Swann's Way
the 'scene' which he would make if he saw me, she said, in a voice
half-stifled by her anger: "Run away at once. Don't let your father see
you standing there like a crazy jane!"
But I begged her again to "Come and say good night to me!" terrified as
I saw the light from my father's candle already creeping up the wall,
but also making use of his approach as a means of blackmail, in the hope
that my mother, not wishing him to find me there, as find me he must
if she continued to hold out, would give in to me, and say: "Go back to
your room. I will come."
Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively I murmured, though no one
heard me, "I am done for!"
I was not, however. My father used constantly to refuse to let me do
things which were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters
granted me by my mother and grandmother, because he paid no heed to
'Principles,' and because in his sight there were no such things as
'Rights of Man.' For some quite irrelevant reason, or for no reason at
all, he would at the last moment prevent me from taking some particular
walk, one so regular and so consecrated to my use that to deprive me of
it was a clear breach of faith; or again, as he had done this evening,
long before the appointed hour he would snap out: "Run along up to
bed now; no excuses!" But then again, simply because he was devoid
of principles (in my grandmother's sense), so he could not, properly
speaking, be called inexorable. He looked at me for a moment with an air
of annoyance and surprise, and then when Mamma had told him, not without
some embarrassment, what had happened, said to her: "Go along with him,
then; you said just now that you didn't feel like sleep, so stay in his
room for a little. I don't need anything."
"But dear," my mother answered timidly, "whether or not I feel like
sleep is not the point; we must not make the child accustomed..."
"There's no question of making him accustomed," said my father, with
a shrug of the shoulders; "you can see quite well that the child is
unhappy. After all, we aren't gaolers. You'll end by making him ill,
and a lot of good that will do. There are two beds in his room; tell
Françoise to make up the big one for you, and stay beside him for the
rest of the night. I'm off to bed, anyhow; I'm not nervous like you.
Good night."
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my
sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring
to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white
nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere
in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up
his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli
which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself
away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of
the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually
climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have
perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have
arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days
I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of
comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able
to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be
possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if
I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to
control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found
myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is
only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that
I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively
drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would
suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again
through the silent evening air.
Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so
deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents
gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the
reward of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in
this crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat
arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him
and due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance
expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps even what
I called his strictness, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that
title less, really, than my mother's or grandmother's attitude, for his
nature, which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own,
had probably prevented him from guessing, until then, how wretched I was
every evening, a thing which my mother and grandmother knew well; but
they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering,
which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous
sensibility and to strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection
for me was of another kind, I doubt if he would have shewn so much
courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he
had said to my mother: "Go and comfort him." Mamma stayed all night in
my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination
those hours, so different from anything that I had had a right to
expect; for when Françoise (who guessed that something extraordinary
must have happened when she saw Mamma sitting by my side, holding my
hand and letting me cry unchecked) said to her: "But, Madame, what is
little Master crying for?" she replied: "Why, Françoise, he doesn't know
himself: it is his nerves. Make up the big bed for me quickly and then
go off to your own." And thus for the first time my unhappiness was
regarded no longer as a fault for which I must be punished, but as
an involuntary evil which had been officially recognised a nervous
condition for which I was in no way responsible: I had the consolation
that I need no longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness
of my tears; I could weep henceforward without sin. I felt no small
degree of pride, either, in Françoise's presence at this return to humane
conditions which, not an hour after Mamma had refused to come up to my
room and had sent the snubbing message that I was to go to sleep, raised
me to the dignity of a grown-up person, brought me of a sudden to a sort
of puberty of sorrow, to emancipation from tears. I ought then to have
been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first
concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step
down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time
she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck
me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her; that I had
succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in
relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening opened
a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar. And if I had dared
now, I should have said to Mamma: "No, I don't want you; you mustn't
sleep here." But I was conscious of the practical wisdom, of what
would be called nowadays the realism with which she tempered the ardent
idealism of my grandmother's nature, and I knew that now the mischief
was done she would prefer to let me enjoy the soothing pleasure of
her company, and not to disturb my father again. Certainly my mother's
beautiful features seemed to shine again with youth that evening, as she
sat gently holding my hands and trying to check my tears; but, just for
that reason, it seemed to me that this should not have happened; her
anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness
which my childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and
secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first
white hair shew upon her head. This thought redoubled my sobs, and then
I saw that Mamma, who had never allowed herself to go to any length
of tenderness with me, was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to
struggle to keep back her own. Then, as she saw that I had noticed
this, she said to me, with a smile: "Why, my little buttercup, my little
canary-boy, he's going to make Mamma as silly as himself if this goes
on. Look, since you can't sleep, and Mamma can't either, we mustn't
go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I'll get one of your
books." But I had none there. "Would you like me to get out the books
now that your grandmother is going to give you for your birthday? Just
think it over first, and don't be disappointed if there is nothing new
for you then."
I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to find a parcel of books
in which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which it was
wrapped, any more than its squareness and size, but which, even at this
first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already
the paint-box of last New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year
before. It contained _La Mare au Diable_, _François le Champi_, _La
Petite Fadette_, and _Les Maîtres Sonneurs_. My grandmother, as I
learned afterwards, had at first chosen Mussel's poems, a volume of
Rousseau, and _Indiana_; for while she considered light reading as
unwholesome as sweets and cakes, she did not reflect that the strong
breath of genius must have upon the very soul of a child an influence
at once more dangerous and less quickening than those of fresh air and
country breezes upon his body. But when my father had seemed almost to
regard her as insane on learning the names of the books she proposed
to give me, she had journeyed back by herself to Jouy-le-Vicomte to
the bookseller's, so that there should be no fear of my not having my
present in time (it was a burning hot day, and she had come home so
unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again
to tire herself in that way), and had there fallen back upon the four
pastoral novels of George Sand.
"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the
child anything that was not well written."
The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything
from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all,
that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our
pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called
'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or
a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long
desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted
them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than
to serve the common requirements of our own. She would have liked me to
have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places.
But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the
picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity
and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical
nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a
subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality,
at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was
art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of
art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains
of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some
great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me
photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of
Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, which