In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  On occasion, before our outing we would go and look at one or other of the small exhibitions which were opening during those late winter days; and in the galleries where they were held, Swann, a noted collector, was always greeted with marked deference by the dealers. The weather being still cold, all my old desire to go to the south, to Venice, was reawakened by those rooms in which spring was already well in, where hot sunlight slashed the pink Alpilles with glowing purples and deepened a dark transparency of emerald in the Grand Canal. If the weather was unpleasant, we went on to a concert or the theatre; and we finished the afternoon in a tea-room. When Mme Swann had something to say to me which she wished to keep from people sitting at tables near ours, or even just from the waiters, she addressed me in English, as though we were the only ones who could speak the language. But of course everybody could speak English, except me that is, as I had not yet learned the language; and this I had to point out to Mme Swann, so as to make her desist from passing remarks on those who were drinking the tea, and those who brought it to them, remarks which I could tell were insulting, albeit every word of them was lost on me, if not on the people insulted.

  Once, in connection with an outing to the theatre, Gilberte gave me a great surprise. It was the day she had referred to before, the anniversary of her grandfather’s death. She and I were supposed to be going with her governess to hear a programme of operatic extracts; and Gilberte, who had already changed into the outfit she was to wear to the performance, was showing her usual expression of indifference towards the event of the afternoon, saying she did not mind what we did, as long as I wanted to do it and her parents agreed to it. Just before lunch, her mother took us aside to say that Gilberte’s father was quite put out by our intention of going to a concert on such a day. To me, this seemed quite understandable. Gilberte’s face was expressionless, though she turned pale with anger that she could not conceal; and she said not another word. When M. Swann came home, his wife took him down to the other end of the drawing-room, where they stood murmuring to each other. He eventually asked Gilberte to come with him into the next room. We could hear voices raised. I could not believe that Gilberte, who was so dutiful, so loving, so biddable, would refuse a request of her father’s on such a day, and for such an unimportant reason. Swann said, going towards the door:

  ‘Well, you’ve heard what I had to say. Now you must do as you see fit.’

  Throughout lunch, Gilberte’s face was pinched with irritation. We had no sooner gone to her room afterwards than she exclaimed, as though nothing had been further from her mind than the notion of cancelling our outing, ‘Look at the time, will you! Two o’clock! It starts at half past!’ And she told her governess to hurry up.

  ‘But, look, I said, isn’t your father annoyed about this?

  – Not in the least.

  – But didn’t he think it would appear odd for us to be going out, because of the anniversary?

  – Look, what do I care about what people think! I think it’s preposterous to worry about other people when feelings are involved. You feel things for yourself, not for an audience. My governess, who hardly gets out at all, has been looking forward to this concert, and I’m not going to spoil her pleasure just to please the gallery!’

  She started putting on her hat.

  ‘But, Gilberte, I said, taking her arm, it’s not to please the gallery, it’s to please your father.

  – Oh look! she snapped, snatching her arm away. Don’t you start!’

  An even greater boon than to be taken to the Zoo in the Bois, or to a concert, was to be included in the Swanns’ friendship with Bergotte, the thing which had been one of the sources of their charm, long before I came to know Gilberte, in the days when I had dreamed that to be friends with such a girl, who was a friend of the divine old man, would be a thrilling experience, if only the disdain which she must feel for me had not made it for ever futile for me to hope I might one day accompany them on their excursions to the towns he loved. Then one day Mme Swann sent me an invitation to a special luncheon. I did not know who the other guests were to be. And as I arrived, I was disconcerted and intimidated by a small incident which happened just inside the Swanns’ front door. Mme Swann rarely failed to adopt any of the short-lived customs which are supposed to be smart, which last for a season, then disappear – for instance, many years before, she had had her hansom cab,51 and had her dinner invitations printed with the English words to meet immediately preceding the name of some guest of any importance. Many of these customs were quite unmysterious, even to the uninitiated. Such a one at that time was a little fad imported from England, which led Odette to have her husband’s visiting-cards printed with the title of Mr before the name Charles Swann. After my very first visit to their house, Mme Swann had called on me and left one of these ‘pasteboards’, as she termed them. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever left a card on me! I had been seized with such a fit of pride, excitement and gratitude that I scraped together all the money I possessed in the world, ordered a magnificent basket of camellias and had them sent to her. I also begged my father to go and leave a card on her, but to be sure first to get some with Mr in front of his name. He did neither of these things, which first plunged me into despair for a few days, then made me wonder whether he had not been right. Futile though it was, this fad for Mr was at least not misleading. However, the same could not be said for another one, which was revealed to me, without its meaning, on the day of Mme Swann’s special luncheon. Just as I was about to step from the ante-room into the drawing-room, the butler handed me a long, thin envelope on which my name was written. Such was my surprise that I thanked him, while I cast a glance at the envelope. I had no more notion of what I was supposed to do with it than a foreigner has about the purpose of the little implements given to guests at Chinese dinners. I could see it was sealed; so, rather than be thought indiscreet by opening it there and then, I slipped it into my pocket with a knowing air. The note Mme Swann had sent me a few days before had mentioned a lunch ‘for a select few’. Despite which, it was a party of sixteen; and I had no idea that among us was Bergotte. Mme Swann, who had just ‘named’ me, as she put it, to several of the guests, suddenly appended to my name, in exactly the same voice as she had used for pronouncing it, and as though he and I were merely two guests of hers who must be equally glad to make each other’s acquaintance, the name of my soft-voiced bard with the white hair. The name ‘Bergotte’ startled me as though it was a shot fired from a gun; but I was already bowing, going through the motions of polite behaviour. There in front of me, bowing back at me, like the conjuror in his tails emerging unscathed, while a dove flies up, from the smoke and dust of a detonation, I saw a stocky, coarse, thick-set, short-sighted man, quite young, with a red bottle-nose and a black goatee. I was heartbroken: it was not only that my gentle old man had just crumbled to dust and disappeared, it was also that for those things of beauty, his wonderful works, which I had once contrived to fit into that infirm and sacred frame, that dwelling I had lovingly constructed like a temple expressly designed to hold them, there was now no room in this thick-bodied little man standing in front of me, with all his blood-vessels, his bones, his glands, his snub nose and his little black beard. The whole Bergotte I had slowly and painstakingly constructed for myself, a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books, had suddenly been rendered useless by the need to include the bottle-nose and the black goatee, just as our perfect solution to a mathematical problem turns out to be useless, because we have misread the terms of it and ignored the fact that the total should add up to a certain number. The presence of the nose and the beard loomed so large and were so bothersome that they not only forced me to rebuild from scratch the character of Bergotte, but also seemed to imply, to create, to be secreting non-stop a certain type of busy and self-satisfied mentality, all of which was quite unfair, as it was a mentality which had nothing in common with the type of mind that informed the books I knew so well, s
teeped in their mild and divine wisdom. Starting from the books, I could never have foreseen the bottle-nose; but starting from the nose – which looked quite unworried by all of this, and was rather full of itself, like a false nose – I was on a quite different course, which would never lead me to the works of Bergotte, it seemed, but towards the attitudes of some engineer who is always pressed for time, the kind of man who, when you greet him, thinks it is the thing to answer, ‘Fine, thanks, and yourself?’ though you haven’t asked him anything yet, who, when you say you are delighted to make his acquaintance, replies with an abbreviation he thinks is stylish, clever and up-to-the-minute, because it avoids wasting time in empty chat: ‘Likewise.’ Names are of course fanciful designers; the sketches they draw of people and places are such poor likenesses that we are often struck dumb when, instead of the world as we have imagined it, we are suddenly confronted by the world as we see it (which is not the real world, of course, as the senses are not much better at likenesses than the imagination; so we end up with approximate drawings of reality, which are at least as different from the seen world as the seen world was different from the imagined world). But with Bergotte, the embarrassment of the name, laden with its disconcerting preconceptions, was insignificant compared to the chagrin I felt at the prospect of tying this man with his goatee to the work I knew, as though to a balloon, and wondering whether it might still have the power to become airborne. However, it did appear that he was the man who had written the books I was so fond of, for when Mme Swann made a point of mentioning my liking for one of them, he did not appear taken aback that this had been said to him rather than to some other guest, and gave no hint of thinking there must be some misunderstanding: he just stood there, his body, which was looking forward to lunch, filling the frock-coat he had put on in honour of all these guests, his attention taken up by other important things, and gave a reminiscent smile, as though thinking back to some fleeting incident from former years, as though what had been mentioned was the hose and doublet of the Duc de Guise costume he had worn one year to a fancy-dress ball, rather than his books, which instantly collapsed (dragging down with themselves the whole point and glory of Beauty, of the universe, of life itself) and showed that they had never been anything but a trite pastime for a man with a little beard. It occurred to me that he must have put a great effort into this pastime, but also that, if he had lived on an island surrounded by oyster-banks, he would have engaged just as successfully in the buying and selling of pearls. His work no longer seemed as inevitable as before. I began to wonder whether originality really shows that great writers are gods, each of them reigning over a kingdom which is his alone, whether misleading appearances might not play a role in this, and whether the differences between their books might not be the result of hard work, rather than the expression of a radical difference in essence between distinct personalities.

  We went into dinner. Lying beside my plate was a carnation, its stem wrapped in silver paper. It bothered me less than the envelope given to me in the ante-room and which I had completely forgotten. Though also new to me, the meaning of this custom soon became clearer, when I saw all the other men at the table pick up carnations lying beside their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their frock-coats. I did the same, with the casual air of the atheist in church, who, though knowing nothing about the service, stands up when the others stand, and kneels with only a moment’s delay when everybody else kneels. Another custom, just as unfamiliar to me but more lasting, was less to my taste. Just to the right of my plate was a smaller dish full of a blackish substance which, unknown to me, was caviar. I had no idea what one was supposed to do with it; but I was determined not to eat any of it.