve got the muted responses of the waves, and they can be heard quite distinctly of course, since nothing else can move. In Paris it’s just the opposite: merely a strange glow, barely noticeable, on the fronts of the great buildings, and that faint glare in the sky, like the reflection from a house on fire, colourless and dangerless, that hint of some immense but banal happening somewhere … I must say, though, that the little phrase, the whole sonata, for that matter, does take place in the Bois de Boulogne – I mean, in the gruppetto you can clearly hear someone’s voice saying, “There’s almost enough light to read the paper by!” ’ Swann’s words might have had the result of distorting my eventual understanding of the sonata, as music is so versatile, too prone to suggestion to reject entirely whatever somebody hints we might hear in it. But I realized, from other things he said, that the leaves at night in their dense stillness were none other than the ones under which, on many an evening, dining in restaurants on the outskirts of Paris, he had sat listening to the little phrase. Instead of the depth of meaning which he had so often sought in it, what it now brought back to him was all that serried foliage, leafy motifs winding and painted all about it, leaves that the phrase made him yearn to go and see, because it seemed to live on inside them like a soul; it brought back the whole springtime of that past year which, in a fever of sorrow, he had been too hapless to savour, and which it had kept for him, as one keeps for an invalid the nice things he has been too unwell to eat. The Vinteuil sonata could tell Swann of the charm of certain nights in the Bois de Boulogne, about which it would have been pointless to ask Odette, although she had been no less with him on those nights than the little phrase. But she had only been sitting beside him (whereas the theme by Vinteuil was inside him); and even if she had been gifted with vastly greater understanding, she would have been unable to see what cannot be externalized for anyone (at least, I believed for a long time that this was a rule to which there were no exceptions). ‘But I mean, it is rather a neat touch, isn’t it, Swann said, that there can be reflections from sound as there are from water or from a mirror? Mind you, the only things that phrase of Vinteuil’s shows me now are all the things I didn’t pay attention to at the time. It’s swapped them for my worries and my love-affairs, which it has completely forgotten. – Charles! If you ask me, it sounds as though what you’re saying is not very complimentary to me! – Not complimentary! Aren’t women wonderful! I’m merely trying to point out to this young fellow here that what music shows, to me at any rate, is nothing like “The Will-in-Itself” or “The Synthesis of the Infinite”, but something like the palm house at the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, with old Verdurin in his frock-coat. I’ll have you know, that little phrase has come and taken me out to dine dozens of times at Armenonville. God knows it’s far nicer than going out there to dine with Mme de Cambremer.’ ‘That’s a lady who was said to have lost her heart to Charles,’ said Mme Swann, laughing, and in the same tone of voice in which she had just said of Vermeer of Delft, whom I was surprised to see she knew of, ‘Well, you see, that gentleman over there was greatly interested in that painter at the time when he was courting me. Isn’t that so, Charles my love? – Please do not take the name of Mme de Cambremer in vain, said Swann, who was really quite flattered. – I’m only repeating what I’ve heard said. Actually, she’s supposed to be very clever, though I’ve never met her. I believe she’s very pushing (here Mme Swann lapsed again into English), which really surprises me in a woman who’s clever. Anyway, everyone says she was head over heels in love with you – there’s nothing in that to take offence at.’ Swann turned a very obvious deaf ear, which served both to confirm the suggestion and to show his smugness. ‘Well,’ said Mme Swann, with mock peevishness, ‘since my playing reminds you of the Zoo, perhaps we could go there this afternoon, if this young man feels like an outing? It’s a nice day and you, my love, could relive your memories! Speaking of the Zoo, do you know that this young fellow was under the apprehension that we were very fond of someone that I cut dead as often as I can – Mme Blatin, can you imagine! I think it’s degrading for people to think she’s a friend of ours. Even nice Dr Cottard, who wouldn’t speak evil of a soul, says the woman’s a pest. – Isn’t she ghastly! Her sole redeeming feature is that she’s the image of Savonarola. She’s exactly the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommeo.’ There was nothing implausible in this quirk of Swann’s, of seeing likenesses of real people in paintings: even what we call an individual expression is something general (as we discover to our chagrin when we are in love, and wish to believe in the unique reality of the individual), something which may well have manifested itself at different periods. If Swann was to be believed, the Journey of the Magi, anachronistic enough when Benozzo Gozzoli painted the faces of the Medici brothers into it, was even more in advance of its time, as it contained, he said, the portraits of a host of people, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, dating not just from fifteen centuries later than the Nativity, but from four centuries after the time of the painter himself. According to Swann, not one notable Parisian was missing from the retinue of the Magi, as in that scene from a play by Sardou in which, for the sake of their friendship with the playwright and the leading lady, so as to be in the fashion, but also for fun, all the men about town, the most famous doctors, politicians and lawyers took turns in playing a tiny non-speaking part, each of them being on stage at a different performance.41 ‘But I don’t see Mme Blatin’s connection with the Zoo. – Oh, it’s obvious! – You mean she’s got a sky-blue backside like a monkey? – Charles, you’re being indecent! No, I was remembering what that Singhalese chap said to her that time. Tell him, it’s really such a lovely little story. – It’s too stupid. You see, Mme Blatin likes to address people in a way which she thinks is friendly, but which gives the impression that she’s talking down to them. – What our neighbours across the Channel call patronizing, Odette interrupted. – So recently she went to the Zoo, where there was this exhibition being given by black fellows, from Ceylon, I think, or so I’m told by my wife, who’s much better at ethnography than I am. – Charles, do stop being facetious. – I’m not being facetious in the slightest. So, there she is, saying to this black fellow, “Good morning, blackie!” – Isn’t it just ducky? – Well, this form of speech was not to the black fellow’s liking – “Me blackie,” he bellowed at Mme Blatin, “you camel!” – I think that’s a very funny story! I just love that story! Isn’t it lovely? Can’t you just see Mme Blatin’s face: “Me blackie, you camel!” ’ I expressed a strong desire to go and see the Singhalese, one of whom had called Mme Blatin a camel. Not that I had the slightest interest in them. But I knew that, in going to and from the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, we would cross the allée des Acacias, where I had once distantly doted on Mme Swann; and I hoped that Coquelin’s42 half-caste friend, to whom I had always hoped in vain to show off by bowing to Odette as she passed, would see me now sitting by her side in the victoria.