Swann's Way
will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive
quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh
for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister
to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house
uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of crafty and pitiless
stratagems. Many years later we discovered that, if we had been fed on
asparagus day after day throughout that whole season, it was because the
smell of the plants gave the poor kitchen-maid, who had to prepare them,
such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my
aunt's service.
Alas! we had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one
of the Sundays following our meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after
which my father had been forced to confess himself mistaken, as mass
drew to an end, and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world,
something else invaded the church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that
Mme. Goupil, Mme. Percepied (all those, in fact, who a moment ago, when
I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, their eyes fixed
on their prayer-books; who, I might even have thought, had not seen
me come in, had not their feet moved slightly to push away the little
kneeling-desk which was preventing me from getting to my chair) began in
loud voices to discuss with us all manner of utterly mundane topics, as
though we were already outside in the Square, we saw, standing on the
sun-baked steps of the porch, dominating the many-coloured tumult of the
market, Legrandin himself, whom the husband of the lady we had seen with
him, on the previous occasion, was just going to introduce to the wife
of another large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin's face
shewed an extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a profound bow, with
a subsidiary backward movement which brought his spine sharply up into a
position behind its starting-point, a gesture in which he must have
been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme. de Cambremer. This rapid
recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's
hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but
this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the
least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury
by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke
my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different
from the one whom we knew. The lady gave him some message for her
coachman, and while he was stepping down to her carriage the impression
of joy, timid and devout, which the introduction had stamped there,
still lingered on his face. Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled,
then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than
usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left,
in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he
abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he
were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile
we were coming out through the porch; we were passing close beside him;
he was too well bred to turn his head away; but he fixed his eyes, which
had suddenly changed to those of a seer, lost in the profundity of his
vision, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us,
and so had not to acknowledge our presence. His face emerged, still with
an air of innocence, from his straight and pliant coat, which looked
as though conscious of having been led astray, in spite of itself,
and plunged into surroundings of a detested splendour. And a spotted
necktie, stirred by the breezes of the Square, continued to float in
front of Legrandin, like the standard of his proud isolation, of his
noble independence. Just as we reached the house my mother discovered
that we had forgotten the 'Saint-Honoré,' and asked my father to go
back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the church we met
Legrandin, coming towards us with the same lady, whom he was escorting
to her carriage. He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was
saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little
sign, which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids, and as
it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to
pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the
intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which
they had to find expression, he made that blue chink, which was set
apart for us, sparkle with all the animation of cordiality, which went
far beyond mere playfulness, and almost touched the border-line of
roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink
of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the
mysteries of complicity in a plot, and finally exalted his assurances
of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a
declaration of love, lighting up for us, and for us alone, with a secret
and languid flame invisible by the great lady upon his other side, an
enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.
Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him
on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company,"
he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from
some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from
the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of
spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with
the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the
stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian
flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter
daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to
embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere
the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious
silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the
many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the
spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart,
for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the
closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."
The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought
still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused
to believe that he could have been impolite.
"You admit yourself that he appears at church there, quite simply
dressed, and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added
that; in any event, even if, at the worst, he had been intentionally
rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing.
And indeed my father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the
attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a
final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude
or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear
no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our
suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are
reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the
face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether
indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with
the result that such attitudes, and these alone are of importance in
indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.
I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by moonlight. "There
is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence;
for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist, whom you will read
in time to come, claims that there is no remedy but silence and shadow.
And see you this, my boy, there comes in all lives a time, towards which
you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of
light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the
stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what
the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence."
I could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like everything that he said,
it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed by the memory of a lady whom
I had seen recently for the first time; and thinking, now that I
knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local
aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I
summoned up all my courage and said to him: "Tell me, sir, do you, by
any chance, know the lady--the ladies of Guermantes?" and I felt glad
because, in pronouncing the name, I had secured a sort of power over
it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my dreams and giving it an
objective existence in the world of spoken things.
But, at the sound of the word Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of
our friend's blue eyes a little brown dimple appear, as though they had
been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of his pupils,
reacting from the shock, received and secreted the azure overflow.
His fringed eyelids darkened, and drooped. His mouth, which had been
stiffened and seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and
smiled, while his eyes still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a
good-looking martyr whose body bristles with arrows.
"No, I do not know them," he said, but instead of uttering so simple a
piece of information, a reply in which there was so little that could
astonish me, in the natural and conversational tone which would have
befitted it, he recited it with a separate stress upon each word,
leaning forward, bowing his head, with at once the vehemence which a man
gives, so as to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though
the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some
strange accident of fortune) and with the emphasis of a man who, finding
himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation,
chooses to proclaim it aloud, so as to convince his hearers that the
confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, but is
easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation in question, in this
case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family, might very
well have been not forced upon, but actually designed by Legrandin
himself, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or
mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.
"No," he resumed, explaining by his words the tone in which they were
uttered. "No, I do not know them; I have never wished to know them; I
have always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart,
as you know, I am a bit of a Radical. People are always coming to me
about it, telling me I am mistaken in not going to Guermantes, that I
make myself seem ill-bred, uncivilised, an old bear. But that's not the
sort of reputation that can frighten me; it's too true! In my heart
of hearts I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches,
books--two or three, pictures--rather more, perhaps, and the light of
the moon when the fresh breeze of youth (such as yours) wafts to my
nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes are not sharp
enough, now, to distinguish."
I did not understand very clearly why, in order to refrain from going
to the houses of people whom one did not know, it should be necessary to
cling to one's independence, nor how that could give one the appearance
of a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was this, that
Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only
for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very