In Search of Lost Time Read online

  What is odd, which I cannot go into here, is the extent to which, around that time, all the people whom Albertine loved, and who might have been able to make her do what they wanted, asked for, implored, I may even say begged for, if not my friendship, then at least some sort of acquaintance with me. I should no longer have needed to offer Mme Bontemps money to send Albertine back to me. This unexpected turn in my affairs, occurring when it no longer served any purpose, saddened me deeply, not on account of Albertine, whom I would have received with no pleasure had she been brought back, not now from Touraine but from the other world, but because of a young woman with whom I was in love and whom I could not arrange to see. I told myself that if she died, or if I no longer loved her, everybody who might have been able to bring us together would be throwing themselves at my feet. In the meantime I tried in vain to influence them, not having been cured by experience, which ought to have taught me – if it had taught me anything – that love is an evil spell, like the ones in fairy-tales, against which one is powerless until the enchantment be broken.

  ‘Actually, the book I’m reading at the moment is about that sort of thing’, she said to me. (I had mentioned that mysterious ‘We would have got on very well together’ to Robert. He claimed not to remember saying it, and added that, in any case, he had not meant anything out of the ordinary by it.)

  ‘It’s an old Balzac I’ve been mugging up on, so as to know as much as my uncles, La Fille aux yeux d’or. But it’s absurd and unrealistic, a complete fantasy. I mean, a woman might be kept under surveillance like that by another woman, but never by a man. – You’re wrong, I once knew a woman who ended up completely shut away by the man who loved her; she was never allowed to see anyone, and could only go out accompanied by trusty servants. – But someone as good as you must have been horrified by that. In fact Robert and I were saying that you ought to get married. A wife would make you healthy again, and you would make her very happy. – No, I’m not a good enough person. – What an absurd idea! – No, I mean it. Besides, I was engaged once, but I couldn’t make up my mind to marry her (and then she broke it off herself, because of my fussiness and indecision).’ It was, indeed, in this over-simplified form that I regarded my adventure with Albertine, now that I could see it only from the outside.

  As I went back up to my room, I reflected sadly that I had not even once been to revisit the church at Combray, which looked, amidst all the greenery, in that violet-tinted window, as if it were expecting me. I said to myself: ‘Never mind, it’ll have to wait for another year, if I don’t die in the meantime,’ seeing no obstacle to this other than my death, never envisaging that of the church, which seemed bound to endure long after my death, as it had endured for so long before my birth.

  Nevertheless I did mention Albertine to Gilberte one day, and asked her whether Albertine had loved women. ‘Oh! Not in the least. – But you said once that she behaved badly. – I said that? I’m sure you must be wrong. Anyway, if I did, but I’m sure I didn’t, I must have been talking about involvements with young men. Besides, at her age, they probably didn’t amount to anything.’ Was Gilberte telling me this in order to hide the fact that, according to what Albertine had told me, she loved women too and had made suggestions to Albertine? Or did she know (for others are often better informed about our lives than we think) that I had loved and been jealous of Albertine, and (others being able to know more of the truth about us than we think, but also to take it too far and fall into the error of assuming too much, where we had hoped that they might have made the mistake of not assuming anything at all) did she imagine that I still was, and was she, out of kindness, placing a blindfold over my eyes, as one is always prepared to do for those who are jealous? At all events, everything Gilberte said, from the original ‘behaved badly’ to the present certificate of good conduct, followed an inverse sequence to the assertions of Albertine, who had finally all but admitted a certain intimacy of relations with Gilberte. Albertine had astonished me by this, as I had been astonished by what Andrée had told me, because, before I came to know them, I had believed all of that little gang to be involved in perversion; I later realized that my assumption was wrong, as so often happens when one finds a decent girl, practically ignorant of the realities of love, in circles one had wrongly believed to be completely depraved. Later I had followed the same path in the opposite direction, ending with a renewed belief in the truth of my original supposition. But perhaps Albertine had wanted to tell me that so that she would appear more experienced than she really was, and to dazzle me in Paris with the glamour of her perversity, as she had done, that first time at Balbec, with the prestige of her virtue. And quite simply, when I had spoken to her about women who loved women, so as not to seem not to understand what I meant, as in the course of conversation one adopts an air of comprehension if Fourier5 or Tobolsk6 are mentioned, even though one has no idea what is meant by them. She had spent her time, perhaps, close to Mlle Vinteuil’s woman friend and to Andrée, separated by a watertight partition from them because of their belief that she ‘wasn’t one’, and had only informed herself about the topic later – in the same way as a woman who marries a man of letters seeks to improve her mind – in order to please me by becoming capable of replying to my questions, until the day when she realized that they were inspired by jealousy, after which she had backtracked. Unless it were Gilberte who was lying to me. It even occurred to me that it was because of having learned from her, in the course of a flirtation he would have conducted with his own ends in view, that she was not averse to women, that Robert had married her, hoping for pleasures which, since he took them elsewhere, he must never have found with her. None of these hypotheses was absurd, for with women like Odette’s daughter, or the girls of the little gang, there is so much diversity, such an accumulation of alternating, if not indeed simultaneous tastes, that they pass easily from a liaison with a woman to a passionate affair with a man, so that determining their real and dominant taste remains difficult. I did not want to borrow Gilberte’s copy of La Fille aux yeux d’or, as she was still reading it. But she lent me, to read before going to sleep that last evening I spent with her, a book which made a powerful but uneven impression on me, although it proved not to be a lasting one. This was a recently published volume of the Goncourts’ journal.7

  And when, before snuffing out my candle, I read the passage I transcribe below, my lack of an aptitude for literature, sensed long ago on the Guermantes way, and confirmed during the stay whose last evening this was – one of those evenings just before a departure when, with the imminent loss of the cocoon of regularity, one attempts to take stock of oneself – seemed to me something less regrettable, as if literature did not reveal any profound truth; and at the same time it seemed to me sad that literature was not what I had believed it to be. On the other hand, the state of ill-health which was about to confine me to a sanatorium also seemed less regrettable, if the fine things spoken of in books were no finer than those I had seen myself. Yet, by a curious contradiction, now that this book was talking about them, I had a longing to see them. Here are the pages that I read before tiredness closed my eyes:

  ‘The day before yesterday Verdurin drops in here to take me off to dine with him; he used to be a critic for La Revue, wrote that book about Whistler in which truly the technique, the painterly handling of colour, of the eccentric American is frequently conveyed with considerable refinement by that amateur of all the subtleties, all the delicacies, of the painted surface that Verdurin is. And while I am dressing to go out with him he starts telling me a long story, parts of it in a timorous whisper almost like a confession, about his renunciation of writing immediately after his marriage to Fromentin’s “Madeleine”, a renunciation due, he tells me, to his morphine habit, and which resulted, by his account, in most of the habitués of his wife’s drawing-room having not the least idea that her husband had ever written anything, and talking to him about Charles Blanc, Saint-Victor, Sainte-Beuve, and Burty8 as figures to wh
om they thought him utterly inferior. “But of course you Goncourts know – and so did Gautier – that my Salons were something altogether different from those woeful Maîtres d’ autrefois9 which my wife’s family take to be such a masterpiece.” Then, through a dusk in which the last flickering rays of light on the towers of the Trocadéro turn them into towers exactly like the ones glazed with redcurrant jelly that confectioners used to create, the conversation continues in the carriage that is taking us to the Quai Conti and their hôtel,10 which its present owner claims was once the residence of the Venetian ambassadors, and where there is apparently a smoking-room which Verdurin talks about as having been transported, Arabian Nights-fashion, from a famous palazzo, the name of which I forget, but a palazzo with a well-head depicting a coronation of the Virgin which he maintains to be absolutely one of Sansovino’s finest works, and which their guests use as somewhere to drop their cigar ash. And, by Jove, when we arrive, in a greenish, diffused, watery moonlight very reminiscent of that in which the Classical paintings shroud Venice, and above which the silhouetted cupola of the Institut recalls the Salute in Guardi’s pictures, I do have a momentary illusion of being beside the Grand Canal. An illusion further fostered by the hôtel’s construction, as you cannot see the Quai from the first floor, and by the evocative remark of the master of the house as he asserts that the Rue du Bac takes its name – dashed if it had ever occurred to me before – from the “bac”, or ferry, on which an order of nuns, the Miramiones, once used to travel across to services at Notre-Dame. The whole quarter is one I used to wander around as a child when my aunt de Courmont lived there, and I began to re-love it when, practically next door to the Verdurins’ house, I discovered the sign-board of “Le Petit Dunkerque”, one of the very few shops to have survived, other than as vignettes in the scumbled shadow of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s pencil drawings, where eighteenth-century collectors came to spend their idle moments haggling over French and foreign trinkets and “all the last creations of the arts”, as an old bill of sale from “Le Petit Dunkerque” puts it, bills which Verdurin and I are, I believe, the only ones to possess copies of, and which are among the ephemeral masterpieces of those embellished documents on which the world of Louis XV made out their accounts, with a letter-head depicting a wave-tossed sea laden with ships, a wavy sea that could easily have been an illustration to “The Oyster and the Plaintiffs” in the Fermiers Généraux edition of La Fontaine.11 The mistress of the house, next to whom I am to sit at dinner, tells me charmingly that she has decorated her table with nothing but Japanese chrysanthemums, but chrysanthemums arranged in vases which turn out to be exceedingly rare masterpieces, one of them in particular being made of bronze overlaid with reddish copper petals so lifelike they would seem to have fallen there from the flower itself. Cottard, the doctor, is there with his wife, and the Polish sculptor Viradobetski, Swann the collector, an aristocratic Russian lady, a princess with a name ending in ‘-ov’ which I don’t quite catch, and Cottard whispers in my ear that it is she who shot at the Archduke Rudolph at point-blank range, and that according to her I have an extraordinarily exalted reputation in Galicia and the whole of northern Poland, no young woman ever agreeing to an offer of marriage without first determining whether her fiancé is an admirer of La Faustin.12 “This is not something you Westerners can under stand,” is the princess’s concluding challenge, who strikes me, I must say, as possessed of an altogether superior intelligence, “this insight by a writer into a woman’s most private feelings.” A man with clean-shaven chin and lips and a butler’s side-whiskers, holding forth in the condescending tone of a fifth-form master joking with his favoured pupils during the Charlemagne Day celebrations, turns out to be Brichot, from the University. Upon my being presented by Verdurin, he has nothing to say that suggests any acquaintance with our books, arousing in me an irascible despondency at the conspiracy organized against us by the Sorbonne, importing even into the gracious home where I am so warmly entertained the discrepant unfriendliness of a deliberate silence. We go in to dinner and there follows an extraordinary procession of plates which are quite simply masterpieces of the porcelain-maker’s art, an art which, in the course of an elegant meal, flatters the attentive ear of a connoisseur with the most agreeably artistic tinkle of its conversation, – Yung-chêng plates, with their nasturtium-coloured borders and the blue of their irises, tumid and leafless, and a wonderfully ornamented flight of kingfishers and cranes across a dawn sky, the dawn rendered with precisely those matutinal tones which greet my daily awakening in the Boulevard Montmorency – Dresden plates, more delicate in the grace of their technique, with the drowsy anaemia of their roses washed to violet, with the wine-dark laciniation of a tulip, with the rococo of a pink or a forget-me-not – Sèvres plates latticed with the fine guilloche of their white fluting, verticillated with gold, or knotted, on the creamy surface of the paste, with a gold ribbon raised in elegant relief – finally an entire service of silver chased with those myrtles of Luciennes that the Du Barry13 would have recognized. And what is perhaps equally rare is the really quite remarkable quality of the things served on them, a meal exquisitely planned, a veritable feast, such as the Parisians, it must most emphatically be said, never have at their grandest dinners, and which reminds me of some of the great dishes at Jean d’Heurs.14 Even the foie gras bears no relation to the insipid mousse normally served under that name, and I do not know many places where a simple potato salad is made, like this, out of potatoes with the firmness of Japanese ivory buttons and the patina of those little ivory spoons with which Chinese women sprinkle water over their freshly caught fish. In the Venetian glass I have before me, a rich profusion of jewelled reds glows from an extraordinary Léoville, bought at M. Montalivet’s sale, and it is a delight for the eye’s imagination, and also, I do not scruple to say it, for the imagination of what one used to call the chops, to see carried in a brill which has nothing in common with the far from fresh brill that are served at the most luxurious tables and which have had, in the slow course of their journey to the kitchen, the pattern of their bones impressed on to their back, a brill served not with the floury paste so many chefs in great houses prepare under the name of white sauce, but with a real white sauce made with butter costing five francs a pound – to see this brill brought in on a wonderful Yung-chêng dish striated by the crimson rays of a sunset above a sea wittily navigated by a band of lobsters, their gritty stippling so extraordinarily rendered that they seem to have been moulded from the live carapace, a dish whose border depicts a little Chinese boy catching with rod and line a fish, the azured silvering of whose belly is an enchantment of nacreous colour. When I observe to Verdurin what an exquisite pleasure it must be for him to eat this superb provender off a collection such as no prince currently possesses in his glass cabinets, “It is clear to see you don’t know him,” interjects sadly the mistress of the house. And she speaks to me of her husband as a cranky eccentric, indifferent to all these sophistications, “Cranky,” she repeats, “there’s no other word for it,” a crank who would prefer a bottle of cider, drunk in the rather plebeian cool of a Normandy farm. And this charming woman, whose eloquence reveals her complete love of its regional colour, speaks with brimming enthusiasm of that part of Normandy where they once lived, a Normandy that seems to have been like a great English park, fragrant with stands of mature trees, as in a painting by Lawrence, fringed with the cryptomerian velvet of their natural lawns, porcelained with pink hydrangeas, with masses of crumpled sulphur roses tumbling above a rural gateway, against which the overlay of two interlaced pear trees seems to imitate some purely ornamental sign-board, calling to mind the free-flowing lines of a flowering branch in the bronze of a Gouthière sconce, a Normandy completely undreamed of by holidaying Parisians, each clos protected by its gates, all of which gates the Verdurins confess to me they had no qualms about opening. At the day’s end, amid a soporific fading of all the colours, when the only source of light was an almost curdled sea, tinged with the milk
y-blue of whey (“No, not like any sea you’ve seen,” protests frantically my neighbour, in response to my saying that Flaubert had taken us, my brother and myself, to Trouville, “absolutely nothing like, you’ll have to come with me, else you’ll never know”), they would return home, through the veritable forests of pink tulle formed by the rhododendrons, utterly befuddled with the smell of the sardine fisheries, which gave her husband terrible attacks of asthma – “yes, she insists, I mean it, they were real asthma attacks.” And there, the following summer, they returned, accommodating an entire colony of artists in a marvellous medieval building, part of an ancient monastery, which they rented for practically nothing. And, by Jove, listening to this woman who, moving among so many circles of truly distinguished people, has yet retained in her speech something of the vitality of language of a woman of the people, language which shows you things with the colour that your imagination sees in them, my mouth waters at the life she confesses to me that they led down there, each person working in his cell and, in the drawing-room so vast that it had two fireplaces, everybody gathering before luncheon for altogether elevated conversation, interspersed with parlour games, making me think of the kind of life described in Diderot’s masterpiece, the Lettres à Mademoiselle Volland. Then after lunch everybody would go out, even on squally days, in a burst of sunshine, or the effulgence of a shower, of a shower outlining with its gleaming trickles the nodes of a magnificent sweep of centenarian beeches, which set before the entrance gate that vegetable idea of the beautiful so dear to the eighteenth century, and the arborescent shrubs which, in place of burgeoning buds, had, hanging from their branches, drops of water. They would stop to listen to the delicate dabbling of a bullfinch, entranced by the coolness, bathing in the dainty, minuscule Nymphenburg bath formed by the petals of a white rose. And when I mention to Mme Verdurin the landscapes and flowers of the region in Elstir’s delicate pastels: “But I’m the one who introduced him to all that,” she interjects with an angry toss of her head, “everything, do you realize, everything, the hidden nooks, every one of his subjects, I threw it in his face when he left, didn’t I, Auguste, all the scenes he painted. To be fair, he was always aware of objects, I have to admit that. But he’d never seen the flowers, he couldn’t tell a hollyhock from an althea. You won’t believe this, but I even had to show him how to recognize jasmine.” And one must admit that it is a curious thought that the artist held up by connoisseurs today as the leading flower-painter, superior even to Fantin-Latour, would perhaps never, without this woman sitting beside me, have been able to paint a jasmine. “Yes, honestly, jasmine. And all the roses he has done were painted at my house, or else brought to him by me. When he was with us, we never called him anything but Monsieur Tiche: ask Cottard or Brichot, or any of the others, whether we treated him as a great man here. He would have laughed if we had. I taught him how to arrange his flowers; he couldn’t manage it at all, to begin with. He never learned how to make a bouquet. He had no natural sense of what to choose, I always had to say, ‘No, don’t paint that one, it’s not worth it, paint this one.’ Ah, if only he’d listened to what we said about arranging his life as attentively as he did about arranging his flowers, and hadn’t made that rotten marriage!” And abruptly, her eyes fevered by absorption in a reverie of the past, and nervously plucking, as she distractedly flexes her fingers, at the floss of the sleeves of her blouse, she presents, in the anguish of her averted pose, a wonderful picture that has never, I think, been painted, one in which would be displayed all the contained revolt, all the enraged sensibilities of a female friend outraged in the refinement, in the modesty of womanhood. Thereupon she talks about the wonderful portrait Elstir did for her, the portrait of the Cottard family, which she gave to the Luxembourg at the time of her quarrel with the painter, confessing that it was she who gave the painter the idea of having the man in full evening dress in order to achieve all that lovely frothing swell of linen, and who chose the woman’s velvet dress, a dress that provides a solid resting-place amidst all the flitter of bright colours in the carpets, the flowers, the fruit, the little girls’ muslin dresses that look like dancers’ tutus. It was she too, I gather, who gave him the idea of the woman brushing her hair, an idea for which the artist was subsequently much praised, and which simply consisted of painting the woman not as it were on display but surprised in a moment of everyday intimacy. “I used to say to him, ‘In a woman doing her hair, drying her face, warming her feet, when she is unaware of being observed, there is a wealth of interesting movements, movements of a quite Leonardo-esque gracefulness!’ ”