In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  While Gilberte had gone off to get ready to go out, M. and Mme Swann would sit with me in the drawing-room and enjoy telling me about the rare virtues of their daughter. Everything I could see of her for myself seemed to prove they spoke nothing but the truth. I noticed little acts of thoughtful kindness, which confirmed what her mother had said about how she treated not only her friends but the servants and the poor, and a desire to please, premeditated considerateness, a reluctance to give offence, all of which meant she often put herself out so as to do inconspicuous favours. She had done some embroidery for our barley-sugar woman at the Champs-Élysées, and made a point of taking it to her, though it was snowing, wanting to deliver it in person and without a day’s delay. Her father said, ‘I can tell you, that girl has a heart of gold, but she keeps it well hidden.’ Young as she was, she seemed much more sensible than her parents. When Swann spoke about his wife’s grand acquaintances, Gilberte would turn away and say nothing. But she did this without appearing to disapprove, as she felt it would be impossible to criticize her father in any way. Once when I mentioned Mlle Vinteuil, Gilberte said:

  ‘She’s a person I’ll never have anything to do with. Because she wasn’t nice to her father – I’ve heard she made him unhappy. You do agree, don’t you? You’d be just as incapable as I am of wanting to outlive your father by a single day, wouldn’t you? It’s quite natural – I mean, how could anyone ever forget someone they’ve always loved?’

  And on another occasion when she had been more than usually loving with Swann, and I had referred to this after he had left us alone together, she replied:

  ‘Yes, poor Papa. It will soon be the anniversary of the death of his father. So you can appreciate what he must be feeling. You understand what it’s like. We feel the same about things like that, you and I, don’t we? I’m just trying to be less of a bother to him than usual. – But he doesn’t think you’re a bother! He thinks you’re perfect! – Dear Papa, it’s just because he’s so kind-hearted.’

  Her parents did not sing the virtues only of Gilberte, the girl who in my imagination, long before I had even set eyes on her, used to appear standing in front of a church, in a landscape somewhere in the Île-de-France,43 until the day when my dreams were replaced by memories and I saw her always in front of a hedge of pink hawthorn, beside the steep little lane that led up to the Méséglise way. There came a day when I asked Mme Swann, taking great care to speak in the casual tone of a family friend asking about a child’s likes and dislikes, whether Gilberte had a particular favourite among her friends; to which her mother replied:

  ‘Well, I’m sure you must be more privy to these secrets than I am! Aren’t you the great confidant, after all? Aren’t you the great “crack”, as our English friends say?’

  When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of their fulfilment, to retain the prestige of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired. The mind is not even at liberty to remake its own earlier state, so as to compare it with the present one: the new acquaintance we have just made, the memory of those first unexpected moments, the words we have heard spoken, blocking the entrance to our consciousness, and commanding the exits from memory much more than those from imagination, act backwards against our past, which we can no longer see without their presence in it, rather than acting forwards on the still unoccupied shape of our future. For years I had been convinced that to go to the house of Mme Swann was a vague pipe-dream that would never come to pass; a quarter of an hour after first stepping into her drawing-room, it was all the former amount of time I had spent not knowing her which had become the pipe-dream, as insubstantial as a mere possibility that the fulfilment of a different possibility has abolished. How could I have gone on dreaming of her dining-room as an inconceivable place, when I could not make the slightest movement in my mind without seeing it shot through by the unbreakable beams of light, radiating to infinity, illuminating the farthest nooks and crannies of my past life, given off by the lobster à l’américaine which I had just eaten? Something similar must have happened to Swann’s way of seeing things, too: these rooms in which he sat as my host could be seen as the place where two fancied dwellings had come together and become one, not just the ideal place which my imagination had created, but another one which his jealous love, as inventive as my dreams, had so often pictured: the home which he and Odette might one day share, but which, on nights such as the one when she had invited him to her house with Forcheville to have orangeade, he had despaired of ever being able to inhabit. For Swann, what had become amalgamated into the design of the dining-room where we lunched was that inaccessible paradise, which in former years he could never imagine without being beset by a thrilling qualm at the prospect of being able to say one day to their butler the very words I could hear him speak now in a voice of slight impatience touched with a certain self-satisfaction, ‘Is Madame ready yet?’ I could never grasp my happiness, any more than he could, no doubt; and when Gilberte herself exclaimed, ‘You could never have imagined, could you, that the little girl you used to watch playing prisoners’ base, without being on speaking terms with her, would one day be a great friend, whose house you can visit any day you like?’, she spoke of a change which I could not help registering from the outside, but on which I had no inner purchase, as it was composed of two states which I could not focus on at the same time, without them becoming a single one.

  And yet my own experience told me that, because Swann had subjected that flat to such an intensity of purposeful desire, he must surely have found in it something of its former charm, just as it had not lost all its mystery for me. By entering their house, I had not completely banished from it the strange, fascinating element in which I had for such a long time imagined the Swanns having their being; I had tamed it a little, I had made it retreat in the face of the outsider I had been, the outcast to whom Mlle Swann now graciously offered a delightful, hostile and scandalized armchair; and that charm, through memory, I can still feel close to me. Is this perhaps because, while I sat waiting on those days when M. and Mme Swann invited me to have lunch and then share their afternoon outing with Gilberte, my eyes reproduced – all over the carpet, the armchairs, the sideboards, the screens and the paintings – the idea which was deeply imprinted in me, that Mme Swann, or her husband, or Gilberte were just about to come into the room? Was it because these objects have gone on living beside the Swanns in my memory and have at length absorbed something of them? Was it because, knowing the Swanns spent their lives among them, I had come to see all these things as the emblems of their special existence and of their habits, from which I had been too long excluded for their furniture not to go on seeming alien to me, even after I had been granted the boon of using it? For whatever reason, nowadays when I remember that drawing-room which Swann, without his objection to it implying in any way an intention to go against the wishes of his wife, saw as such a jumble of styles (because though its design was still based on the concept of the greenhouse-cum-workshop which had been the guiding principle of Odette’s house when he had first known her, she had begun to weed out of this medley some of the Chinese items, which she thought now a little ‘sham’, quite ‘stale’, but replacing them with a clutter of little pieces upholstered in old Louis XVI silks, to which of course were added the masterpieces brought by Swann himself from his old hôtel on the quai d’Orléans), I see its disparities in retrospect as forming a homogeneous, unified whole, as giving it an individual charm; and these are features one can never see in even the most coherent and uniform compilations left to us from the past, or in those most vividly marked by the imprint of a single person, for it is only ever we ourselves, through our be
lief that things seen have an existence of their own, who can impart to some of them a soul which lives in them, and which they then develop in us. All the fancies I had formed about the hours spent by the Swanns, different from those which other people experience, in that house which, by being to the daily tissue of their existence in time what the body is to the soul, was bound to express the unique quality of their life, were shared by whatever I saw, absorbed into the positioning of the furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the outlook from the windows, the attentions of the servants, equally thrilling and indefinable in them all. After lunch, when we went through into the drawing-room to have coffee, sitting in the broad and sunny bay-window, and Mme Swann asked me how many lumps of sugar I took, it was not just the silk-covered footstool that she moved towards me which gave off both the painful charm I used to sense in the name of Gilberte (through the pink hawthorn, then near the clump of laurels) and also the suspicion with which her parents had viewed me, and which this little footstool had apparently known of and shared so vehemently that I now felt unworthy and a little cowardly in placing my feet on its defenceless upholstery; a personal soul made it secretly one with the light of two o’clock in the afternoon, light which was unique to this bay, as it dappled our feet with its golden waves and lapped about the enchanted islands of the bluish sofas and hazy tapestries; and even the Rubens hanging above the mantelpiece glowed with the same kind of charm, almost the same potency of charm, as M. Swann’s lace-up boots and Inverness cape, the like of which I had longed to wear, and which Odette now asked him to go and change for another overcoat, so as to look more elegant when I did them the honour of going out with them. She too went to change, despite my protests that no walking-dress could possibly become her as much as the superb crêpe de Chine or silk tea-gown, in old rose or cherry, Tiepolo pink, white, mauve, green, red or yellow, self-coloured or with a design, in which she had sat with us having lunch and was now about to remove. When I told her she should wear it for going out, she would laugh, either in mockery of my naïvety or pleasure at my compliment. She apologized for having so many tea-gowns, saying they were the only garments in which she felt comfortable, then went to put on one of those breathtaking outfits that made all heads turn, after having invited me at times to choose the one I preferred to see her wear.

  Once we had left the carriage, how proud I was to walk through the Zoological Gardens beside Mme Swann! Her easy step gave a loose, lazy sway to her coat, and she rewarded my admiring glances with a slow, flirtatious smile. If we met any of Gilberte’s friends, girls or boys, they would greet us as we passed; and now I was looked upon by them as one of those blessed beings whom I had envied so much, those friends who also knew her parents and who belonged to the other part of her life, the part which took place away from the Champs-Élysées.

  Quite often as we walked along the paths of the Bois de Boulogne or the Zoological Gardens, some grand lady, one of Swann’s friends, might greet us in passing; and if he had not noticed, his wife would draw his attention, ‘Charles, haven’t you seen Mme de Montmorency?’ Though his casual smile bespoke years of friendly familiarity, he would sweep off his hat with an elegant flourish that was all his own. Sometimes the grand lady would pause, glad of the chance to be inconsequentially polite to Mme Swann, who, she knew, was well enough schooled by Swann in such things not to try taking undue advantage of it in the future. For all that, Mme Swann had acquired all the manners of the fashionable; and however elegant and dignified the grand lady might be, Odette was always her equal in them. As she stood for that moment beside the friend of her husband’s, introducing Gilberte and myself with such a serene and nonchalant air, she had such affable, unaffected poise that it would have been difficult to tell whether it was Swann’s wife or the aristocratic passer-by who was the great lady. On the day when we had been to view the Singhalese, we saw an old but still beautiful lady coming towards us, followed by two others who seemed to be escorting her; she was wrapped in a dark overcoat and wearing a little bonnet with its strings tied under the chin. ‘Now here’s someone you’ll find interesting,’ Swann told me. The old lady, now only a few feet away, was gazing at us with a smile that was all warmth and gentleness. Swann took off his hat to her, and Mme Swann, in a low curtsey, tried to kiss the hand of the lady who, looking as though she had stepped out of a portrait by Winterhalter,44 drew her up and kissed her. ‘Look, for goodness sake, will you put that hat back on,’ she said to Swann in a deepish voice that was full of a gruff friendliness. ‘I’ll present you in a moment to Her Imperial Highness,’ Mme Swann said to me. Swann took me briefly aside, while Mme Swann chatted with the Princesse about the fine weather and the animals newly arrived in the Gardens. ‘It’s Princesse Mathilde,’ he said. ‘You know, the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and Dumas. Just think, a niece of Napoleon I! Both Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia wanted to marry her. Isn’t that interesting? Have a little talk with her. I do hope, though, that she’s not going to keep us standing about here for an hour.’ ‘I met Taine45 the other day,’ Swann said to her. ‘He tells me Princesse Mathilde is no longer his friend. – He behaved like a pig,’ she growled, pronouncing cochon as though it was the name of the bishop who tried Joan of Arc.46 ‘After that article of his on the Emperor, I left my card at his house with P.P.C. on it.’47 I was as surprised as one might be on reading the correspondence of Charlotte-Elizabeth, the Princess Palatine. Princesse Mathilde, full of very French sentiments, was given to feeling them with a forthright bluntness reminiscent of Germany as it once was, a trait which may well have come to her from her mother, who was from Württemberg. She was outspoken in a rather uncouth or mannish way; but as soon as she smiled, this was softened by a languid Italian manner. These impressions were complemented by her costumes, which were so Second Empire in style that, though her reason for wearing them was no doubt only because she was attached to the fashions she had loved when young, she seemed to have made a point of wearing nothing that was historically discrepant, so as not to disappoint those who expected her to remind them of a bygone era. I prompted Swann to ask her whether she had ever known Alfred de Musset.48 ‘Hardly at all, sir,’ she told him in a voice that feigned ill-temper, the ‘sir’ being her little joke with someone she knew very well. ‘I invited him once to dinner. Seven o’clock, the invitation said. At half-past, he still not having turned up, we went in to dine. He presented himself at eight, gave me a bow, then sat there without uttering a word, and made himself scarce when dinner was done. I hadn’t so much as heard the sound of the man’s voice. Dead-drunk. Not the sort of thing to make one want to have him again.’ Swann and I were standing a little to one side. ‘I do hope this isn’t going to take too long,’ he said to me. ‘The soles of my feet are killing me. I can’t understand why my wife is keeping the conversation going like that. She’ll be the one to complain afterwards of feeling tired; but I’m the one who can’t take all this standing about.’ Mme Swann was in the process of telling Princesse Mathilde something she had learned from Mme Bontemps: that the government, having at last admitted how churlish its recent behaviour towards the Princesse had been, had decided to send her a ticket admitting her to the stands for the visit of Tsar Nicholas to the Invalides two days later. But, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, despite having surrounded herself with artists and men of letters, whenever action was called for, the Princesse was still very much the niece of Napoleon. ‘Exactly, Madame,’ she said. ‘I received their invitation this morning and sent it straight back to the Minister, who must have received it by now. I have told him I have no need of any invitation to go to the Invalides. If the government wishes me to attend, I shall not be in any stands, but in our family vault, where the Emperor lies. And for that I need no ticket – I’ve got my keys. I come and go as I please. The government need only inform me whether it desires my presence or not. But if I do go, that’s where I shall be, and nowhere else.’ At that moment Mme Swann and I were greeted by a young man who, having said his ‘Go
od afternoon’, did not stop, and whom I did not know she knew: Bloch. When I asked her about him, she said he had been introduced to her by Mme Bontemps and that he was on the Minister’s staff, which was news to me. However, she must not have seen much of him, or else she had wanted to avoid pronouncing the name Bloch, perhaps thinking it not ‘chic’ enough, as she said his name was M. Moreul. I assured her she was mixing him up with someone else and that his name was Bloch. The Princesse noticed Mme Swann’s admiring glances at her coat and straightened the train of it, which was twisted. ‘This is actually made from a fur that the Tsar sent me, she said, so, since I’ve just been to see him, I decided to wear it and let him see how it looks when it’s made up into a coat. – I hear that Prince Louis49 has taken a commission in the Russian army, said Mme Swann, not noticing her husband’s signs of impatience. Your Highness will be very sad at not having him here at home. – Much good it’ll do him, I’m sure! As I said to him, “You shouldn’t feel obliged to, just because we’ve had a soldier in the family already!” the Princesse replied, referring in her simple blunt way to the Emperor Napoleon. Swann was more and more impatient. ‘Madame, I am afraid I must be the one to behave like a Highness and request your permission for us to take our leave. My wife has been quite unwell and I am reluctant for her to remain standing in one spot.’ Mme Swann curtseyed once more and the Princesse gave us all the blessing of a beautiful smile which she seemed to summon out of the past, from the gracious days of her youth and the evenings at Compiègne,50 and which all at once smoothed out and softened the brief grumpiness of the face. Then she walked away, followed by her two ladies-in-waiting who, like interpreters, children’s nannies or sick-nurses, had done no more than punctuate the conversation with insignificant verbiage and unnecessary explanations. ‘One day this week you should go and sign the book at her house,’ Mme Swann said to me. ‘It’s not every Royal, as the English say, on whom you can leave a card. But with this one, if you sign, you’ll get an invitation.’