“I believe you know M. Swann very well; he’s a great friend of my nephew and niece, the des Laumes.”
My grandmother had returned from the call full of praise for the house, which overlooked some gardens, and in which Mme de Villeparisis had advised her to rent a flat, and also for a repairing tailor and his daughter who kept a little shop in the courtyard, into which she had gone to ask them to put a stitch in her skirt, which she had torn on the staircase. My grandmother had found these people perfectly charming: the girl, she said, was a jewel, and the tailor the best and most distinguished man she had ever seen. For in her eyes distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position. She was in ecstasies over some answer the tailor had made to her, saying to Mamma:
“Sévigné would not have put it better!” and, by way of contrast, of a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house:
“My dear, he is so common!”
Now, the effect of the remark about Swann had been, not to raise him in my great-aunt’s estimation, but to lower Mme de Villeparisis. It appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother’s authority, we owed to Mme de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that she had failed in this duty by becoming aware of Swann’s existence and in allowing members of her family to associate with him. “What! She knows Swann? A person who, you always made out, was related to Marshal MacMahon!” This view of Swann’s social position which prevailed in my family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of the worst type, almost a prostitute, whom, to do him justice, he never attempted to introduce to us—for he continued to come to our house alone, though more and more seldom—but from whom they felt they could establish, on the assumption that he had found her there, the circle, unknown to them, in which he ordinarily moved.
But on one occasion my grandfather read in a newspaper that M. Swann was one of the most regular attendants at the Sunday luncheons given by the Duc de X——, whose father and uncle had been among our most prominent statesmen in the reign of Louis-Philippe. Now my grandfather was curious to learn all the smallest details which might help him to take a mental share in the private lives of men like Molé, the Duc Pasquier, or the Duc de Broglie. He was delighted to find that Swann associated with people who had known them. My great-aunt, on the other hand, interpreted this piece of news in a sense discreditable to Swann; for anyone who chose his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred, outside his “proper station,” automatically lowered himself in her eyes. It seemed to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the fruits of the splendid connections with people of good position which prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children’s benefit, and she had actually ceased to “see” the son of a lawyer of our acquaintance because he had married a “Highness” and had thereby stepped down—in her eyes—from the respectable position of a lawyer’s son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom, we are told, queens have sometimes shown their favours. She objected, therefore, to my grandfather’s plan of questioning Swann, when next he came to dine with us, about these people whose friendship with him we had discovered. At the same time my grandmother’s two sisters, elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were ladies of lofty aspirations, who for that reason were incapable of taking the least interest in what might be termed gossip, even if it had some historical import, or, generally speaking, in anything that was not directly associated with some aesthetic or virtuous object. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly connected with worldly matters that their sense of hearing—having finally come to realise its temporary futility when the tone of the conversation at the dinner-table became frivolous or merely mundane without the two old ladies’ being able to guide it back to topics dear to themselves—would put its receptive organs into abeyance to the point of actually becoming atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of the two sisters, he had to resort to some such physical stimuli as alienists adopt in dealing with their distracted patients: to wit, repeated taps on a glass with the blade of a knife, accompanied by a sharp word and a compelling glance, violent methods which these psychiatrists are apt to bring with them into their everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or because they think the whole world a trifle mad.
Their interest grew, however, when, the day before Swann was to dine with us, and when he had made them a special present of a case of Asti, my great-aunt, who had in her hand a copy of the Figaro in which to the name of a picture then on view in a Corot exhibition were added the words, “from the collection of M. Charles Swann,” asked: “Did you see that Swann is ‘mentioned’ in the Figaro?”
“But I’ve always told you,” said my grandmother, “that he had a great deal of taste.”
“You would, of course,” retorted my great-aunt, “say anything just to seem different from us.” For, knowing that my grandmother never agreed with her, and not being quite confident that it was her own opinion which the rest of us invariably endorsed, she wished to extort from us a wholesale condemnation of my grandmother’s views, against which she hoped to force us into solidarity with her own. But we sat silent. My grandmother’s sisters having expressed a desire to mention to Swann this reference to him in the Figaro, my great-aunt dissuaded them. Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.
“I don’t think that would please him at all; I know very well that I should hate to see my name printed like that, as large as life, in the paper, and I shouldn’t feel at all flattered if anyone spoke to me about it.”
She did not, however, put any very great pressure upon my grandmother’s sisters, for they, in their horror of vulgarity, had brought to such a fine art the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed. As for my mother, her only thought was of trying to induce my father to speak to Swann, not about his wife but about his daughter, whom he worshipped, and for whose sake it was understood that he had ultimately made his unfortunate marriage.
“You need only say a word; just ask him how she is. It must be so very hard for him.”
My father, however, was annoyed: “No, no; you have the most absurd ideas. It would be utterly ridiculous.”
But the only one of us in whom the prospect of Swann’s arrival gave rise to an unhappy foreboding was myself. This was because on the evenings when there were visitors, or just M. Swann, in the house, Mamma did not come up to my room. I dined before the others, and afterwards came and sat at table until eight o’clock, when it was understood that I must go upstairs; that frail and precious kiss which Mamma used normally to bestow on me when I was in bed and just going to sleep had to be transported from the dining-room to my bedroom where I must keep it inviolate all the time that it took me to undress, without letting its sweet charm be broken, without letting its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate; and it was precisely on those very evenings when I needed to receive it with special care that I was obliged to take it, to snatch it brusquely and in public, without even having the time or the equanimity to bring to what I was doing the single-minded attention of lunatics who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly oppose it with the recollection of the precise moment when they shut the door.
We were all in the garden when the double tinkle of the visitors’ bell sounded shyly. Everyone knew that it must be Swann, and yet they looked at one another
inquiringly and sent my grandmother to reconnoitre.
“See that you thank him intelligibly for the wine,” my grandfather warned his two sisters-in-law. “You know how good it is, and the case is huge.”
“Now, don’t start whispering!” said my great-aunt. “How would you like to come into a house and find everyone muttering to themselves?”
“Ah! There’s M. Swann,” cried my father. “Let’s ask him if he thinks it will be fine tomorrow.”
My mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the distress which my family had contrived to cause Swann since his marriage. She found an opportunity to draw him aside for a moment. But I followed her: I could not bring myself to let her out of my sight while I felt that in a few minutes I should have to leave her in the dining-room and go up to my bed without the consoling thought, as on ordinary evenings, that she would come up later to kiss me.
“Now, M. Swann,” she said, “do tell me about your daughter. I’m sure she already has a taste for beautiful things, like her papa.”
“Come along and sit down here with us all on the verandah,” said my grandfather, coming up to him. My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.
“We can talk about her again when we are by ourselves,” she said, or rather whispered to Swann. “Only a mother is capable of understanding these things. I’m sure that hers would agree with me.”
And so we all sat down round the iron table. I should have liked not to think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend that evening alone in my room, without being able to go to sleep: I tried to convince myself that they were of no importance since I should have forgotten them next morning, and to fix my mind on thoughts of the future which would carry me, as on a bridge, across the terrifying abyss that yawned at my feet. But my mind, strained by this foreboding, distended like the look which I shot at my mother, would not allow any extraneous impression to enter. Thoughts did indeed enter it, but only on the condition that they left behind them every element of beauty, or even of humour, by which I might have been distracted or beguiled. As a surgical patient, thanks to a local anaesthetic, can look on fully conscious while an operation is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite lines, or watch my grandfather’s efforts to talk to Swann about the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any emotion from the one or amusement from the other. Hardly had my grandfather begun to question Swann about that orator when one of my grandmother’s sisters, in whose ears the question echoed like a solemn but untimely silence which her natural politeness bade her interrupt, addressed the other with:
“Just fancy, Flora, I met a young Swedish governess today who told me some most interesting things about the co-operative movement in Scandinavia. We really must have her to dine here one evening.”
“To be sure!” said her sister Flora, “but I haven’t wasted my time either. I met such a clever old gentleman at M. Vinteuil’s who knows Maubant quite well, and Maubant has told him every little thing about how he gets up his parts. It’s the most interesting thing I ever heard. He’s a neighbour of M. Vinteuil’s, and I never knew; and he is so nice besides.”
“M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours,” cried my aunt Céline in a voice that was loud because of shyness and forced because of premeditation, darting, as she spoke, what she called a “significant glance” at Swann. And my aunt Flora, who realised that this veiled utterance was Céline’s way of thanking Swann for the Asti, looked at him also with a blend of congratulation and irony, either because she simply wished to underline her sister’s little witticism, or because she envied Swann his having inspired it, or because she imagined that he was embarrassed, and could not help having a little fun at his expense.
“I think it would be worth while,” Flora went on, “to have this old gentleman to dinner. When you get him going on Maubant or Mme Materna he will talk for hours on end.”
“That must be delightful,” sighed my grandfather, in whose mind nature had unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever for becoming passionately interested in the Swedish co-operative movement or in the methods employed by Maubant to get up his parts, just as it had forgotten to endow my grandmother’s two sisters with a grain of that precious salt which one has oneself to “add to taste” in order to extract any savour from a narrative of the private life of Molé or of the Comte de Paris.
“By the way,” said Swann to my grandfather, “what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It’s in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least a wonderfully well written journal, which fairly distinguishes it from the tedious journals we feel bound to read morning and evening.”
“I don’t agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed,” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro.
“Yes,” aunt Céline went one better, “when they write about things or people in whom we are interested.”
“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?” He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. “And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years,” he went on, showing that contempt for worldly matters which some men of the world like to affect, “we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium.” But at once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak of serious matters even in jest, he added ironically: “What a fine conversation we’re having! I can’t think why we climb to these lofty heights,” and then, turning to my grandfather: “Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulévrier had had the audacity to try to shake hands with his sons. You remember how he says of Maulévrier, ‘Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything but ill-humour, boorishness, and folly.’ ”
“Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very different,” said Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as her sister, since the present of Asti had been addressed to them both. Céline laughed.
Swann was puzzled, but went on: “ ‘I cannot say whether it was ignorance or cozenage,’ writes Saint-Simon. ‘He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.’ ”
My grandfather was already in ecstasies over “ignorance or cozenage,” but Mlle Céline—the name of Saint-Simon, a “man of letters,” having arrested the complete paralysis of her auditory faculties—was indignant:
“What! You admire that? Well, that’s a fine thing, I must say! But what’s it supposed to mean? Isn’t one man as good as the next? What difference can it make whether he’s a duke or a groom so long as he’s intelligent and kind? He had a fine way of bringing up his children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn’t teach them to shake hands with all decent folk. Really and truly, it’s abominable. And you dare to quote it!”
And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother: “Just tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on these occasions. Oh, yes: ‘What v
irtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!’2 How good that is!”
I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to kiss her several times in public, as I would have done in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter’s absence. But tonight, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: “The little man looks tired; he’d better go up to bed. Besides, we’re dining late tonight.”
And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or my mother in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: “Yes; run along; off to bed.”
I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang.
“No, no, leave your mother alone. You’ve said good night to one another, that’s enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.”
And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the staircase “against my heart,”3 as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by kissing me, given my heart leave to accompany me. That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal, through the inhalation—far more poisonous than moral penetration—of the smell of varnish peculiar to that staircase.