Swann's Way
Odette, who was going downhill, and in the other direction. A second
passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter
remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately
after Odette. "They had obviously arranged it between them," he added;
"they must have agreed to meet at the foot of the cliff, but they
wouldn't say good-bye together; it might have looked odd. She is his
mistress." The strange young man burst into tears. Swann endeavoured to
console him. "After all, she is quite right," he said to the young man,
drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more
at ease. "I've advised her to do that, myself, a dozen times. Why be
so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her." So Swann
reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at
first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had
distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the
'first person' in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped
with a fez.
As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association
of ideas, then a certain modification of the Baron's usual physiognomy,
and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour across his breast,
had made Swann give that name; but actually, and in everything that the
person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was
indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images,
Swann in his sleep drew false deductions, enjoying, at the same time,
such creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple
act of division, like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he
felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he
thought that he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of
which he was not yet conscious, he brought about sudden vicissitudes
which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at definite
points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to
startle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; an alarum
rang, the inhabitants ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses;
he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own
heart, which, with equal violence, was anxiously beating in his breast.
Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt a pain, a
nausea that were inexplicable; a peasant, dreadfully burned, flung at
him as he passed: "Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the night
with her friend. He used to go about with her, and she tells him
everything. It was they that started the fire." It was his valet, come
to awaken him, and saying:--
"Sir, it is eight o'clock, and the barber is here. I have told him to
call again in an hour."
But these words, as they dived down through the waves of sleep in which
Swann was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing
that refraction which turns a ray of light, at the bottom of a bowl of
water, into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of
the door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the
clangour of an alarum, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile
the scenery of his dream-stage scattered in dust, he opened his eyes,
heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, grown very
distant. He touched his cheek. It was dry. And yet he could feel the
sting of the cold spray, and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose,
and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early because he had
written, the day before, to my grandfather, to say that he was going,
that afternoon, to Combray, having learned that Mme. de Cambremer--Mlle.
Legrandin that had been--was spending a few days there. The association
in his memory of her young and charming face with a place in the country
which he had not visited for so long, offered him a combined attraction
which had made him decide at last to leave Paris for a while. As the
different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain
other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we
are in love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before
love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest
appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us
pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as
an indication, a warning, a presage. It was in this fashion that Swann
had often carried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in
the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought of ever
seeing her again--and that he now recalled the party at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's, at which he had introduced General de Froberville to
Mme. de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life that it is
not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness
which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations
of a grief from which we are still suffering. And, no doubt, that might
have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's. Who,
indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening,
somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to
him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable? But what
did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place,
and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact
that he had at last decided to go to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that
evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention
that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any
length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had been most to be
wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he
had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time unsuspected,
which were already being brought to birth,--the exact balance between
which was too difficult to establish--were linked by a sort of
concatenation of necessity.
But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions
to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become
disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he
saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pallid
complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all
the things which--in the course of those successive bursts of affection
which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the
first impression that he had formed of her--he had ceased to observe
after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless,
while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of
those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared
in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time,
the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To think
that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that
the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did
not please me, who was not in my style!"
PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME
Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during
my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more
utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an
atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety, than
my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which,
washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in
which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure,
azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted
with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration
in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set
against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases
with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law
of nature which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was
reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so
that the walls were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted only
by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was
this that the whole room had the appearance of one of those model
bedrooms which you see nowadays in Housing Exhibitions, decorated with
works of art which are calculated by their designer to refresh the eyes
of whoever may ultimately have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being
kept in some degree of harmony with the locality and surroundings of the
houses for which the rooms are planned.
And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real
Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy
days, when the wind was so strong that Françoise, as she took me to
the Champs-Elysées, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the
street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and
would recount to me, with many lamentations, the terrible disasters and
shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper. I longed for nothing
more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as
a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there
were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be
not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and
unalterable,--the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art. I was
not curious, I did not thirst to know anything save what I believed
to be more genuine than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of
shewing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force
or the grace of nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself,
without human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice,
reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never console a
man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm
would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the
Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine,
that the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an
embankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides, nature, by
all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to me the most opposite
thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less she
bore their imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of my
heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balbec, which
Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side place in the very midst
of "that funereal coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed,
for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and flying foam from the
waves.
"You feel, there, below your feet still," he had told me, "far more even
than at Finistère (and even though hotels are now being superimposed
upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the
earth's skeleton) you feel there that you are actually at the land's
end of France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate
encampment of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have
lived since the world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of
the sea-fogs and shadows of the night." One day when, at Combray, I had
spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn from
him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent
storms, he had replied: "I should think I did know Balbec! The church
at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still
half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our
Norman gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it