In Search of Lost Time Page 4

  ‘But at a sign from Verdurin, indicating that the re-arousal of this indignation was not good for the health of his wife, who is very highly strung, Swann invites me to admire the necklace of black pearls worn by the mistress of the house, and bought by her, in their original whiteness, at the sale of a descendant of Mme de La Fayette, to whom they were given by Henrietta of England, pearls which had become black after a fire which destroyed part of the house in which the Verdurins lived, in a street whose name I no longer remember, a fire from which the casket containing the pearls was recovered, but with the pearls now entirely black. “And I know the portrait of them, of these pearls, on the very shoulders of Mme de La Fayette, yes, I know their portrait very well,” insists Swann, forestalling the somewhat amazed exclamations of the other guests, “the authentic portrait of them, in the collection of the Duc de Guermantes.” A collection without equal anywhere in the world, declares Swann, and which I ought to go and see, a collection inherited by the famous Duc, who was her favourite nephew, from his aunt, Mme de Beausergent, afterwards Mme d’Hatzfeldt, sister of the Marquise de Villeparisis and of the Princess of Hanover, in whose house my brother and I had at one time grown so fond of him in the person of the charming little child called Basin, which as a matter of fact is indeed the Duc’s forename. Thereupon Dr Cottard, with the subtlety which reveals him to be a man of genuine eminence, turns back to the story of the pearls, and informs us that catastrophes of this nature produce alterations in the human brain quite comparable to those observable in inanimate matter, and cites, in a manner considerably more philosophical than most doctors could command, the instance of Mme de Verdurin’s own manservant, who, from the horror of that fire, in which he very nearly perished, had become a changed man, with a handwriting so altered that when his master and mistress, then in Normandy, received his first letter informing them of the occurrence, they imagined it to be the work of a practical joker. And not only an altered handwriting, according to Cottard, who maintains that from being abstemious this man had become such an abominable drunk that Mme Verdurin had been obliged to dismiss him. And this thought-provoking discourse adjourns, at a gracious signal from the mistress of the house, from the dining-room to the Venetian smoking-room, where Cottard tells us that he has witnessed veritable instances of dual personality, citing the case of one of his patients, whom he very kindly offers to bring to my house, and whose temples he has, apparently, only to touch to awaken him to a second life, a life during which he remembers nothing of the first, to such a degree that, although entirely honest in the one, he has several times been arrested for thefts committed in the other, in which he is quite simply a complete scoundrel. Upon which Mme Verdurin shrewdly remarks that medicine might furnish the modern theatre with a more truthful set of subjects, in which the convolutions of the imbroglio would be founded upon misapprehensions of a pathological nature, which, by a natural progression, leads Mme Cottard to relate that a very similar idea has been used by a story-teller who is the bedtime favourite of her children, the Scotsman Stevenson, a name which prompts Swann to the peremptory assertion, “But he’s altogether a great writer, Stevenson, I assure you, M. de Goncourt, very great, equal to the greatest.” And when, after having marvelled at the ceiling, with its escutcheoned coffers, taken from the old Palazzo Barberini, of the room in which we are smoking, I hint at my regret at the gradual darkening of a certain stone basin by the ash of our Havanas, and Swann having recounted how similar stains on books once belonging to Napoleon I, books which are now, despite his anti-Bonapartist opinions, in the possession of the Duc de Guermantes, testify to the Emperor’s having chewed tobacco, Cottard, who shows himself to be interested to a quite profound degree in everything, declares that the stains do not come from that at all – “No, no, not at all,” he insists with authority – but from the habit he had of always having in his hand, even on the battlefield, liquorice tablets, to allay his liver pains. “Because he had a disease of the liver and that is what he finally died of,” concludes the doctor.’

  I stopped there, because I was leaving in the morning; and besides it was the hour at which I was customarily claimed by the master, in whose service we spend, each day, a large part of our time. The work to which he compels us, we accomplish with our eyes shut. Each morning he returns us to our other master, knowing that if he does not, we will be reluctant to surrender ourselves again to his service. Inquisitive, when our intelligence has reopened its eyes, to know what we may have done in the house of this master, who has his slaves lie down before putting them so rapidly to work, the shrewdest of them, their task scarcely finished, try to steal a clandestine glimpse of it. But sleep races against them to dispel the traces of what they would like to see. And after so many centuries we still do not know very much about it.

  So I closed the Goncourts’ journal. The magic of literature! I would have liked to see the Cottards again, asked them so many details about Elstir, gone to look at that shop, ‘Le Petit Dunkerque’, if it still existed, asked permission to visit the Verdurin hôtel where I had been to dinner. But I felt a vague sense of unease. Certainly I had never concealed from myself the fact that I did not know how to listen, nor, as soon as I was not alone, how to observe. My eyes would not notice what kind of pearl necklace an old woman might be wearing, and anything that might be said about it would not penetrate my ears. Yet I had known these individuals in my daily life, I had often dined with them, whether they were the Verdurins, the Duc de Guermantes, the Cottards, and each of them had seemed to me as ordinary as that Basin had appeared to my grandmother, who little suspected that he was the cherished nephew, the charming young hero, of Mme de Beausergent, to me they had all seemed insipid; I could recall the numberless vulgarities of which each of them was compounded…

  Et que tout cela fasse un astre dans la nuit!15

  I resolved provisionally to set aside the objections to literature aroused in me by the pages of Goncourt read on the eve of my departure from Tansonville. Even discounting the evidence of personal naïvety so conspicuous in the work of this memoirist, I could set my mind at rest on a number of other points. First, so far as my own personality was concerned, my incapacity to look attentively and to listen, which the quotation from the journal had so painfully illustrated to me, was yet not total. There was in me a character who knew more or less how to look, but this was an intermittent character, coming to life only when some general essence was revealed, something common to several things, in which it found its nourishment and its delight. Then the character looked and listened, but only to a certain depth, so that my observation did not benefit from it. Just as a geometrician, stripping things of their physical qualities, sees only their linear substratum, so what people said escaped me, because what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the manner in which they said it, in so far as this revealed their character or their absurdities; or, rather, the object that had always been the aim of my researches, because it gave me a specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another. It was only when I glimpsed this that my intelligence – thitherto sleeping, even behind the apparent alertness of my conversation, the animation of which masked from the others a complete intellectual torpor – set out joyously in pursuit, but what it was then pursuing – for example, the identity of the Verdurin salon in different places and at different times – was situated at a somewhat deeper point, beyond appearances themselves, in a zone set slightly further back. Thus the visible, reproducible, charm of individuals escaped me, because I did not have the ability to dwell on it, like a surgeon who will see, beneath the sleek surface of a woman’s belly, the internal disease which is gnawing at it. How ever often I dined out, I did not see the other guests, because when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact radiographing them.

  It followed from this that, by combining all the observations I had been able to make of the guests at a dinner, the pattern of the lines I had traced formed a cluster of psychological laws in which a guest’
s personal stake in the conversation had almost no place. But did that remove all merit from my portraits, since I was not offering them as such? If, in the realm of painting, one portrait demonstrates certain truths relative to volume, to light, to movement, does this make it necessarily inferior to some other portrait, with no points of similarity, of the same person, in which a thousand details omitted in the first are minutely stated – a second portrait from which one would conclude that the model was ravishingly beautiful, while one would have thought him or her ugly in the first, something which may possess a documentary, and even historical, importance, but is not necessarily a truth of art.

  Moreover my frivolousness, as soon as I was not alone, made me eager to please, more eager to amuse by chattering than to learn by listening, unless it were that I had gone out into society to enquire about some aspect of art, or some jealous suspicion which had earlier been occupying my thoughts. I was really incapable of seeing anything for which the desire had not been awakened in me by something I had read, anything of which I had not first outlined for myself a sketch which I then wanted to compare with reality. How many times, as I was well aware even without the Goncourt pages reminding me of it, have I remained incapable of bestowing my attention on things or people that subsequently, once their image had been presented to me in solitude by an artist, I would have travelled miles, risked death, to encounter again! Only then had my imagination started to work, begun to paint. And of something which a year before had made me yawn, I would say to myself anxiously, contemplating it in advance, desiring it: ‘Will it really be impossible to see it? What I wouldn’t give to be able to!’

  When one reads articles about people, even just society people, described as ‘the last representatives of a world to which no witness any longer exists’, one may of course exclaim: ‘To think that they should speak so generously and so fulsomely about such an insignificant person! That is what I should so have regretted not having known, if I had only read the newspapers and magazines and not met the man!’ But I was tempted instead, reading such pages in the newspapers, to think: ‘What a pity that – when I was solely preoccupied with my next meeting with Gilberte or Albertine – I did not pay more attention to this gentleman! I took him for a society bore, a stuffed shirt, but he was a major figure!’

  The pages of Goncourt that I read made me regret this tendency. For it may be that I might have inferred from them that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book. If need be, we may console ourselves for finding scant pleasure in the company of a Vinteuil, or a Bergotte. The middle-class prudishness of the one, the insufferable deficiencies of the other, even the pretentious vulgarity of an Elstir in his early days (for the Goncourts’ journal had made me realize that he was none other than the ‘M. Tiche’ who had once held forth so exasperatingly to Swann, at the Verdurins’ house), prove nothing against them, since their genius is manifested by their work. In their case, whether it is the memoirs or ourselves that are at fault when they make their society, which we disliked, seem attractive, is not an important problem, since, even if it were the writer of the memoir who was wrong, that would prove nothing against the value of the life that produced such genius. (After all, what man of genius has not adopted the irritating conversational mannerisms of the artists of his set, before achieving, as did Elstir, and as happens all too rarely, a higher level of taste? Are not Balzac’s letters, for instance, strewn with vulgar turns of phrase which Swann would have died a thousand deaths rather than employ? And yet in all probability Swann, discriminating as he was, so free of every dislikeable absurdity, would have been incapable of writing La Cousine Bette or Le Curé de Tours.)

  At the other extreme of experience, when I considered how the most revealing anecdotes, which make up the inexhaustible substance of the Goncourts’ journal, providing entertainment for the reader’s solitary evenings, had been recounted to him by these dinner-guests whom we might, through his pages, have felt a desire to meet, and who had yet left me no impression of any interesting recollection, that also was not too hard to explain. Despite the naïvety of Goncourt, who inferred from the interest of these anecdotes the probable eminence of the men who recounted them, it could very well be that undistinguished people might have encountered during their lives, or heard related, noteworthy things, which they themselves retold in their turn. Goncourt knew how to listen, as he knew how to see: I did not.

  Moreover, all these facts would have had to be judged one at a time. M. de Guermantes had certainly not impressed me as that adorable model of youthful graces whom my grandmother had so much wanted to know, and which she set before me as a standard I could never match up to, as described in the memoirs of Mme de Beausergent. But it must be remembered that Basin was then seven years old, that the writer was his aunt, and that even husbands who in a few months will be obtaining a divorce will endlessly eulogize their wives to you. One of Sainte-Beuve’s prettiest poems16 is devoted to the apparition before a fountain of a little girl crowned with every gift and every grace, the young Mlle de Champlâtreux, who could not then have been more than ten years old. Despite all the affectionate reverence which that poet of genius, the Comtesse de Noailles, bore for her mother-in-law the Duchesse de Noailles née Champlâtreux, it is possible that, if she had been obliged to portray her, the result might have contrasted quite sharply with the portrait that Sainte-Beuve drew of her fifty years earlier.

  What was perhaps more unsettling were the cases in between, were those people of whom what is said implies that there was more to them than simply a memory that could retain a revealing anecdote, yet without allowing one, as one has with the Vinteuils, the Bergottes, the recourse of judging them on their work, as they have not created any: they have merely – to the great astonishment of us, who found them so ordinary – inspired it. It may chance that the salon which, in the museums, will give the greatest impression of elegance since the great paintings of the Renaissance might be that of the absurd middle-class woman whom, if I had not known her, I would have imagined, as I looked at the picture, approaching in reality, hoping to learn from her the most precious secrets of the painter’s art, which his canvas would not yield me, and how her ceremonial train of velvet and lace could have become a piece of painting comparable to the finest works of Titian. Having long understood that it is not the man who is the wittiest, the best educated, or the best connected, but the one who can become a mirror and thereby reflect his life, however commonplace, who becomes a Bergotte (for all that his contemporaries may have thought him less witty than Swann and less erudite than Bréauté), might one not say as much, and with greater justification, of an artist’s models? When the love of beauty stirs in the breast of an artist who could paint anything, the model for the elegance in which he will be able to find a fittingly lovely subject will be furnished him by people somewhat richer than he is, in whose surroundings he will find what is generally missing from the studio of an unknown man of genius who sells his pictures for fifty francs: a drawing-room with furniture covered in old silk, plenty of lamps, beautiful flowers, beautiful fruit, beautiful dresses – relatively unpretentious people, or so they would seem to really glittering society (which is unaware that they even exist), but people, consequently, who are more likely to make an obscure artist’s acquaintance, to appreciate him, to invite him, to buy his canvases, than members of the aristocracy who have themselves painted, like the Pope or Heads of State, by academicians. Will not posterity find the poetry of an elegant home and the beautiful dresses of our time better represented in Renoir’s painting of the publisher Charpentier’s drawing-room, than in the portraits of the Princesse de Sagan or the Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld by Cot or Chaplin?17 The artist
s who give us the greatest visions of elegance have gleaned the elements of them from the homes of people who were seldom the leaders of fashion of their epoch, for those seldom had themselves painted by an unknown carrier of a kind of beauty which they are unable to perceive in his canvases, concealed as it is by the interposition of a stereotype of outmoded charm, which floats before the eyes of the public like those subjective visions which a sick person believes are actually present in front of him. But that these commonplace models whom I had known should also have inspired and advised certain arrangements which had enchanted me, that the presence of one or other of them in the pictures might be not merely that of a model, but that of a friend whom a painter might want to put into his canvases, made me wonder whether all the people we regret not having known because Balzac depicted them in his books or dedicated his books to them in admiring homage, about whom Sainte-Beuve or Baudelaire composed their finest verses, still more whether all the Récamiers, all the Pompadours, might not have seemed insignificant to me in person, either as a result of a weakness in my nature, which made me angry at my being ill and unable to go back and see all the people whom I had failed to appreciate, or else because they owed their prestige only to the illusory magic of literature, which forced me to change my reading habits, and consoled me for having, at any moment, because of the progress my illness was making, to break with society, give up travelling and visiting museums, in order to enter a sanatorium and undergo treatment. Yet perhaps this deceptive aspect, this artificial light, exists only in memoirs when they are too recent, when reputations are evaporating so quickly, intellectual ones as much as fashionable ones (for however much erudition then tries to react against this entombment, does it ever succeed in destroying even once in a thousand times the oblivion which piles up so relentlessly?).