In Search of Lost Time (7 page)

My sole consolation, when I went upstairs for the night, was that Mama would come and kiss me once I was in bed. But this goodnight lasted so short a time, she went back down so soon, that the moment when I heard her coming up, then, passing along the hallway with its double doors, the soft sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, hung with little cords of plaited straw, was for me a painful moment. It
announced the moment that would follow it, in which she had left me, in which she had gone back down. So that I came to wish this goodnight I loved so much would take place as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite in which Mama had not yet come. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I wanted to call her back, to say ‘kiss me one more time,' but I knew that immediately her face would look vexed, because the concession she was making to my sadness and agitation by coming up to kiss me, by bringing me this kiss of peace, irritated my father, who found these rituals absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to lose the need for it, the habit of it, far indeed from allowing me to acquire that of asking her, when she was already on the doorstep, for one kiss more. And to see her vexed destroyed all the calm she had brought me a moment before, when she had bent her loving face down over my bed and held it out to me like a host for a communion of peace from which my lips would draw her real presence and the power to fall asleep. But those evenings, when Mama stayed so short a time altogether in my room, were still sweet compared to the ones when there were people for dinner and when, because of that, she did not come up to say goodnight to me. These people were usually limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few acquaintances passing through, was almost the only person who came to our house at Combray, sometimes for a neighbourly dinner (more rarely after that unfortunate marriage of his, because my parents did not want to receive his wife), sometimes after dinner, unexpectedly. The evenings when, sitting in front of the house under the large chestnut tree, around the iron table, we heard at the far end of the garden, not the copious high-pitched bell that drenched, that deafened in passing with its ferruginous, icy, inexhaustible noise any person in the household who set it off by coming in ‘without ringing', but the shy, oval, golden double tinkling of the little visitors' bell, everyone would immediately wonder: ‘A visitor – now who can that be?' but we knew very well it could only be M. Swann; my great-aunt speaking loudly, to set an example, in a tone of voice that she strained to make natural, said not to whisper that way; that nothing is more disagreeable for a visitor just coming in who is led to think that people are saying things he should not hear; and they would send as a scout my
grandmother, who was always glad to have a pretext for taking one more walk around the garden and who would profit from it by surreptitiously pulling up a few rose stakes on the way in order to restore a little naturalness to the roses, like a mother who runs her hand through her son's hair to fluff it up after the barber has flattened it too much.

We would all remain hanging on the news my grandmother was going to bring us of the enemy, as though there had been a great number of possible assailants to choose among, and soon afterwards my grandfather would say: ‘I recognize Swann's voice.' In fact one could recognize him only by his voice, it was difficult to make out his face with its aquiline nose, its green eyes, under a high forehead framed by blond, almost red hair, cut Bressant-style,
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because we kept as little light as possible in the garden so as not to attract mosquitoes, and I would go off, as though not for that purpose, to say that the cordials should be brought out; my grandmother placed a great deal of importance, considering it more amiable, on the idea that they should not seem anything exceptional, and for visitors only. M. Swann, though much younger than he, was very attached to my grandfather, who had been one of the closest friends of his father, an excellent man but peculiar, in whom, apparently, a trifle was sometimes enough to interrupt the ardour of his feelings, change the course of his thinking. Several times a year I would hear my grandfather at the table telling anecdotes, always the same ones, about the behaviour of old M. Swann upon the death of his wife, over whom he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, had rushed to his side at the estate the Swanns owned in the vicinity of Combray and, so that he would not be present at the coffining, managed to entice him for a while, all in tears, out of the death chamber. They walked a short way in the park, where there was a little sun. Suddenly M. Swann, taking my grandfather by the arm, cried out: ‘Oh, my old friend, what a joy it is to be walking here together in such fine weather! Don't you think it's pretty, all these trees, these hawthorns! And my pond – which you've never congratulated me on! You're looking as sad as an old dishcloth. Feel that little breeze? Oh, say what you like, life has something to offer despite everything, my dear Amédée!' Suddenly the memory of his dead wife came back to him and, no
doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a gesture habitual to him whenever a difficult question came into his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: ‘It's odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can't think of her for long at a time.' ‘Often, but only a little at a time, like poor old Swann,' had become one of my grandfather's favourite phrases, which he uttered apropos of the most different sorts of things. I would have thought this father of Swann's was a monster, if my grandfather, whom I considered a better judge and whose pronouncement, forming a legal precedent for me, often served me later to dismiss offences I might have been inclined to condemn, had not exclaimed: ‘What! He had a heart of gold!'

For many years, even though, especially before his marriage, the younger M. Swann often came to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and my grandparents did not suspect that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society his family had frequented and that, under the sort of incognito which this name Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring – with the perfect innocence of honest innkeepers who have under their roof, without knowing it, some celebrated highwayman – one of the most elegant members of the Jockey Club,
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a favourite friend of the Comte de Paris
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and the Prince of Wales,
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one of the men most sought after by the high society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Our ignorance of this brilliant social life that Swann led was obviously due in part to the reserve and discretion of his character, but also to the fact that bourgeois people in those days formed for themselves a rather Hindu notion of society and considered it to be made up of closed castes, in which each person, from birth, found himself placed in the station which his family occupied and from which nothing, except the accidents of an exceptional career or an unhoped-for marriage, could draw him in order to make him enter a higher caste. M. Swann, the father, was a stockbroker; ‘Swann the son' would find he belonged for his entire life to a caste in which fortunes varied, as
in a tax bracket, between such and such fixed incomes. One knew which had been his father's associations, one therefore knew which were his own, with which people he was ‘in a position' to consort. If he knew others, these were bachelor acquaintances on whom old friends of the family, as were my relatives, would close their eyes all the more benignly because he continued, after losing his parents, to come faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to wager that these people whom he saw, who were unknown to us, were the sort he would not have dared greet had he encountered them when he was with us. If you were determined to assign Swann a social coefficient that was personal to him, among the other sons of stockbrokers in a position equal to that of his parents, this coefficient would have been a little lower for him because, very simple in his manner and having always had a ‘craze' for antiques and for painting, he now lived and amassed his collections in an old townhouse which my grandmother dreamed of visiting, but which was situated on the quai d'Orléans, a part of town where my great-aunt felt it was ignominious to live. ‘But are you a connoisseur? I ask for your own sake, because you're likely to let the dealers unload some awful daubs on you,' my great-aunt would say to him; in fact she did not assume he had any competence and even from an intellectual point of view had no very high opinion of a man who in conversation avoided serious subjects and showed a very prosaic preciseness not only when he gave us cooking recipes, entering into the smallest details, but even when my grandmother's sisters talked about artistic subjects. Challenged by them to give his opinion, to express his admiration for a painting, he maintained an almost ungracious silence and, on the other hand, redeemed himself if he could provide about the museum in which it was to be found, about the date at which it had been painted, a material piece of information. But usually he would content himself with trying to entertain us by telling a new story each time about something that had just happened to him involving people selected from among those we knew, the Combray pharmacist, our cook, our coachman. Certainly these tales made my great-aunt laugh, but she could not distinguish clearly if this was because of the absurd role Swann always assigned himself or because of the wit he put into telling them: ‘You are quite a character,
Monsieur Swann!' Being the only rather vulgar person in our family, she took care to point out to strangers, when they were talking about Swann, that, had he wanted to, he could have lived on the boulevard Haussmann or the avenue de l'Opéra, that he was the son of M. Swann, who must have left four or five million, but that this was his whim. A whim that she felt moreover must be so amusing to others that in Paris, when M. Swann came on New Year's Day to bring her her bag of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there was company, to say to him: ‘Well, Monsieur Swann! Do you still live next-door to the wine depot, so as to be sure of not missing the train when you go to Lyon?' And she would look out of the corner of her eye, over her lorgnon, at the other visitors.

But if anyone had told my great-aunt that this Swann, who, as the son of old M. Swann, was perfectly ‘qualified' to be received by all the ‘best of the bourgeoisie', by the most respected notaries or lawyers of Paris (a hereditary privilege he seemed somewhat inclined to let lapse), had, as though in secret, quite a different life; that on leaving our house, in Paris, after telling us he was going home to bed, he retraced his steps as soon as he had turned the corner and went to a certain drawing-room that no eye of any broker or broker's associate would ever contemplate, this would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as might to a better-educated lady the thought of being personally on close terms with Aristaeus and learning that, after having a chat with her, he would go deep into the heart of the realms of Thetis, into an empire hidden from the eyes of mortals, where Virgil shows us him being received with open arms; or – to confine oneself to an image that had more chance of occurring to her, for she had seen it painted on our petits-fours plates at Combray – of having had as a dinner guest Ali Baba, who, as soon as he knows he is alone, will enter the cave dazzling with unsuspected treasure.

One day when he had come to see us in Paris after dinner apologizing for being in evening clothes, Françoise having said, after he left, that she had learned from the coachman that he had dined ‘at the home of a princess,' – ‘Yes, a princess of the
demi-monde
!' my aunt had responded shrugging her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting, with serene irony.

Thus, my great-aunt was cavalier in her treatment of him. Since she believed he must be flattered by our invitations, she found it quite natural that he never came to see us in the summertime without having in his hand a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden and that from each of his trips to Italy he would bring me back photographs of masterpieces.

They did not hesitate to send him in search of it when they needed a recipe for gribiche sauce or pineapple salad for large dinners to which they had not invited him, believing he did not have sufficient prestige for one to be able to serve him up to acquaintances who were coming for the first time. If the conversation turned on the princes of the House of France: ‘people you and I will never know, will we, and we can manage quite well without that, can't we,' my great-aunt would say to Swann, who perhaps had a letter from Twickenham
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in his pocket; she had him push the piano around and turn the pages on the evenings when my grandmother's sister sang, handling this creature, who was elsewhere so sought-after, with the naive roughness of a child who plays with a collector's trinket no more carefully than with some cheap object. No doubt the Swann who was known at the same period to so many clubmen was quite different from the one created by my great-aunt, when in the evening, in the little garden at Combray, after the two hesitant rings of the bell had sounded, she injected and invigorated with all that she knew about the Swann family the dark and uncertain figure who emerged, followed by my grandmother, from a background of shadows, and whom we recognized by his voice. But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing a person we know' is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly have the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a
transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue – half memory, half forgetfulness – of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighbourliness. The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with all this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann – to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though it were the same in our life as in a museum where all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, one tonality – to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries and a sprig of tarragon.