Swann's Way
At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamentation of their
leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the
apple-trees were exposing their broad petals of white satin, or hanging
in shy bunches their unopened, blushing buds. It was while going
the 'Méséglise way' that I first noticed the circular shadow which
apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable
threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards
from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through
with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.
Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little
cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have
to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary
clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the
background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to
find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of
art were very different--at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had
attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies--from those in
which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have
recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine,
some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the
sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and
as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it
enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one
ought to set before children, and that children shewed their own innate
good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would
continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt
they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded
vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their
equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's
heart.
It was along the 'Méséglise way,' at Montjouvain, a house built on the
edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that
M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her
dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never
saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than
herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end
installed herself permanently, one day, at Montjouvain. People said:
"That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by love not to see what everyone
is talking about, and to let his daughter--a man who is horrified if you
use a word in the wrong sense--bring a woman like that to live under his
roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold,
and that she would have shewn extraordinary musical talent if she had
only been trained. He may be sure it is not music that she is teaching
his daughter." But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed
it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of their
normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom they are in
physical intercourse. Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly
decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them
of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine
resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. Dr. Percepied, whose loud
voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's content the
part of 'double-dealer,' a part to which he was not, otherwise, adapted,
without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite
unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make
the Curé and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh
voice: "What d'ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with
her friend, Mlle. Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? Oh, I know
nothing, nothing at all. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about
it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that
girl. I should never dream of thwarting the artistic vocation of a
child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too,
with his daughter's friend. Why, gracious heavens, it must be a regular
musical box, that house out there! What are you laughing at? I say
they've been playing too much music, those people. I met Papa Vinteuil
the other day, by the cemetery. It was all he could do to keep on his
feet."
Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil, about this time,
avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught
sight of them, changed in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a
sea of sorrows, incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting
his daughter's happiness, spending whole days beside his wife's grave,
could hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dying of a
broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he paid no attention to
the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed,
what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid
his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of
circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which
he himself has been most outspoken in condemning, without at first
recognising it beneath the disguise which it assumes on entering his
presence, so as to wound him and to make him suffer; the odd words, the
unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand
reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must
have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have
to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed
to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there
needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a
vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by
no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might
blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil
may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his
adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to
the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that
engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they
can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without
weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not
make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of
its physician. But when M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself
from the point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when he
attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied
in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give
judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely
the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his
daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in 'low,' in the
very 'lowest water,' inextricably stranded; and his manners had of late
been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked
above him and to whom he must now look up (however far beneath him they
might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of
rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any
human misfortune.
One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of
Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so
suddenly face to face with us all that he had not time to escape; and
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who,
amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's
shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence, the
outward signs of which serve to enhance and gratify the self-esteem of
the bestower because he feels that they are all the more precious to him
upon whom they are bestowed, conversed at great length with M. Vinteuil,
with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and
invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over, one day,
to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier,
would have enraged M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much
gratitude that he felt himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion
of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to
be in itself so honourable, so precious a support for his cause that he
felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so as to have the
wholly Platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve.
"What a charming man!" he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the
same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of the
middle classes fall victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a
duchess, even though she be ugly and a fool. "What a charming man! What
a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!"
And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most
sincere of men, who cast off, while they are talking to anyone, the
opinion they actually hold of him and will express when he is no longer
there, my family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann's marriage,
invoking principles and conventions which (all the more because they
invoked them in common with him, as though we were all thorough good
fellows of the same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way
infringed at Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit
Swann, an omission which Swann was the first to regret. For constantly,
after meeting M. Vinteuil, he would remember that he had been meaning
for a long time to ask him about some one of the same name as himself,
one of his relatives, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he determined
that he would not forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil
should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.
Since the 'Méséglise way' was the shorter of the two that we used to
take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for
days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Méséglise
shewed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the
fringe of Roussainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for
shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves.
Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its
roundness, but whose edge the sun gilded in return. The brightness,
though not the light of day, would then be shut off from a landscape
in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village
of Roussainville carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its
gables, with a startling precision of detail. A gust of wind blew from
its perch a rook, which floated away and settled in the distance, while
beneath a paling sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of
blue, as though they were painted in one of those cameos which you still
find decorating the walls of old houses.
But on other days would begin to fall the rain, of which we had had due
warning from the little barometer-figure which the spectacle-maker hung
out in his doorway. Its drops, like migrating birds which fly off in a
body at a given moment, would come down out of the sky in close marching
order. They would never drift apart, would make no movement at random in
their rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place, would draw
after it the drop which was following, and the sky would be as greatly
darkened as by the swallows flying south. We would take refuge among the
trees. And when it seemed that their flight was accomplished, a few last