Swann's Way
doesn't know me. Unless he's mad, of course."
And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour
and a half late for luncheon and covered with mud from head to foot, and
made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow myself to be
influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or
by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly
reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but
I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more
pernicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the
umbrella and the watch."
In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray. He
was, of course, hardly the friend my parents would have chosen for
me; they had, in the end, decided that the tears which he had shed on
hearing of my grandmother's illness were genuine enough; but they
knew, either instinctively or from their own experience, that our early
impulsive emotions have but little influence over our later actions and
the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty
to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule
of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly
followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They
would have preferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would
have given me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class
morality, for boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly
send me a basket of fruit because they happened, that morning, to have
thought of me with affection, but who, since they were incapable of
inclining in my favour, by any single impulse of their imagination and
emotions, the exact balance of the duties and claims of friendship, were
as incapable of loading the scales to my prejudice. Even the injuries
we do them will not easily divert from the path of their duty towards us
those conventional natures of which my great-aunt furnished a type: who,
after quarrelling for years with a niece, to whom she never spoke again,
yet made no change in the will in which she had left that niece the
whole of her fortune, because she was her next-of-kin, and it was the
'proper thing' to do.
But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
meaningless' beauty of _La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë_ tired me more
and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with
him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And he
would still have been received at Combray but for one thing. That same
night, after dinner, having informed me (a piece of news which had a
great influence on my later life, making it happier at one time and then
more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that
there was not one of them whose resistance a man could not overcome,
he had gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on unimpeachable
authority that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in her younger
days, and had been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain from passing
on so important a piece of information to my parents; the next time
Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards, when I met him in the
street, he greeted me with extreme coldness.
But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.
For the first few days, like a tune which will be running in one's head
and maddening one soon enough, but of which one has not for the moment
'got hold,' the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style
had not yet caught my eye. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel
of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the
story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we go every day to meet
a woman at some party or entertainment by the charm of which we imagine
it is that we are attracted. Then I observed the rare, almost archaic
phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow
of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would
animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these,
too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the
"inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture
of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for
all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals"; that he
would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of
marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have
ascribed that sound of harping which began to chime and echo in my ears,
an accompaniment to which that imagery added something ethereal and
sublime. One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which I
had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy
I had tasted in the first passage bore no comparison, a joy which I felt
myself to have experienced in some innermost chamber of my soul, deep,
undivided, vast, from which all obstructions and partitions seemed to
have been swept away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised
in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same bursts
of music, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the
earlier passages without my having taken them into account as the source
of my pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being confronted
by a particular passage in one of Bergotte's works, which traced a
purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but
rather of the 'ideal passage' of Bergotte, common to every one of his
books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming
merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own
understanding seemed to be enlarged.
I was by no means Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer
also of a friend of my mother's, a highly literary lady; while Dr. du
Boulbon had kept all his patients waiting until he finished Bergotte's
latest volume; and it was from his consulting room, and from a house in
a park near Combray that some of the first seeds were scattered of that
taste for Bergotte, a rare-growth in those days, but now so universally
acclimatised that one finds it flowering everywhere throughout Europe
and America, and even in the tiniest villages, rare still in its
refinement, but in that alone. What my mother's friend, and, it would
seem, what Dr. du Boulbon liked above all in the writings of Bergotte
was just what I liked, the same flow of melody, the same old-fashioned
phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by
him, in such prominence, as to hint at a particular quality of taste on
his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of roughness,
a tone that was almost harsh. And he himself, no doubt, realised that
these were his principal attractions. For in his later books, if he had
hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral,
he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a
lengthy prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence which, in
the earlier volumes, remained buried beneath the form of his prose,
discernible only in a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more
delightful, more harmonious when it was thus veiled from the eye, when
the reader could give no precise indication of where the murmur of the
current began, or of where it died away. These passages in which he
delighted were our favourites also. For my own part I knew all of them
by heart. I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his
narrative. Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until
then remained hidden from me, of pine-forests or of hailstorms, of
_Notre-Dame de Paris_, of _Athalie_, or of _Phèdre_, by some piece
of imagery he would make their beauty explode and drench me with its
essence. And so, dimly realising that the universe contained innumerable
elements which my feeble senses would be powerless to discern, did he
not bring them within my reach, I wished that I might have his opinion,
some metaphor of his, upon everything in the world, and especially upon
such things as I might have an opportunity, some day, of seeing for
myself; and among such things, more particularly still upon some of the
historic buildings of France, upon certain views of the sea, because the
emphasis with which, in his books, he referred to these shewed that he
regarded them as rich in significance and beauty. But, alas, upon almost
everything in the world his opinion was unknown to me. I had no doubt
that it would differ entirely from my own, since his came down from an
unknown sphere towards which I was striving to raise myself; convinced
that my thoughts would have seemed pure foolishness to that perfected
spirit, I had so completely obliterated them all that, if I happened to
find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own
mind, my heart would swell with gratitude and pride as though some deity
had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be
beautiful and right. It happened now and then that a page of Bergotte
would express precisely those ideas which I used often at night, when
I was unable to sleep, to write to my grandmother and mother, and so
concisely and well that his page had the appearance of a collection of
mottoes for me to set at the head of my letters. And so too, in later
years, when I began to compose a book of my own, and the quality of some
of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to
go on with the undertaking, I would find the equivalent of my sentences
in Bergotte's. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages,
that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in
my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I seemed to have
detected in my mind, and in my fear of their not turning out 'true to
life,' I had no time to ask myself whether what I was writing would be
pleasant to read! But indeed there was no kind of language, no kind of
ideas which I really liked, except these. My feverish and unsatisfactory
attempts were themselves a token of my love, a love which brought me no
pleasure, but was, for all that, intense and deep. And so, when I came
suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say
stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and
self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite
for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to
prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself. And
so, when I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some joke about
an old family servant, to which his solemn and magnificent style added a
great deal of irony, but which was in principle what I had often said to
my grandmother about Françoise, and when, another time, I had discovered
that he thought not unworthy of reflection in one of those mirrors of
absolute Truth which were his writings, a remark similar to one which I
had had occasion to make on our friend M. Legrandin (and, moreover, my
remarks on Françoise and M. Legrandin were among those which I would
most resolutely have sacrificed for Bergotte's sake, in the belief
that he would find them quite without interest); then it was suddenly
revealed to me that my own humble existence and the Realms of Truth were
less widely separated than I had supposed, that at certain points they
were actually in contact; and in my new-found confidence and joy I wept
upon his printed page, as in the arms of a long-lost father.
From his books I had formed an impression of Bergotte as a frail and