Swann's Way
relative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be more simple,
takes us in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in five
minutes. How much we love him--as at that moment I loved Françoise--the
good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable,
human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in
the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and
seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman
whom we love. If we are to judge of them by him, this relative who has
accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel mysteries,
then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal. Those inaccessible
and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown
pleasures--behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold,
one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a moment
as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important to ourself
because our mistress is more intensely a part of it; we picture it to
ourselves, we possess it, we intervene upon it, almost we have created
it: namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are waiting
there below. And very probably the other moments of the party will not
be essentially different, will contain nothing else so exquisite or so
well able to make us suffer, since this kind friend has assured us that
"Of course, she will be delighted to come down! It will be far more
amusing for her to talk to you than to be bored up there." Alas! Swann
had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are
powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even
into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind
friend comes down again alone.
My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my
self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she
had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something
or other) made Françoise tell me, in so many words "There is no
answer"--words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in
'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to
some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing?
It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well,
I shall wait a little longer." And just as she invariably protests that
she does not need the extra gas which the porter offers to light for
her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an occasional
remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger
whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put some
customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Françoise's offer to
make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the
servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the
voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden.
But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line to Mamma,
by approaching--at the risk of making her angry--so near to her that I
felt I could reach out and grasp the moment in which I should see her
again, I had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep
until I actually had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more
painfully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm
and to acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided,
a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong
medicine begins to take effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a
resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma,
and had decided to kiss her at all costs, even with the certainty of
being in disgrace with her for long afterwards, when she herself came
up to bed. The tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely
alert, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear
of danger.
Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed;
hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things
outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the
moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its
substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer,
like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.
What had to move--a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance--moved. But
its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with
utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene,
and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon
this surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most
distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end
of the town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish' that the
impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their
'pianissimo' execution, like those movements on muted strings so well
performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does
not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being
played somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all
the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had
given them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught
the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded
the corner of the Rue de Trévise.
I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which
none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my
parents' hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would
have imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only
some really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they
had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of
other children, and I had been taught to place at the head of the list
(doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which
I needed to be more carefully protected) those in which I can now
distinguish the common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to
a nervous impulse. But such words as these last had never been uttered
in my hearing; no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way
which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my
giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable of holding out
against them. Yet I could easily recognise this class of transgressions
by the anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour of the
punishment which followed them; and I knew that what I had just done was
in the same category as certain other sins for which I had been severely
chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to
meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw that I
had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage,
I should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should be
packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had
I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window,
I should still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was
Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road
which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my
steps.
I could hear my parents' footsteps as they went with Swann; and, when
the rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone, I crept to
the window. Mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster
good, and whether M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio ice.
"I thought it rather so-so," she was saying; "next time we shall have to
try another flavour."
"I can't tell you," said my great-aunt, "what a change I find in Swann.
He is quite antiquated!" She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann
always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to
find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him.
And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal,
excessive, scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of
that class for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow
must be longer than for other men, since for such a one it is void of
promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any
subsequent partition among his offspring.
"I fancy he has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his, who
'lives' with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It's
the talk of the town."
My mother observed that, in spite of this, he had looked much less
unhappy of late. "And he doesn't nearly so often do that trick of his,
so like his father, of wiping his eyes and passing his hand across his
forehead. I think myself that in his heart of hearts he doesn't love his
wife any more."
"Why, of course he doesn't," answered my grandfather. "He wrote me a
letter about it, ages ago, to which I took care to pay no attention, but
it left no doubt as to his feelings, let alone his love for his wife.
Hullo! you two; you never thanked him for the Asti!" he went on, turning
to his sisters-in-law.
"What! we never thanked him? I think, between you and me, that I put it
to him quite neatly," replied my aunt Flora.
"Yes, you managed it very well; I admired you for it," said my aunt
Céline.
"But you did it very prettily, too."
"Yes; I liked my expression about 'nice neighbours.'"
"What! Do you call that thanking him?" shouted my grandfather. "I heard
that all right, but devil take me if I guessed it was meant for Swann.
You may be quite sure he never noticed it."
"Come, come; Swann is not a fool. I am positive he appreciated the
compliment. You didn't expect me to tell him the number of bottles, or
to guess what he paid for them."
My father and mother were left alone and sat down for a moment; then my
father said: "Well, shall we go up to bed?"
"As you wish, dear, though I don't feel in the least like sleeping. I
don't know why; it can't be the coffee-ice--it wasn't strong enough to
keep me awake like this. But I see a light in the servants' hall: poor
Françoise has been sitting up for me, so I will get her to unhook me
while you go and undress."
My mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the
staircase. Presently I heard her coming upstairs to close her window. I
went quietly into the passage; my heart was beating so violently that I
could hardly move, but at least it was throbbing no longer with anxiety,
but with terror and with joy. I saw in the well of the stair a light
coming upwards, from Mamma's candle. Then I saw Mamma herself: I threw
myself upon her. For an instant she looked at me in astonishment, not
realising what could have happened. Then her face assumed an expression
of anger. She said not a single word to me; and, for that matter, I used
to go for days on end without being spoken to, for far less offences
than this. A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that
further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility,
and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still, as
indicating that, with such a punishment as was in store for me, mere
silence, and even anger, were relatively puerile.
A word from her then would have implied the false calm in which one
converses with a servant to whom one has just decided to give notice;
the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off to enlist, which
would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being
angry with him for a few days. But she heard my father coming from the
dressing-room, where he had gone to take off his clothes, and, to avoid