‘Won’t you feel the cold? It might be better to keep it on, it’s not very warm here.’
To which I replied, ‘No matter.’ Perhaps I did not even feel the cold, but certainly I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying, like the importance of getting down to work, had likewise vanished from my mind. I handed over the coat, we stepped into the dining-room, to the strains of a swashbuckling march played by the gipsies, and walked between the rows of laid tables as though we were conquering heroes; and, though we could feel in our bodies the thrill of exuberance communicated by the rhythms of the band, as it accorded us these military honours and an undeserved triumph, we hid it behind an appearance of glacial gravity and a world-weary gait, avoiding any suggestion of the type of swaggering songstress who performs in cabarets, strutting on to her little stage with the martial air of a victorious general, and launching into a bawdy adaptation of a marching-song.
From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.
An amount of beer, let alone of champagne, which I would not have wanted to drink in a week at Balbec, even though my mind, when unclouded and sober, was capable of having a clear appreciation of the taste of these drinks as a pleasure, albeit one which could be easily forgone, now passed my lips in the space of an hour, interspersed with a little port, which I was too preoccupied even to taste; and to the violinist, who had just played for us, I gave the two golden louis, saved over the previous month so as to enable me to buy something which had now completely gone from my head. Some of the waiters rushed along the aisles between the rows of tables, one outstretched hand bearing a dish which it was the seeming purpose of this type of race not to drop. Sure enough, the chocolate soufflés reached their destination without spilling, the potatoes à l’anglaise, despite the canter and the apparent shaking about, always arrived as they had set out, neatly ranged about the Pauillac lamb.85 I noticed one of these servers, very tall, with a superb plume of black hair and wearing make-up of a colour more suggestive of certain species of rare birds than of a human face, who ran to and fro, without let-up and, it seemed, without purpose, from one end of the room to the other, and brought to mind the macaws which fill the large aviaries in zoos with their gorgeous colouring and incomprehensible agitation. Soon the spectacle became more ordered, at least to my eyes, turning into something nobler and calmer. All the giddy activity slowed down and settled into a soothing harmony. I could see the round tables, a countless constellation of them filling the restaurant like so many planets, as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times. These different heavenly bodies also exercised irresistible attractions on one another, and at every table the diners kept looking at the other tables, except for a rich man entertaining guests, including a famous writer whom he had managed to attract, whom he was now plying with questions, in the hope that the virtues of the turning table would induce him to utter inanities, which the ladies would marvel at. The harmony of these astral tables did not impede the incessant revolutions of the innumerable servers who, being on foot, unlike the seated diners, moved in a higher realm. Of course, one or other of them dashed in with the hors-d’œuvre, changed the wine, brought extra glasses. But despite these particular reasons, their perpetual hurrying about among the round tables eventually clarified the law of its own restlessness, dizzying but regulated. Like a pair of witches, sitting behind a great floral decoration, two ghastly cashiers, endlessly busy with their arithmetic, seemed engaged in astrological calculations of the upheavals which might on occasion disrupt life in this planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages.
I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpractised in the art of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies. Their heads were full of the knowledge that they were dining with such and such a person, that the meal would cost this or that much, that they would probably eat another dinner the following day. They seemed absolutely impervious to the appearance of a procession of young waiters’ assistants who, probably having no urgent business to attend to, were processionally bringing in bread in baskets. Some of them, too young, and victimized by the senior waiters, who cuffed them about the head in passing, had their hangdog eyes on a distant day-dream, and cheered up only if a guest staying at the Balbec hotel, where they had been formerly employed, recognized them, spoke to them and asked them in person to take away the champagne, which was undrinkable, and this filled them with pride.
I could hear the muffled protests of my nerves, in which there was actually a feeling of well-being, unconnected with the external objects which can supply it, but which the slightest movement I made with my body or my mind sufficed to give to me, as a gentle pressure on a closed eye can create an impression of colour. I had already drunk a great deal of port; and when I asked for more, it was less because I was hoping the next glasses would give a feeling of well-being than because the previous ones had already given it. I let the music conduct my pleasure to each note, and it rested on them docilely. While the restaurant at Rivebelle, like those chemical industries which produce great quantities of substances which, in nature, occur only by chance and are very rare, brought together more women and their prospects of happiness for me than a year of chance encounters during journeys or outings in the country could have brought me, the music we could hear (arrangements of waltzes, German operettas and cabaret songs, all of it new to me) was itself like an airy place of pleasure, superimposed on the real one and more exciting than it: each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, did not limit to a single privileged person, as she would have done, the secret of its sensual thrills – it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, more powerful or wealthy; and in the tunes I detected something cruel: the fact that the slightest disinterested sense of beauty or vestige of intelligence was foreign to them – for them, there is nothing beyond physical pleasure. They are the most merciless form of hell, the hell with no way out, for any poor victim of jealousy who hears that pleasure in them – the pleasure which the woman he loves enjoys with someone else – and who hears it as the only thing desired in the whole world by the woman who is the whole world to him. To me, as I hummed over the tune and returned its kiss, the special sensual pleasure which it gave enchanted me so much that I would have left my parents, to follow the echoes of the phrase through the singular world which it created in its invisible element, its outlines at times languishing, at times sprightly. At such moments, despite the fact that this secret joy is not of a sort which increases the attractiveness of the person who has acquired it, since no one else can perceive it, and though any failure to impress a woman who may have dismissed us at a single glance cannot possibly be imputed to our having or not having this inner and subjective bliss, since in her unawareness of its presence or absence in us, her view of us is bound to be unaffected by it, I felt endowed with a power which seemed to make me almost irresistible. It felt as though my love was no longer something irksome, something to be dismissed with a smile, but that it had exactly the touching beauty, the wistful charm of this music, which itself now gave the impression of being a favourable place and time which had brought me and the woman I loved together, to meet and become close.
Women of easy virtue were not the only people to frequent this restaurant; there were also people from the most fashionable society, who would go to it for afternoon tea or else held lavish dinner-parties there. Afternoon tea was served in a long, narrow gallery, like a corridor walled with glass, leading from the entrance-hall to the dining-room and forming one side of the garden, from which
it was separated only by its few pillars of stone and the large windows, many of which were often open. The result of this arrangement was not only that it was very draughty, but that one was exposed to sudden and intermittent sunlight, a dazzling and unreliable form of illumination which made it all but impossible to make out the women taking tea; and when they sat there, crammed at pairs of tables along both sides of the narrow passageway, shimmering at every movement they made as they sipped their tea or greeted each other, the place looked like a tank or a creel which a fisherman has filled with his shiny catch, some of the fish being half out of the water, their sheen glinting and changing under glossy lights.
Some hours later, during dinner, which was served of course in the dining-room, the lamps would be lit though it was still daylight outside, and in the garden one could see, alongside outlying pavilions still lit by the dusk, and looking like pallid evening ghosts of themselves, arbours of green gloom shot through by the last rays of sunlight, and resembling, out there beyond the glass of the lamplit room where we sat dining – and unlike the late-afternoon ladies at tea, enmeshed in the sparkling moisture of their bluish-gold passage – plants in a giant aquarium bathed in a faint, supernaturally green light. As dinner finished and the room began to empty, the diners who, though they had spent their time during the meal looking at, recognizing, or asking to be informed of the names of other diners near by, held together in complete cohesion round their own table, now began to be freed of the gravitational force which had kept them close about their host of the evening, which lost its power over them at the moment when they drifted out to take coffee in the corridor where afternoon tea had been served; and a dinner-party on the move would often shed one or more of its corpuscles, which had been too strongly affected by the attractive power of a competing dinner-party, and was briefly replaced by a lady or gentleman who stepped across to greet a friend, before going back to their own group, saying, ‘Must go – I’m with Monsieur X’s party tonight.’ One had a momentary impression of two separate bouquets exchanging a few of their flowers. Then even the corridor was deserted. Some nights this long corridor was left unlit, as there was still a little daylight even after dinner, and with the trees hanging down close by, just outside the glass, it had the look of a path through a shadowy, overgrown garden. On occasion a lady, detached from a dinner-party, lingered in the half-dark. One evening, as I crossed the corridor on my way out, I noticed, sitting among a group of people unknown to me, the beautiful Princess of Luxembourg. I raised my hat to her but did not stop. She recognized me and inclined her head, smiling: from far above this movement of her head, and emitted by it, a few melodious words for me rose into the air, probably an elongated good evening intended not to delay me, but just to round off the nod of the head, to make it a spoken nod. Her words were so indistinct to me, and the sound of them, which was all I heard, lasted so long and was so musical, that it was as though a nightingale among the close, leafy twilight had burst into song. If, as sometimes happened, Saint-Loup decided to finish the night with a group of his friends whom we had met, and with whom he went on to the Casino of one of the neighbouring seaside towns, he would put me into a carriage by myself: I told the cabman to set the horse at a gallop, so as to abridge as much as possible the interval during which I could rely on no one but myself to provide my sensitivity – by engaging its reverse gear, and switching off the mechanism of passivity in which I had been held – with the stimuli which, ever since arriving at Rivebelle, I had been receiving from other people. Nothing, not even the possibility of colliding with a carriage coming in the other direction, along these paths which were pitch-dark and wide enough for only a single vehicle at a time, the uneven ground which was often littered with earth-falls from the cliff above, or the nearby precipice on the other side dropping straight to the sea, could bring me to make the small effort required for the idea of danger, and the fear of it, to rise to my reasoning mind. Just as it is not the wish to be famous, but a habit of hard work, which may make a creative artist of us, so it is not the joy we take in the present, but sober reflection on the past, which may enable us to safeguard the future. In my own case, not only had I begun the evening at Rivebelle by throwing away my crutches of rationality and self-discipline, which help us in our infirmity to walk a straight path, and had been afflicted thereby by a sort of moral ataxia, but then the alcohol, with its heightened effect on the nerves, had filled the present minutes with a quality and a charm, the effect of which had not been to make me more able, or even more willing, to defend myself against them: my state of light-headedness segregated them from the rest of my life and made me see them as vastly preferable to it; I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards; in brief eclipse, my past had ceased to project in front of me that shadow of itself which we call our future; seeing the purpose of my life not in any past dreams coming true but in the simple bliss of the passing moment, I could see no further than that moment. So, by the working of a contradiction which was one only in appearance, it was at the very moment when I experienced an exceptional pleasure, when I sensed that my life could be one of fulfilment, and should therefore have seen it as having increased in value, that I felt liberated from the anxieties it had hitherto inspired in me, and was prepared to commit it without hesitation to the unsure hands of chance. In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern which others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea-voyage, a ride in an aeroplane, a drive in a motor-car, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain. So it was that, if somebody had turned up at the Rivebelle restaurant with the intention of killing me on one of the evenings when we stayed on there, when my grandmother, my life to come and my unwritten books had all shrunk to a remote unreality, when I had no mind to give to anything but the fragrance of the woman at the next table, the courtesies of the head waiter, the outlines of the waltz-tune being played, when I was glutted with the present sensation and had no existence beyond it, no wish except to be never separated from it, I would have died in its embrace, I would have let myself be torn limb from limb, without raising a hand to defend myself, like a bee so bemused by tobacco-smoke as to have lost its intent to garner away the supplies its efforts have gathered, and all hope of ever reaching the hive.
It must be added that the insignificance which came over all serious things in the face of my intense exhilaration eventually affected even Mlle Simonet and her friends. The enterprise of getting to know them now seemed easy, but a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest variations and even by the mere continuity of it, had any importance; everything else, my parents, my work, my pleasures, my gang of girls at Balbec, was reduced to the insubstantiality of a fleck of spray in the high wind which prevents it from coming to earth, and had no existence except in so far as it related to my sensation of power: drunkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves. This does not mean that genuine love, if we happen to have such a feeling, cannot survive in these conditions. But we are well aware, as though we had moved into a new element, that unknown pressures have altered the dimensions of our feeling, and we can no longer consider it as we did before. We know it is still there somewhere, but it has shifted, it no longer weighs on us, it is satisfied with the sensation afforded it by the present, a sensation which satisfies us too, for we have no interest in anything that is not the present. Unfortunately, the coefficient which alters values in this way works only during the hour of drunkenness. Tomorrow the individuals who had become insignificant, whom we blew away like soap-bubbles, will again take on their full density; and the work left undone, but whi
ch had lost all meaning, will have to be faced once more. Even more seriously, these morning-after mathematics, which are no different from day-before mathematics, are not only the making of the unavoidable problems which we must still contend with, they are also the mathematics which, unknown to ourselves, have in fact been governing our life during the drunken hours. If at those moments we are with a woman whose virtue or unfriendliness made her inaccessible, what was implausible the day before (that she should be attracted to us) now seems a million times easier, although it has not become any easier in fact, it being only in our eyes, our inner view of ourself, that we have changed. At the moment when we take a little liberty with her, she is as displeased as we will be the morning after, when we remember having tipped the porter 100 francs, and for the same reason, which for us has simply been delayed: the fact of not being drunk.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 49