Swann's Way
madly, flinging aside all the reasons I had just found to support such
action, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.
"Isn't he delicious! Quite a ladies' man already; he takes after his
uncle. He'll be a perfect 'gentleman,'" she went on, setting her teeth
so as to give the word a kind of English accentuation. "Couldn't he come
to me some day for 'a cup of tea,' as our friends across the channel
say; he need only send me a 'blue' in the morning?"
I had not the least idea of what a 'blue' might be. I did not understand
half the words which the lady used, but my fear lest there should be
concealed in them some question which it would be impolite in me not to
answer kept me from withdrawing my close attention from them, and I was
beginning to feel extremely tired.
"No, no; it is impossible," said my uncle, shrugging his shoulders. "He
is kept busy at home all day; he has plenty of work to do. He brings
back all the prizes from his school," he added in a lower tone, so that
I should not hear this falsehood and interrupt with a contradiction.
"You can't tell; he may turn out a little Victor Hugo, a kind of
Vaulabelle, don't you know."
"Oh, I love artistic people," replied the lady in pink; "there is no
one like them for understanding women. Them, and really nice men like
yourself. But please forgive my ignorance. Who, what is Vaulabelle? Is
it those gilt books in the little glass case in your drawing-room? You
know you promised to lend them to me; I will take great care of them."
My uncle, who hated lending people books, said nothing, and ushered me
out into the hall. Madly in love with the lady in pink, I covered my
old uncle's tobacco-stained cheeks with passionate kisses, and while he,
awkwardly enough, gave me to understand (without actually saying) that
he would rather I did not tell my parents about this visit, I assured
him, with tears in my eyes, that his kindness had made so strong an
impression upon me that some day I would most certainly find a way of
expressing my gratitude. So strong an impression had it made upon me
that two hours later, after a string of mysterious utterances which did
not strike me as giving my parents a sufficiently clear idea of the new
importance with which I had been invested, I found it simpler to let
them have a full account, omitting no detail, of the visit I had paid
that afternoon. In doing this I had no thought of causing my uncle any
unpleasantness. How could I have thought such a thing, since I did not
wish it? And I could not suppose that my parents would see any harm in
a visit in which I myself saw none. Every day of our lives does not
some friend or other ask us to make his apologies, without fail, to some
woman to whom he has been prevented from writing; and do not we forget
to do so, feeling that this woman cannot attach much importance to a
silence which has none for ourselves? I imagined, like everyone else,
that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles
with no power of specific reaction to any stimulus which might be
applied to them; and I had not the least doubt that when I deposited in
the minds of my parents the news of the acquaintance I had made at my
uncle's I should at the same time transmit to them the kindly judgment
I myself had based on the introduction. Unfortunately my parents had
recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested
they should adopt when they came to form their estimate of my uncle's
conduct. My father and grandfather had 'words' with him of a violent
order; as I learned indirectly. A few days later, passing my uncle in
the street as he drove by in an open carriage, Î felt at once all the
grief, the gratitude, the remorse which I should have liked to convey to
him. Beside the immensity of these emotions I considered that merely to
raise my hat to him would be incongruous and petty, and might make
him think that I regarded myself as bound to shew him no more than the
commonest form of courtesy. I decided to abstain from so inadequate a
gesture, and turned my head away. My uncle thought that, in doing so I
was obeying my parents' orders; he never forgave them; and though he
did not die until many years later, not one of us ever set eyes on him
again.
And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room (now kept
shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts
of the back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and
announced: "I am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take
up the hot water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave," I would then
decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read.
The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution
to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and
continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human
shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the
same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such
quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress
them was a poor sickly creature, some way 'gone' in pregnancy when
we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that
Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so
much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in
bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day,
whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample
smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of
the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given
me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he
inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with
Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled
and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical,
squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins,
so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are
personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues
and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as
the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which
she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant,
without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and
spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather
heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is
about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena
beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung
upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for
it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found
expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the
painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at
her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to
extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of
sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart
to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might
hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to
some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level
above. The 'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of
envy. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and
is represented with such realism; the serpent hissing between the lips
of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that
the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, like a child's who
is filling a balloon with his breath, and that Envy, and we ourselves
for that matter, when we look at her, since all her attention and ours
are concentrated on the action of her lips, have no time, almost, to
spare for envious thoughts.
Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess for these figures
of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in seeing
in our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that
Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much
as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the
glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of
the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular
features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain
good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to
see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces
of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting
strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part
played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these
were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere
expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled,
added something more precise and more literal to their meaning,
something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted.
And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention
incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the
same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of
death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal,
intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it
happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them
to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a
difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to
which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
There must have been a strong element of reality in those Virtues and
Vices of Padua, since they appeared to me to be as much alive as
the pregnant servant-girl, while she herself appeared scarcely less
allegorical than they. And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack)
of participation by a person's soul in the significant marks of its own
special virtue has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which,
if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical.
Later on, when, in the course of my life, I have had occasion to meet
with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical
charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and
slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern
no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and
no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the
sublime face of true goodness.
Then while the kitchen-maid--who, all unawares, made the superior
qualities of Françoise shine with added lustre, just as Error, by
force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth--took in coffee which
(according to Mamma) was nothing more than hot water, and then carried
up to our rooms hot water which was barely tepid, I would be lying
stretched out on my bed, a book in my hand, in my room which trembled
with the effort to defend its frail, transparent coolness against the
afternoon sun, behind its almost closed shutters through which, however,
a reflection of the sunlight had contrived to slip in on its golden
wings, remaining motionless, between glass and woodwork, in a corner,
like a butterfly poised upon a flower. It was hardly light enough for
me to read, and my feeling of the day's brightness and splendour was
derived solely from the blows struck down below, in the Rue de la Cure,
by Camus (whom Françoise had assured that my aunt was not 'resting' and