In Search of Lost Time (56 page)

Swann wanted to leave, but just when he was at last about to escape, Général de Froberville asked him for an introduction to Mme de Cambremer and he was obliged to go back into the drawing-room with him to look for her.

– Now, Swann, I'd rather be the husband of that woman than slaughtered by savages, what do you say?

The words ‘slaughtered by savages' pierced Swann's heart painfully; and at once he felt the need to continue the conversation:

– Well, you know, he said to him, some really fine lives that have ended that way… For instance, if you remember… That navigator whose ashes were brought back by Dumont d'Urville, La Pérouse… (And Swann was immediately happy, as if he had spoken Odette's name.) He was a fine character, La Pérouse was, and one who interests me very much, he added with a melancholy air.

– Oh, yes, of course. La Pérouse, said the Général. It's a well-known name. There's even a street by that name.

– You know someone in the rue La Pérouse? asked Swann in some agitation.

– I know only Mme de Chanlivault, the sister of that good fellow Chaussepierre. She gave us a nice theatre-party the other day. Her salon will be very elegant one of these days, you'll see!

– Ah, so she lives in the rue La Pérouse. It's an appealing street, very pretty, and so melancholy.

– Why, not at all, that's because you haven't been there for some time; it's not melancholy now, they're beginning to build there, they're building in the whole neighbourhood.

When at last Swann introduced M. de Froberville to young Mme de Cambremer, since it was the first time she had heard the Général's name she ventured the smile of joy and surprise she would have given him if no other name but that one had ever been uttered in her presence, for as she did not know the friends of her new family, each time a person was presented to her, she believed he was one of them, and thinking it would be tactful of her to look as though she had heard such a lot about him since she was married, she would put out her hand with a hesitant air meant as a proof of the inculcated reserve she had to conquer and the spontaneous congeniality that succeeded in overcoming it. And so her parents-in-law, whom she still believed to be the most brilliant people in France, declared that she was an angel; especially since they preferred to appear, in marrying their son to her, to have responded to the attraction of her fine qualities rather than of her great wealth.

– One can see that you have the soul of a musician, Madame, the
Général said to her, unconsciously alluding to the incident of the sconce.

But the concert was beginning again and Swann realized he would not be able to leave before the end of this new number. He was suffering at having to remain shut up among these people whose stupidity and absurd habits struck him all the more painfully since being unaware of his love, incapable, had they known about it, of taking any interest in it or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish nonsense or deplore it as utter madness, they made it appear to him as a subjective state which existed only for him, whose reality was confirmed for him by nothing outside himself; he suffered most of all, to the point where even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry out, from prolonging his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, where no one, where nothing knew her, from which she was entirely absent.

But suddenly it was as though she had appeared in the room, and this apparition caused him such harrowing pain that he had to put his hand on his heart. What had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it lingered as though waiting for something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to try to endure until it arrived, to welcome it before expiring, to keep the way open for it another moment with a last bit of strength so that it could come through, as one holds up a trap-door that would otherwise fall back. And before Swann had time to understand, and say to himself: ‘It's the little phrase from the sonata by Vinteuil; don't listen!' all his memories of the time when Odette was in love with him, which he had managed until now to keep out of sight in the deepest part of himself, deceived by this sudden beam of light from the time of love which they believed had returned, had awoken and flown swiftly back up to sing madly to him, with no pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness.

In place of the abstract expressions ‘the time when I was happy', ‘the time when I was loved', which he had often used before now without suffering too much, for his mind had enclosed within them only spurious extracts of the past that preserved nothing of it, he now
recovered everything which had fixed for ever the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he saw everything again, the snowy curled petals of the chrysanthemum that she had tossed to him in his carriage, that he had held against his lips – the embossed address of the ‘Maison Dorée' on the letter in which he had read: ‘My hand is shaking so hard as I write to you' – the way her eyebrows had come together when she said to him with a supplicating look: ‘It won't be too long before you send word to me?'; he smelled the fragrance of the hairdresser's iron by which he would have his ‘brush-cut' straightened while Lorédan went to fetch the young working-girl, the stormy rains that fell so often that spring, the icy drive home in his victoria, by moonlight, all the meshes formed from habits of thinking, impressions of the seasons, reactions on the surface of his skin, which had laid over a succession of weeks a uniform net in which his body was now recaptured. At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing Odette's charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always! Alas, he recalled the accents in which she had exclaimed: ‘But I will always be able to see you, I am always free!' – she who was never free now! – the interest, the curiosity she had shown in his own life, the passionate desire that he should do her the favour – which he in fact dreaded in those days as a cause of tiresome inconveniences – of allowing her to enter it; how she had been obliged to beg him to let her take him to the Verdurins'; and when he had allowed her to come to him once a month, how she had had to tell him over and over again, before he would let himself give in to her, how delightful it would be to have the habit of seeing each other every day, a habit which she dreamed of whereas to him it seemed only a tedious bother, which she had then grown tired of and broken once and for all, while for him it had become such an irresistible and painful need. He did not know how truthfully he was speaking when, the third time he saw her, as she said to him yet again: ‘But why don't you let me come more often?', he
had said to her with a laugh, gallantly: ‘for fear of being hurt'. Now, alas, she still wrote to him occasionally from a restaurant or hotel on paper that bore its printed name; but now the letters of that name burned him like letters of fire. ‘It's written from the Hôtel Vouillemont?
¹⁰¹
What can she have gone there to do? And with whom? What has been going on there?' He remembered the gas-jets being extinguished along the boulevard des Italiens when he had met her against all hope among the wandering shadows on that night which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which indeed – since it belonged to a time when he did not even have to ask himself if he would vex her by looking for her, by finding her, so sure was he that her greatest joy was to see him and go home with him – was truly part of a mysterious world to which one can never return once its doors have closed. And Swann saw, motionless before that relived happiness, a miserable figure who filled him with pity because he did not recognize him right away, and he had to lower his eyes so that no one would see they were full of tears. It was himself.

When he realized this, his pity vanished, but he was jealous of the other self she had loved, he was jealous of those of whom he had often said to himself without suffering too much ‘maybe she loves them', now that he had exchanged the vague idea of loving, in which there is no love, for the petals of the chrysanthemum and the letterhead of the Maison d'Or, which were full of it. Then his pain became too sharp, he passed his hand over his forehead, let his monocle drop, wiped its glass. And no doubt, if he had seen himself at that moment, he would have added to the collection of those which he had singled out for distinction the monocle he was removing like an importunate thought and from whose clouded face, with a handkerchief, he was trying to wipe off his worries.

There are tones in a violin – if we cannot see the instrument and therefore cannot relate what we hear to our image of it, which changes the sound of it – so similar to those of certain contralto voices that we have the illusion a singer has been added to the concert. We lift our eyes, we see only the bodies of the instruments, as precious as Chinese boxes, but at times we are still fooled by the deceptive call of the siren; at times too we think we hear a captive genie struggling deep inside
the intelligent, bewitched and tremulous box, like a devil in a holy-water basin; at times, lastly, it is like a pure and supernatural being that passes through the air uncoiling its invisible message.

As if the instrumentalists were not so much playing the little phrase as performing the rituals it required in order to make its appearance, and proceeding to the incantations necessary for obtaining and prolonging a few moments the wonder of its evocation, Swann, who could no more see it than if it had belonged to an ultra-violet world, and who was experiencing something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he was struck as he approached it, felt it to be present, like a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who in order to be able to come to him in the midst of the crowd and take him aside to talk to him, had assumed the disguise of this body of sound. And while it passed, light, soothing, murmured like a perfume, telling him what it had to tell him, as he scrutinized every word, sorry to see them fly off so quickly, he involuntarily made the motion with his lips of kissing the harmonious fleeting body as it passed. He no longer felt exiled and alone since the little phrase was addressing him, was talking to him in a low voice about Odette. For he no longer felt, as he once had, that the little phrase did not know him and Odette. It had so often witnessed their moments of happiness! True, it had just as often warned him how fragile they were. And in fact, whereas in those days he read suffering in its smile, in its limpid and disenchanted intonation, he now found in it instead the grace of a resignation that was almost gay. Of those sorrows of which it used to speak to him and which, without being affected by them, he had seen it carry along with it, smiling, in its rapid and sinuous course, of those sorrows which had now become his own, without his having any hope of ever being free of them, it seemed to say to him as it had once said of his happiness: ‘What does it matter? It means nothing.' And for the first time Swann's thoughts turned with a stab of pity and tenderness to Vinteuil, to that unknown, sublime brother who must also have suffered so; what must his life have been like? from the depths of what sorrows had he drawn that godlike strength, that unlimited power to create? When it was the little phrase that spoke to him about the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found solace in that very wisdom which, just
recently, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought he could read it on the faces of the indifferent people who considered his love an insignificant aberration. For the little phrase, unlike them, whatever its opinion of the brief duration of the conditions of the soul, did not see them as these people did, as something less serious than the events of everyday life, but on the contrary, regarded them as so superior that they alone were worth expressing. These charms of an intimate sadness – these were what it sought to imitate, to recreate, and their very essence, even though it is to be incommunicable and to seem frivolous to everyone but the one who is experiencing them, had been captured by the little phrase and made visible. So much so that it caused their value to be acknowledged, and their divine sweetness savoured, by all those same people sitting in the audience – if they were at all musical – who would afterwards fail to recognize these charms in real life, in every individual love that came into being before their eyes. Doubtless the form in which it had codified them could not be resolved into reasoned arguments. But ever since, more than a year ago now, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, revealing to him many of the riches of his own soul, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance. When, after the Verdurin evening, he had had the little phrase played over for him, and had sought to disentangle how it was that, like a perfume, like a caress, it encircled him, enveloped him, he had realized that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes that composed it, and to the constant repetition of two of them, that was due this impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was reasoning this way not about the phrase itself but about simple values substituted, for his mind's convenience, for the mysterious entity he had perceived, before knowing the Verdurins, at that party where he had first heard the sonata played. He knew that even the memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable keyboard of seven notes, but an immeasurable
keyboard still almost entirely unknown on which, here and there only, separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe, have been found by a few great artists who do us the service, by awakening in us something corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety, is hidden unbeknownst to us within that great unpenetrated and disheartening darkness of our soul which we take for emptiness and nothingness. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little phrase, although it might present an obscure surface to one's intelligence, one sensed a content so solid, so explicit, to which it gave a force so new, so original, that those who had heard it preserved it within themselves on the same footing as the ideas of the intellect. Swann referred back to it as to a conception of love and happiness whose distinctive character he recognized at once, as he would that of
La Princesse de Clèves
or of
René
,
¹⁰²
when their titles returned to his memory. Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind in the same way as did certain other notions without equivalents, like the notion of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, which are the rich possessions that diversify and ornament the realms of our inner life. Perhaps we will lose them, perhaps they will fade away, if we return to nothingness. But as long as we are alive, we can no more eliminate our experience of them than we can our experience of some real object, than we can for example doubt the light of the lamp illuminating the metamorphosed objects in our room whence even the memory of darkness has vanished. In this way Vinteuil's phrase had, like some theme from
Tristan
,
¹⁰³
for example, which may also represent to us a certain emotional accretion, espoused our mortal condition, taken on something human that was rather touching. Its destiny was linked to the future, to the reality of our soul, of which it was one of the most distinctive, the best differentiated ornaments. Maybe it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is non-existent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing also. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and
share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.