Swann's Way
Oedipe-Roi_, inscribed not on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique, but
on the wine-coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed
to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of
the _Diamants de la Couronne_ than the sleek, mysterious satin of the
_Domino Noir_; and since my parents had told me that, for my first visit
to the theatre, I should have to choose between these two pieces, I
would study exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title
of the other (for those were all that I knew of either), attempting to
snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure which it offered me, and to
compare this pleasure with that latent in the other title, until in the
end I had shewn myself such vivid, such compelling pictures of, on
the one hand, a play of dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle,
velvety play, that I was as little capable of deciding which play I
should prefer to see as if, at the dinner-table, they had obliged me to
choose between _rice à l'Impératrice_ and the famous cream of chocolate.
All my conversations with my playfellows bore upon actors, whose art,
although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its
numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its
enjoyment. Between one actor's tricks of intonation and inflection and
another's, the most trifling differences would strike me as being of an
incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would
arrange them in the order of their talent in lists which I used to
murmur to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified
in my brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.
And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, when the
master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would
always begin by asking him whether he had begun yet to go to theatres,
and if he agreed that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second
Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron,
or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of
Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my mind, in
which it moved upwards to the second place, the rich vitality with which
the name of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable it to slip
down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of
budding and blossoming life.
But if the thought of actors weighed so upon me, if the sight of
Maubant, coming out one afternoon from the Théâtre-Français, had plunged
me in the throes and sufferings of hopeless love, how much more did the
name of a 'star,' blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more,
seen through the window of a brougham which passed me in the street, the
hair over her forehead abloom with roses, did the face of a woman who,
I would think, was perhaps an actress, leave with me a lasting
disturbance, a futile and painful effort to form a picture of her
private life.
I classified, in order of talent, the most distinguished: Sarah
Bernhardt, Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was
interested in them all. Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and
also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses
in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house. And if we went to
see him on certain days only, that was because on the other days ladies
might come whom his family could not very well have met. So we at least
thought; as for my uncle, his fatal readiness to pay pretty widows (who
had perhaps never been married) and countesses (whose high-sounding
titles were probably no more than _noms de guerre_) the compliment of
presenting them to my grandmother or even of presenting to them some
of our family jewels, had already embroiled him more than once with
my grandfather. Often, if the name of some actress were mentioned in
conversation, I would hear my father say, with a smile, to my mother:
"One of your uncle's friends," and I would think of the weary novitiate
through which, perhaps for years on end, a grown man, even a man of real
importance, might have to pass, waiting on the doorstep of some such
lady, while she refused to answer his letters and made her hall-porter
drive him away; and imagine that my uncle was able to dispense a little
jackanapes like myself from all these sufferings by introducing me in
his own home to the actress, unapproachable by all the world, but for
him an intimate friend.
And so--on the pretext that some lesson, the hour of which had been
altered, now came at such an awkward time that it had already more than
once prevented me, and would continue to prevent me, from seeing my
uncle--one day, not one of the days which he set apart for our visits, I
took advantage of the fact that my parents had had luncheon earlier
than usual; I slipped out and, instead of going to read the playbills on
their column, for which purpose I was allowed to go out unaccompanied,
I ran all the way to his house. I noticed before his door a carriage and
pair, with red carnations on the horses' blinkers and in the coachman's
buttonhole. As I climbed the staircase I could hear laughter and a
woman's voice, and, as soon as I had rung, silence and the sound of
shutting doors. The man-servant who let me in appeared embarrassed, and
said that my uncle was extremely busy and probably could not see me; he
went in, however, to announce my arrival, and the same voice I had heard
before said: "Oh, yes! Do let him come in; just for a moment; it will be
so amusing. Is that his photograph there, on your desk? And his mother
(your niece, isn't she?) beside it? The image of her, isn't he? I should
so like to see the little chap, just for a second."
I could hear my uncle grumbling and growing angry; finally the
manservant told me to come in.
On the table was the same plate of marchpanes that was always there; my
uncle wore the same alpaca coat as on other days; but opposite to him,
in a pink silk dress with a great necklace of pearls about her throat,
sat a young woman who was just finishing a tangerine. My uncertainty
whether I ought to address her as Madame or Mademoiselle made me blush,
and not daring to look too much in her direction, in case I should be
obliged to speak to her, I hurried across to kiss my uncle. She looked
at me and smiled; my uncle said "My nephew!" without telling her my name
or telling me hers, doubtless because, since his difficulties with
my grandfather, he had endeavoured as far as possible to avoid any
association of his family with this other class of acquaintance.
"How like his mother he is," said the lady.
"But you have never seen my niece, except in photographs," my uncle
broke in quickly, with a note of anger.
"I beg your pardon, dear friend, I passed her on the staircase last year
when you were so ill. It is true I only saw her for a moment, and your
staircase is rather dark; but I saw well enough to see how lovely she
was. This young gentleman has her beautiful eyes, and also this," she
went on, tracing a line with one finger across the lower part of her
forehead. "Tell me," she asked my uncle, "is your niece Mme.----; is her
name the same as yours?"
"He takes most after his father," muttered my uncle, who was no more
anxious to effect an introduction by proxy, in repeating Mamma's name
aloud, than to bring the two together in the flesh. "He's his father all
over, and also like my poor mother."
"I have not met his father, dear," said the lady in pink, bowing her
head slightly, "and I never saw your poor mother. You will remember it
was just after your great sorrow that we got to know one another."
I felt somewhat disillusioned, for this young lady was in no way
different from other pretty women whom I had seen from time to time at
home, especially the daughter of one of our cousins, to whose house I
went every New Year's Day. Only better dressed; otherwise my uncle's
friend had the same quick and kindly glance, the same frank and friendly
manner. I could find no trace in her of the theatrical appearance
which I admired in photographs of actresses, nothing of the diabolical
expression which would have been in keeping with the life she must lead.
I had difficulty in believing that this was one of 'those women,' and
certainly I should never have believed her one of the 'smart ones' had I
not seen the carriage and pair, the pink dress, the pearly necklace, had
I not been aware, too, that my uncle knew only the very best of them.
But I asked myself how the millionaire who gave her her carriage and her
flat and her jewels could find any pleasure in flinging his money away
upon a woman who had so simple and respectable an appearance. And yet,
when I thought of what her life must be like, its immorality disturbed
me more, perhaps, than if it had stood before me in some concrete and
recognisable form, by its secrecy and invisibility, like the plot of a
novel, the hidden truth of a scandal which had driven out of the home
of her middle-class parents and dedicated to the service of all mankind
which had brought to the flowering-point of her beauty, had raised
to fame or notoriety this woman, the play of whose features, the
intonations of whose voice, like so many others I already knew, made me
regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good family, her who
was no longer of a family at all.
We had gone by this time into the 'study,' and my uncle, who seemed a
trifle embarrassed by my presence, offered her a cigarette.
"No, thank you, dear friend," she said. "You know I only smoke the ones
the Grand Duke sends me. I tell him that they make you jealous." And
she drew from a case cigarettes covered with inscriptions in gold, in
a foreign language. "Why, yes," she began again suddenly. "Of course I
have met this young man's father with you. Isn't he your nephew? How on
earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so charming to me," she
went on, modestly and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what
must actually have been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been
so charming), I, who knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked,
as though at some indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the
excessive recognition bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality.
It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part
played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote
all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of
sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise
the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame
of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the
fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched
and ill-polished lives of men. And just as this one filled the
smoking-room, where my uncle was entertaining her in his alpaca coat,
with her charming person, her dress of pink silk, her pearls, and the
refinement suggested by intimacy with a Grand Duke, so, in the same
way, she had taken some casual remark by my father, had worked it up
delicately, given it a 'turn,' a precious title, set in it the gem of a
glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility
and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work
of art, into something altogether charming.
"Look here, my boy, it is time you went away," said my uncle.
I rose; I could scarcely resist a desire to kiss the hand of the lady
in pink, but I felt that to do so would require as much audacity as a
forcible abduction of her. My heart beat loud while I counted out to
myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?" and then I ceased to ask myself
what I ought to do so as at least to do something. Blindly, hotly,