At regular intervals, amid the inimitable ornamentation of their leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the apple-trees opened their broad petals of white satin, or dangled the shy bunches of their blushing buds. It was on the Méséglise way that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I used to see my father slash through with his stick without ever making them deviate.
Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up, white as a cloud, furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to come on for a while, and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I enjoyed finding its image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of art were very different—at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies—from those in which the moon would seem fair to me today, but in which I should not have recognised it then. It might, for instance, be some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which it is silhouetted against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works as naïvely unformed as were my own impressions, and which it enraged my grandmother’s sisters to see me admire. They held that one ought to set before children, and that children showed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, without one’s needing to nurture equivalents of them and let them slowly ripen in one’s own heart.
It was along the Méséglise way, at Montjouvain, a house built on the edge of a large pond against the side of a steep, bushy hill, that M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself with a bad reputation in the neighbourhood, who one day installed herself permanently at Montjouvain. People said: “That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by fatherly love not to see what everyone is talking about—a man who is shocked by the slightest loose word letting his daughter bring a woman like that to live under his roof! He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold, and that she would have shown extraordinary musical talent if she had only been trained. He may be sure it isn’t music that she’s teaching his daughter.” But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed it is remarkable how people never fail to arouse admiration for their moral qualities in the relatives of those with whom they are having carnal relations. Physical passion, so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of kindness and self-abnegation, to such an extent that they shine resplendent in the eyes of their immediate entourage. Dr Percepied, whose hearty voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart’s content the role of mischief-maker which his looks belied, without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make the Curé and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a gruff voice: “What d’ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with her friend, Mlle Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? I’m not so sure. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that girl. I’m not one to thwart the artistic vocation of a child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too, with his daughter’s friend. Why, good lord, it must be a regular musical box, that house! What are you laughing at? They play too much music, those people, in my opinion. I met Papa Vinteuil the other day, by the cemetery. It was all he could do to keep on his feet.”
Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil at that time, avoiding people whom he knew, turning away as soon as he caught sight of them, growing old within a few months, brooding over his sorrows, becoming incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting his daughter’s happiness, spending whole days beside his wife’s grave, could hardly have failed to realise that he was dying of a broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he was unaware of the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed, what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning—without altogether recognising it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behaviour which it assumes in his presence: the strange remarks, the unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil’s sensibility it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to be the monopoly of Bohemian circles; for they occur whenever a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child—perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colour of its eyes—needs to ensure for itself the room and the security necessary for its development. And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter’s conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. But when M. Vinteuil thought of his daughter and himself from the point of view of society, from the point of view of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the same terms as the most hostile inhabitant of Combray; he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up (however far beneath him they might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human downfall.
One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so suddenly face to face with us all that he had no time to escape; and Swann, with that condescending charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another’s shame merely a reason for treating him with a benevolence the expression of which serves to gratify all the more the self-esteem of the bestower because he feels that it is all the more precious to the recipient, conversed at great length with M. Vinteuil, with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over one day to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier, would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accepting. Swann’s friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support that he felt it would perhaps be advisable not to make use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of preserving it.
“What a charming man!” he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of the middle classes fall victims to the charms of a duchess, however ugly and stupid. “What a charming man! What a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!”
And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most sincere people, who lay aside
the opinion they actually hold of a person while they are talking to him and express it as soon as he is no longer there, my family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann’s marriage, invoking principles and conventions which (for the very reason that they were invoking them in common with him, as though they were all decent people of the same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way infringed at Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit Swann, an omission which Swann was the first to regret. For whenever he met M. Vinteuil, he would remember afterwards that he had been meaning for a long time to ask him about someone of the same name, a relation of his, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he had made up his mind not to forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.
Since the Méséglise way was the shorter of the two that we used to take on our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Méséglise was somewhat wet, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Roussainville wood beneath whose dense thatch of leaves we could take shelter.
Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its roundness and whose edge it gilded in return. The brightness though not the luminosity would be expunged from a landscape in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Roussainville carved its white gables in relief upon the sky with an overpowering precision and finish. A gust of wind put up a solitary crow, which flapped away and settled in the distance, while against a greying sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though painted in one of those monochromes that still decorate the overmantels of old houses.
But on other days the rain with which the barometer in the optician’s window had threatened us would begin to fall. Its drops, like migrating birds which fly off in a body at a given moment, would come down out of the sky in serried ranks—never drifting apart, never wandering off on their own during their rapid course, but each one keeping its place and drawing its successor in its wake, so that the sky was more darkened than during the swallows’ exodus. We would take refuge among the trees. And when it seemed that their flight was accomplished, a few last drops, feebler and slower than the rest, would still come down. But we would emerge from our shelter, for raindrops revel amidst foliage, and even when it was almost dry again underfoot, many a stray drop, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly they splashed on to our upturned faces from the top of the branch.
Often, too, we would hurry to take shelter, huddled together cheek by jowl with its stony saints and patriarchs, under the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs. How French that church was! Over its door the saints, the chevalier kings with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals were carved as they might have been in the mind of Françoise. The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, precisely as Françoise in her kitchen was wont to hold forth about St Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents whom she considered less “righteous.” One could see that the notions which the mediaeval artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, distorted, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray personality whom I could discern also, potential and presaged, in the Gothic sculptures of Saint-André-des-Champs was young Théodore, the assistant in Camus’s shop. And, indeed, Françoise herself was so well aware that she had in him a countryman and contemporary that when my aunt was too ill for Françoise to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed or to carry her to her chair, rather than let the kitchen-maid come upstairs and, perhaps, get into my aunt’s good books, she would send for Théodore. And this lad, who was rightly regarded as a scapegrace, was so abounding in that spirit which had served to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, and particularly in the feelings of respect due, in Françoise’s eyes, to all “poor invalids,” and above all to her own “poor mistress,” that when he bent down to raise my aunt’s head from her pillow, he wore the same naïve and zealous mien as the little angels in the basreliefs who throng, with tapers in their hands, about the swooning Virgin, as though those carved stone faces, naked and grey as trees in winter, were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower again in countless plebeian faces, reverent and cunning as the face of Théodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
There, too, not affixed to the stone like the little angels, but detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her pedestal as upon a footstool that had been placed there to save her feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full cheeks, the firm breasts swelling out her draperies like clusters of ripe grapes inside a sack, the narrow forehead, short and impudent nose, deep-set eyes, and hardy, stolid, fearless demeanour of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which imparted to the statue a kindliness that I had not looked to find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose presence there—like the leaves of a climbing plant that have grown up beside some sculpted foliage—seemed deliberately intended to enable us, by confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a promised or an accursed land, Roussainville, within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussainville was now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised like a village in the Old Testament by all the slings and arrows of the storm, which beat down obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already received the forgiveness of the Almighty, who had restored to it the light of his sun, which fell upon it in frayed, golden shafts, unequal in length like the rays of a monstrance.
Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go home and to remain shut up indoors. Here and there in the distance, in a landscape which in the failing light and saturated atmosphere resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower slopes of a hill plunged in watery darkness shone out like little boats which have folded their sails and ride at anchor all night upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial ill-temper on the part of the permanent, underlying fine weather which, in sharp contrast to the fluid and unstable fine weather of winter, having firmly established itself in the soil where it has materialised in dense masses of foliage on which the rain may drip without weakening the endurance of their deep-seated happiness, has hoisted for the entire season, in the very streets of the village, on the walls of its houses and its gardens, its silken banners, violet and white. Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner with a book, I could hear the water dripping from our chestnut-trees, but I knew that the shower would merely burnish their leaves, and that they promised to remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the rainy night, ensuring the continuance of the fine weather; I knew that however much it rained, tomorrow, over the white fence of Tansonville, the little heart-shaped leaves would ripple, as numerous as ever; and it was without the least distress that I watched the poplar in the Rue des Per champs praying for mercy, bowing in desperation before the storm; without the least distress that I heard, at the bottom of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among the lilacs.
If the weather was bad all morning, my parents would abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie’s estate; for she had died at last, vindicating at one and the same time those who had insisted that her debilit
ating regimen would ultimately kill her and those who had always maintained that she suffered from a disease that was not imaginary but organic, by the visible proof of which the sceptics would be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it; causing by her death no great grief save to one person alone, but to that one a grief that was savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my aunt’s last illness Françoise never left her for an instant, never undressed, allowed no one else to do anything for her, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then at last we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise had lived of my aunt’s harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a feeling which we had mistaken for hatred and which was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions had been impossible to foresee, whose ruses had been so difficult to foil, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no more. Compared with such a mistress we were of very little account. The time had long passed since, on first coming to spend our holidays at Combray, we had enjoyed as much prestige as my aunt in Françoise’s eyes.
That autumn my parents, so preoccupied with all the legal formalities, the discussions with solicitors and tenants, that they had little time to make excursions, for which in any case the weather was unpropitious, began to let me go for walks without them along the Méséglise way, wrapped up in a huge plaid which protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to throw over my shoulders because I felt that its tartan stripes scandalised Françoise, whom it was impossible to convince that the colour of one’s clothes had nothing whatever to do with one’s mourning for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shown on my aunt’s death was wholly inadequate, since we had not entertained the neighbours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone when we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I am sure that in a book—and to that extent my feelings were akin to those of Françoise—such a conception of mourning, in the manner of the Chanson de Roland and of the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, would have seemed most attractive. But the moment Françoise herself was near me, some demon would urge me to try to make her angry, and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I regretted my aunt’s death because she had been a good woman in spite of her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that she might have been my aunt and yet have seemed to me so odious that her death would not have caused me a moment’s sorrow—statements which, in a book, would have struck me as inept.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Page 21