Swann's Way
some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of
the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had
given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right
proportion between 'information' and 'publicity.'" But at once
regretting that he had allowed himself to speak, even in jest, of
serious matters, he added ironically: "We are having a most entertaining
conversation; I cannot think why we climb to these lofty summits," and
then, turning to my grandfather: "Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulevrier
had had the audacity to offer his hand to his sons. You remember how he
says of Maulevrier, 'Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything but
ill-humour, boorishness, and folly.'"
"Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very
different!" said Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as
her sister, since the present of Asti had been addressed to them both.
Céline began to laugh.
Swann was puzzled, but went on: "'I cannot say whether it was his
ignorance or a trap,' writes Saint-Simon; 'he wished to give his hand to
my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.'"
My grandfather was already in ecstasies over "ignorance or a trap,"
but Miss Céline--the name of Saint-Simon, a 'man of letters,' having
arrested the complete paralysis of her sense of hearing--had grown
angry.
"What! You admire that, do you? Well, it is clever enough! But what is
the point of it? Does he mean that one man isn't as good as another?
What difference can it make whether he is a duke or a groom so long
as he is intelligent and good? He had a fine way of bringing up his
children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn't teach them to shake hands with
all honest men. Really and truly, it's abominable. And you dare to quote
it!"
And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be
for him, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him
the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother: "Just
tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on
these occasions. Oh, yes:
What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!
Good, that is, very good."
I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table
I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time,
and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to
give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my
room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began
to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand
into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and stealthy in
execution, everything that my own efforts could put into it: would
look out very carefully first the exact spot on her cheek where I would
imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts that I might be able,
thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the
minute Mamma would allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my
lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only
prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes
does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's
absence. But to-night, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my
grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: "The little man looks tired;
he'd better go up to bed. Besides, we are dining late to-night."
And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or mother in
observing the letter of a treaty, went on: "Yes, run along; to bed with
you."
I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the
dinner-bell rang.
"No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night quite enough.
These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs."
And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the
staircase 'against my heart,' as the saying is, climbing in opposition
to my heart's desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had
not, by her kiss, given my heart leave to accompany me forth. That
hateful staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out
a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and
fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made
it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed
this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we
have gone to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it
only as a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out
of the water, or as a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to
ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence
can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of
heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the precise converse of this relief
which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my
consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost,
a manner at once insidious and brutal as I breathed in--a far more
poisonous thing than any moral penetration--the peculiar smell of the
varnish upon that staircase.
Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to
dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the
shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which
had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the
red curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted
the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my mother
begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which I could not
put in writing. My fear was that Françoise, my aunt's cook who used to
be put in charge of me when I was at Combray, might refuse to take my
note. I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to
my mother when there was a stranger in the room would appear flatly
inconceivable, just as it would be for the door-keeper of a theatre
to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage. For things which might
or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant,
subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or
irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which
combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast
with prohibitions, of exaggerated refinement, against "seething the kid
in his mother's milk," or "eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow
of the thigh." This code, if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy
which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our
instructions, seemed to have foreseen such social complications and
refinements of fashion as nothing in Françoise's surroundings or in her
career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head;
and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past
existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood,
just as there is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still
testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among
delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre
Fils Aymon.
In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it
highly improbable that--barring an outbreak of fire--Françoise would
go down and disturb Mamma when M. Swann was there for so unimportant a
person as myself was one embodying the respect she shewed not only for
the family (as for the dead, for the clergy, or for royalty), but also
for the stranger within our gates; a respect which I should perhaps have
found touching in a book, but which never failed to irritate me on her
lips, because of the solemn and gentle tones in which she would utter
it, and which irritated me more than usual this evening when the sacred
character in which she invested the dinner-party might have the effect
of making her decline to disturb its ceremonial. But to give myself one
chance of success I lied without hesitation, telling her that it was not
in the least myself who had wanted to write to Mamma, but Mamma who,
on saying good night to me, had begged me not to forget to send her
an answer about something she had asked me to find, and that she would
certainly be very angry if this note were not taken to her. I think that
Françoise disbelieved me, for, like those primitive men whose senses
were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by signs
imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that
we might wish to conceal from her. She studied the envelope for five
minutes as though an examination of the paper itself and the look of
my handwriting could enlighten her as to the nature of the contents,
or tell her to which article of her code she ought to refer the matter.
Then she went out with an air of resignation which seemed to imply:
"What a dreadful thing for parents to have a child like this!"
A moment later she returned to say that they were still at the ice stage
and that it was impossible for the butler to deliver the note at once,
in front of everybody; but that when the finger-bowls were put round he
would find a way of slipping it into Mamma's hand. At once my anxiety
subsided; it was now no longer (as it had been a moment ago) until
to-morrow that I had lost my mother, for my little line was going--to
annoy her, no doubt, and doubly so because this contrivance would make
me ridiculous in Swann's eyes--but was going all the same to admit me,
invisibly and by stealth, into the same room as herself, was going
to whisper from me into her ear; for that forbidden and unfriendly
dining-room, where but a moment ago the ice itself--with burned nuts in
it--and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that
were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of
them and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe
fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my
intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she
was reading what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her;
the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides,
that was not all, for surely Mamma would come.
As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann
would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had
guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due
course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years,
and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so
well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the
creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not
and cannot follow--to him that anguish came through Love, to which it
is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but
when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before
Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting
Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the
disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety
or affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first bound myself
apprentice, when Françoise returned to tell me that my letter would be
delivered; Swann, too, had known well that false joy which a friend can
give us, or some relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at
the house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or party or
'first-night' at which he is to meet her, he sees us wandering outside,
desperately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her. He
recognises us, greets us familiarly, and asks what we are doing there.
And when we invent a story of having some urgent message to give to his