Swann's Way
great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and would be so much
afraid, when in their company, of incurring their displeasure that he
would never dare to let them see that he numbered, as well, among
his friends middle-class people, the families of solicitors and
stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must be known, that it should
be revealed in his absence, when he was out of earshot, that judgment
should go against him (if so it must) by default: in a word, he was a
snob. Of course he would never have admitted all or any of this in the
poetical language which my family and I so much admired. And if I asked
him, "Do you know the Guermantes family?" Legrandin the talker would
reply, "No, I have never cared to know them." But unfortunately the
talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully
hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because
this other could tell stories about our own Legrandin and about his
snobbishness which would have ruined his reputation for ever; and this
other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that
stiffened smile, the undue gravity of his tone in uttering those
few words, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had
instantaneously been stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of
snobbery:
"Oh, how you hurt me! No, I do not know the Guermantes family. Do not
remind me of the great sorrow of my life." And since this other,
this irrepressible, dominant, despotic Legrandin, if he lacked our
Legrandin's charming vocabulary, shewed an infinitely greater promptness
in expressing himself, by means of what are called 'reflexes,' it
followed that, when Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he
would already have spoken, and it would be useless for our friend to
deplore the bad impression which the revelations of his _alter ego_ must
have caused, since he could do no more now than endeavour to mitigate
them.
This was not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he
inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least)
be aware that he was one also, since it is only with the passions of
others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out
about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us. Upon
ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which
substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives,
less stark and therefore more decent. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness
impelled him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it
would set his imagination to make that duchess appear, in Legrandin's
eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would be drawn towards the
duchess, assuring himself the while that he was yielding to the
attractions of her mind, and her other virtues, which the vile race of
snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was
of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the
intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition
the social activities of Legrandin and their primary cause.
At home, meanwhile, we had no longer any illusions as to M. Legrandin,
and our relations with him had become much more distant. Mamma would be
greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, which
he continued to call the unpardonable sin, of snobbery. As for my
father, he found it difficult to take Legrandin's airs in so light, in
so detached a spirit; and when there was some talk, one year, of sending
me to spend the long summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother,
he said: "I must, most certainly, tell Legrandin that you are going to
Balbec, to see whether he will offer you an introduction to his sister.
He probably doesn't remember telling us that she lived within a mile of
the place."
My grandmother, who held that, when one went to the seaside, one ought
to be on the beach from morning to night, to taste the salt breezes, and
that one should not know anyone in the place, because calls and parties
and excursions were so much time stolen from what belonged, by rights,
to the sea-air, begged him on no account to speak to Legrandin of our
plans; for already, in her mind's eye, she could see his sister, Mme. de
Cambremer, alighting from her carriage at the door of our hotel just
as we were on the point of going out fishing, and obliging us to remain
indoors all afternoon to entertain her. But Mamma laughed her fears to
scorn, for she herself felt that the danger was not so threatening, and
that Legrandin would shew no undue anxiety to make us acquainted with
his sister. And, as it happened, there was no need for any of us to
introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who,
without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of
visiting those parts, walked into the trap uninvited one evening, when
we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.
"There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which
are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?" he said to my father.
"Especially a blue which is far more floral than atmospheric, a
cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that
little pink cloud there, has it not just the tint of some flower, a
carnation or hydrangea? Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the
English Channel, where Normandy merges into Brittany, have I been able
to find such copious examples of what you might call a vegetable kingdom
in the clouds. Down there, close to Balbec, among all those places which
are still so uncivilised, there is a little bay, charmingly quiet, where
the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which,
all the same, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and
insignificant; for in that moist and gentle atmosphere these heavenly
flower-beds will break into blossom, in a few moments, in the evenings,
incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade.
Others shed their leaves at once, and then it is more beautiful still
to see the sky strewn with the scattering of their innumerable petals,
sulphurous yellow and rosy red. In that bay, which they call the Opal
Bay, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened,
like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast,
to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every
winter many a brave vessel falls a victim to the perils of the sea.
Balbec! the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our
soil, the true Armor, the sea, the land's end, the accursed region
which Anatole France--an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to
read--has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were
indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes, they
are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and
charming soil, which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is,
down there, to be able to step out at once into regions so primitive and
so entrancing."
"Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?" inquired my father. "This
young man is just going to spend a couple of months there with his
grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps."
Legrandin, taken unawares by the question at a moment when he was
looking directly at my father, was unable to turn aside his gaze, and so
concentrated it with steadily increasing intensity--smiling mournfully
the while--upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness
and frankness and of not being afraid to look him in the face, until he
seemed to have penetrated my father's skull, as it had been a ball of
glass, and to be seeing, at the moment, a long way beyond and behind it,
a brightly coloured cloud, which provided him with a mental alibi, and
would enable him to establish the theory that, just when he was
being asked whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking
of something else, and so had not heard the question. As a rule these
tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, "Why, what are you thinking
about?" But my father, inquisitive, annoyed, and cruel, repeated: "Have
you friends, then, in that neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?"
In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled
to the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and
distraction; then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left for it
now but to answer, he said to us: "I have friends all the world over,
wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated,
which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic
obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them."
"That is not quite what I meant," interrupted my father, obstinate as
a tree and merciless as the sky. "I asked you, in case anything should
happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that she was not all
alone down there, at the ends of the earth, whether you knew any of the
people."
"There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one," replied
Legrandin, who was by no means ready yet to surrender; "places I know
well, people very slightly. But, down there, the places themselves seem
to me just like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality
which would have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life. Perhaps
it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge; standing there
by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before
an evening sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing;
while the fishing-boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of
the Channel, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours.
Or perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if
anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some
imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which
knows not truth," he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, "that land
of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy; and is certainly
not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is
already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart already predisposed
to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous secrets and
futile regrets may agree with an old and disillusioned man like myself;
but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which is still
unformed. Believe me," he went on with emphasis, "the waters of that
bay--more Breton than Norman--may exert a sedative influence, though
even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no
longer unbroken, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything
to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are
contra-indicated.... Good night to you, neighbours," he added, moving
away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed;
and then, turning towards us, with a physicianly finger raised in
warning, he resumed the consultation: "No Balbec before you are fifty!"
he called out to me, "and even then it must depend on the state of the
heart."
My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured
him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly
swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth
of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would
have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative--but an honourable
occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have
constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower
Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own
sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged