For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely
out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself:
« I’m falling asleep. » And half an hour later the thought that it was
time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book
which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone
on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these
thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was
the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between
François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after
I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and
prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning.
Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous
existence must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate
itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same
time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state
of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps,
for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something
dark indeed.
I
would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains,
which, now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note
of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside
through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path
he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by
strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has
had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in
his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home
again.
I
would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as
plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood. I would strike a match to look at
my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to
set out on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakened by a sudden
spasm, sees with glad relief a streak of daylight showing under his door. Thank
God, it is morning! The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and
someone will come to look after him. The thought of being assuaged gives him
strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come
nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished.
It is midnight; someone has just turned down the gas; the last servant has gone
to bed, and he must lie all night suffering without remedy.
I
would fall asleep again, and thereafter would reawaken for short snatches only,
just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my
eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in a
momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy upon the
furniture, the room, the whole of which I formed no more than a small part and
whose insensibility I would very soon return to share. Or else while sleeping I
had drifted back to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever outgrown, and had
come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of
my great-uncle’s pulling my curls which was effectually dispelled on the day—the
dawn of a new era to me—when they were finally cropped from my head. I had
forgotten that event during my sleep, but I remembered it again immediately I
had succeeded in waking myself up to escape my great-uncle’s fingers, and as a
measure of precaution I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before
returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes
too, as Eve was created of a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep
from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the pleasure I was on the
point of enjoying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that pleasure. My
body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become
one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in
comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago; my cheek was
still warm from her kiss, my body ached beneath the weight of hers. If, as
would sometimes happen, she had the features of some woman whom I had known in
waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to this end: to find her again,
like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some city of their
desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charmed one’s fancy.
And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the
girl of my dream.
When
a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the
sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he
consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads off his own position on
the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this
ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose
that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while
he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally
goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back
in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time,
but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he dozes off in
some even more abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for
instance, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic
chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens
his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another
place. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as to
completely relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in
which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not
knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only
the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the
depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller;
but then the memory—not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other
places where I had lived and might now very possibly be—would come like a rope
let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I
could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of
civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with
turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of
my ego.
Perhaps
the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our
conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of
our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and
my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was,
everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My
body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the
pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce
therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece
together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the
composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a
series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen
walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room
that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark. And even before my brain,
hesitating at the threshold of times and shapes, had reassembled the
circumstances sufficiently to identify the room, it—my body—would recall from
each room in succession the style of the bed, the position of the doors, the
angle at which the daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage
outside, what I had had in mind when I went to sleep and found there when I
awoke. The stiffened side on which I lay would, for instance, in trying to fix
its position, imagine itself to be lying face to the wall in a big bed with a
canopy; and at once I would say to myself, « Why, I must have fallen
asleep before Mamma came to say good night, » for I was in the country at
my grandfather’s, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was
lying, faithful guardians of a past which my mind should never have forgotten,
brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its
urn-shaped bowl of Bohemian glass that hung by chains from the ceiling, and the
chimney-piece of Sienna marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my grandparents’ house,
in those far distant days which at this moment I imagined to be in the present
without being able to picture them exactly, and which would become plainer in a
little while when I was properly awake.
Then
the memory of a new position would spring up, and the wall would slide away in
another direction; I was in my room in Mme de Saint-Loup’s house in the
country; good heavens, it must be ten o’clock, they will have finished dinner!
I must have overslept myself in the little nap which I always take when I come
in from my walk with Madame de Saint-Loup before dressing for the evening. For
many years have now elapsed since the Combray days when, coming in from the
longest and latest walks, I would still be in time to see the reflection of the
sunset glowing in the panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind
of life that one leads at Tansonville, at Madame de Saint-Loup’s, and a
different kind of pleasure that I derive from taking walks only in the
evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play as a
child in the sunshine; as for the bedroom in which I must have fallen asleep
instead of dressing for dinner, I can see it from a distance as we return from
our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the
night.
These
shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds;
it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I
did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than,
when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body
as they appear upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of
the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit
them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going
to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest woven out of the most diverse
materials – the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a
shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of a children’s paper – which I had
contrived to cement together, bird-fashion, by dint of continuous pressure;
rooms where, in freezing weather, I would enjoy the satisfaction of being shut
in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark
tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping
in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of smug
and smoky air, shot with the glow of the logs intermittently breaking out again
in flame, a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart
of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting
and altering in temperature as gusts of air traversed them to strike freshly
upon my face, from the corners of the room or from parts near the window or far
from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold;—or rooms in summer, where
I would delight to feel myself a part
of the warm night, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters
would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder, where I would fall
asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze gently
rocks at the tip of a sunbeam;—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful
that I never felt too miserable in it, even on my first night, and in which the
slender columns that lightly supported its ceiling drew so gracefully apart to
reveal and frame the sight of the bed;—sometimes, again, the little room with
the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate
storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment,
mentally poisoned by the unfamiliar scent of vetiver, I was convinced of the
hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock
that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; in which
a strange and pitiless rectangular cheval-glass, standing across one corner of
the room, carved out for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the
soft plenitude of my normal field of vision; in which my mind, striving for
hours on end to break away from its moorings, to stretch upwards so as to take
on the exact shape of the room and to reach to the topmost height of its
gigantic funnel, had endured many a painful night as I lay stretched out in
bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils flaring, my heart
beating; until habit had changed the colour of the curtains, silenced the
clock, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass,
disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of vetiver, and appreciably
reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Habit! That skilful but
slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in
temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less too happy to discover
at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless
to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had veered round for the last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But for all that I now knew that I was not in any of the houses of which the ignorance of the waking moment had, in a flash, if not presented me with a distinct picture, at least persuaded me of the possible presence, my memory had been set in motion; as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go to bed and lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of Gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable. Now I no longer recognised it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, filled with an infamous design, issued from the little triangular forest which softened with dark green the slope of a hill, and advanced fitfully towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood dreaming, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the accompanying patter read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo’s horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed’s, overcame every material obstacle—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking it as an ossature and absorbing it into himself: even the doorknob—on which, adapting themselves at once, his red cloak or his pale face, still as noble and as melancholy, floated invincibly—would never betray the least concern at this transvertebration.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think—and to feel—such melancholy things. The doorknob of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorknobs in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to move of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become—lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would hurry down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held that “It’s a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country,” and used to have endless arguments with my father on the very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. “That is not the way to make him strong and active,” she would say sadly, “especially this little man, who needs all the strength and will-power that he can get.” My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed the precious wicker armchairs indoors so that they should not get soaked, was to be seen pacing the deserted rain-lashed garden, pushing back her disordered grey locks so that her forehead might be freer to absorb the health-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, “At last one can breathe!” and would trod up and down the sodden paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve—her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the power of hygiene, the stupidity of my upbringing and the symmetry of gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the mudstains beneath which it would gradually disappear to a height that was the constant bane and despair of her maid.
When these walks of my grandmother’s took place after dinner there was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: this was if (at one of those points when her circular itinerary brought her back, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her: “Bathilde, come in and stop your husband drinking brandy!” For, simply to tease her (she had brought so different a type of mind into my father’s family that everyone made fun of her), my great-aunt used to make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would get angry and gulp it down all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble of heart that her tenderness for others and her disregard for herself and her own troubles blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, bore no trace of irony save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without seeming to bestow upon them passionate caresses. This torture inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grand-mother’s vain entreaties, of her feeble attempts, doomed in advance, to remove the liqueur-glass from my grandfather’s hands—all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so accustomed as to smile at them and to take the persecutor’s side resolutely and cheerfully enough to persuade oneself that it is not really persecution; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her “Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband drinking brandy,” in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude: reading or day-dreaming, tears or sensual pleasure. Alas! I did not realise that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future, weighed far more heavily on my grandmother’s mind than any little dietary indiscretion by her husband in the course of those endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, during which we used to see her handsome face passing to and fro, half raised towards the sky, its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were “going out,” by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the dying traces of an involuntary tear.
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time, she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the utmost pain; for it heralded the moment which was to follow it, when she would have left me and gone downstairs again. So much so that I reached the point of hoping that this good night which I loved so much would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her “Kiss me just once more,” but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such rituals absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the habit, of having her there at all, let alone get into the habit of asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the calm and serenity 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 an act of peace-giving communion in which my lips might imbibe her real presence and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had people to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our ‘people’ were usually limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house round the iron table beneath the big chestnut-tree, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the shrill and assertive alarm bell which assailed and deafened with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who set it off on entering “without ringing,” but the double tinkle, timid, oval, golden, of the visitors’ bell, everyone would at once exclaim “A visitor! Who in the world can it be?” but they knew quite well that it could only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be more offensive to a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and then my grandmother, always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, would be sent out to reconnoitre, and would take the opportunity to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run her hand through her boy’s hair after the barber has smoothed it down, to make it look naturally wavy.
We would all wait there in suspense for the report which my grandmother would bring back from the enemy lines, as though there might be a choice between a large number of possible assailants, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: “I recognise Swann’s voice.” And indeed one could tell him only by his voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes, under a high forehead fringed with fair, almost red hair, done in the Bressant style, because in the garden we used as little light as possible, so as not to attract mosquitoes; and I would slip away unobtrusively to order the liqueurs to be brought out, for my grandmother made a great point, thinking it “nicer,” of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the ordinary, which we kept for visitors only. Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend of Swann’s father, an excellent but eccentric man the ardour of whose feelings and the current of whose thoughts would often be checked or diverted by the most trifling thing. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns’ family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried, “Ah, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking here together on such a charming day! Don’t you see how pretty they are, all these trees, my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you have never congratulated me? You look as solemn as the grave. Don’t you feel this little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it’s good to be alive all the same, my dear Amédée!” And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came to his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, rubbed his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And yet he never got over the loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years by which he survived her, “It’s a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her for a long time.” “Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann,” became one of my grandfather’s favourite sayings, which he would apply to all manner of things. I should have assumed that this father of Swann’s had been a monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than myself, and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to pardon offences which I should have been inclined to condemn, had not gone on to exclaim, “But, after all, he had a heart of gold.”
For many years, during the course of which—especially before his marriage—M. Swann the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and my grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the society which his family had frequented, and that, under the sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring—with the complete innocence of a family of respectable innkeepers who have in their midst some celebrated highwayman without knowing it—one of the most distinguished members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Our utter ignorance of the brilliant social life which Swann led was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and from which nothing, save the accident of an exceptional career or of a “good” marriage, could extract you and translate you to a superior caste. M. Swann the elder had been a stockbroker; and so “young Swann” found himself immured for life in a caste whose members’ fortunes, as in a category of tax-payers, varied between such and such limits of income. One knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so one knew his own associates, the people with whom he was “in a position” to mix. If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on whom the old friends of his family, like my relatives, shut their eyes all the more good-naturedly because Swann himself, after he was left an orphan, still came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat if he had met them while he was walking with us. Had it been absolutely essential to apply to Swann a social coefficient peculiar to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his father’s position, his coefficient would have been rather lower than theirs, because, being very simple in his habits, and having always had a “craze” for antiques and pictures, he now lived and amassed his collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit but which was situated on the Quai d’Orléans, a neighbourhood in which my great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered. “Are you really a connoisseur at least?” she would say to him; “I ask for your own sake, as you are likely to have fakes palmed off on you by the dealers,” for she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no great opinion of the intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would avoid serious topics and showed a very dull preciseness, not only when he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details, but even when my grandmother’s sisters were talking to him about art. When challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost disobligingly silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been painted. But as a rule he would content himself with trying to amuse us by telling us about his latest adventure with someone whom we ourselves knew, such as the Combray chemist, or our cook, or our coachman. These stories certainly used to make my great-aunt laugh, but she could never decide whether this was on account of the absurd role which Swann invariably gave himself therein, or of the wit that he showed in telling them: “I must say you really are a regular character, M. Swann!”
As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle “common,” she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, had he so wished, have lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l’Opéra, and that he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann called on New Year’s Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: “Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the bonded warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to Lyons?” and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her glasses, at the other visitors.
(…)
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.