The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Page 12

  The event was crowned by a duchess, but the Spanish woman had already met her and could get nothing more out of her. So she exchanged irritated glances with her husband, whose guttural voice could perpetually be heard at soirées, asking at five-minute intervals that were quite filled with other kettles of fish: “Would you present me to the duke?” “Monsieur le duc, would you present me to the duchess?” “Madame la duchesse, may I present my wife?”

  Fuming at having to waste his time, he was nevertheless resigned to starting a conversation with his neighbor, the host’s business partner. For over a year now Fremer had been begging his wife to invite him. She had finally yielded and had tucked him away between the señora’s husband and a humanist. The humanist, who read too much, ate too much. He quoted and burped, and these two complaints were equally repugnant to his neighbor, a self-made aristocrat, Madame Lenoir.

  Having quickly turned the conversation to the Prince de Buivres’s victories at Dahomey, she said in a deeply moved voice: “The dear boy, how delighted I am that he is honoring our family.”

  She was indeed a cousin of the de Buivres, who, all of them younger than she, treated her with the deference that was due her age, her allegiance to the royal family, her massive fortune, and the unfailing barrenness of her three marriages. She had transferred to all the de Buivres whatever family sentiments she might possess. She felt personally ashamed of the de Buivres whose vile deeds had earned him a court-appointed guardianship, and around her right-minded brow, on monarchist bandeaux, she naturally wore the laurels of the de Buivres who was a general. An intruder in this previously closed family, she had become its head and virtually its dowager.

  She felt truly exiled in modern society and she always spoke tearfully about the “elderly noblemen of the old days.” Her snobbery was all imagination and, moreover, was all the imagination she had. With names rich in history and glory exerting a singular power over her sensitive soul, she felt the same unbiased pleasure whether dining with princes or reading memoirs of the Old Regime. Always sporting the same grapevines, her coiffure was as steadfast as her principles. Her eyes sparkled with stupidity. Her smiling face was noble, her gesticulation excessive and meaningless. Putting her trust in God, she displayed the same optimistic excitement on the eve of a garden party or on the eve of a revolution, whereby her hasty gestures seemed to exorcise radicalism or inclement weather.

  Her neighbor, the humanist, was speaking to her with a fatiguing elegance and a dreadful glibness; he kept quoting Homer in order to excuse his own bouts of gluttony and drunkenness in other people’s eyes and to poeticize them in his own eyes. His narrow brow was wreathed with invisible roses, ancient and yet fresh. But with an equable politesse, which came easily to Madame Lenoir (since she viewed it as the exercise of her power and the respect, so rare today, for old traditions), she spoke to Monsieur Fremer’s associate every five minutes. Still, the associate had nothing to complain about: at the opposite end of the table, Madame Fremer accorded him the most charming flattery. She wanted this dinner to count for several years and, determined not to dig up this spoilsport for a long time, she buried him under flowers.

  As for Monsieur Fremer: working at his bank all day, dragged into society by his wife every evening or kept at home when they entertained, always ready to bite anyone’s head off, always muzzled, he eventually developed, even in the most trivial circumstances, an expression that blended stifled annoyance, sullen resignation, pent-up exasperation, and profound brutishness. Tonight, however, the financier’s usual expression gave way to a cordial satisfaction whenever his eyes met his associate’s. Even though he could not stand him in everyday life, he felt fleeting but sincere affection for him, not because he could easily dazzle him with his wealth, but because he felt the same vague fraternity that we experience at the sight of even an odious Frenchman in a foreign country. So violently torn from his habits every evening, so unjustly deprived of the relaxation that he deserved, so cruelly uprooted, Monsieur Fremer felt a normally despised yet powerful bond, which finally linked him to someone, drawing him out of his unapproachable and desperate isolation.

  Across from him, Madame Fremer mirrored her blond beauty in the charmed eyes of the guests. The twofold reputation surrounding her was a deceptive prism through which everyone tried to fathom her real traits. Ambitious, conniving, almost an adventuress, according to the financial world, which she had abandoned for a more brilliant destiny, she was nevertheless regarded as a superior being, an angel of sweetness and virtue, by the aristocracy and the royal family, both of whom she had conquered. Nor had she forgotten her old and humbler friends, and she remembered them particularly when they were sick or in mourning—poignant circumstances, in which, moreover, one cannot complain of not being invited because one does not go out anyway. That was how she indulged her fits of charity, and in conversations with kinsmen or priests at deathbeds she wept honest tears, gradually deadening one by one the pangs of conscience that her all-too-frivolous life inspired in her scrupulous heart.

  But the most amiable guest was the young Duchess de D., whose alert and lucid mind, never anxious or uneasy, contrasted so strangely with the incurable melancholy of her beautiful eyes, the pessimism of her lips, the infinite and noble weariness of her hands. This powerful lover of life in all its forms—kindness, literature, theater, action, friendship—chewed her beautiful red lips like disdained flowers, though not withering them, while a disenchanted smile barely raised the corners of her mouth. Her eyes seemed to promise a spirit forever capsized in the diseased waters of regret. How often, in the street, at the theater, had dreamy passersby kindled their dreams on those twinkling stars! Now the duchess, while recalling some farce or thinking up a wardrobe, kept sadly twisting her noble, resigned, and wistful phalanges and casting about deep and desperate glances that inundated the impressionable diners in torrents of melancholy. Her exquisite conversation was casually adorned with the faded and charming elegance of an already ancient skepticism.

  The company had just had a discussion, and this person, who was so absolute in life and who believed that there was only one way of dressing, repeated to each interlocutor: “But why can’t one say everything, think everything? I could be right, so could you. It’s so terrible and narrow-minded to have only one opinion.”

  Unlike her body, her mind was not clad in the latest fashion, and she readily poked fun at symbolists and believers. Indeed her mind was like those charming women who are lovely enough and vivacious enough to be attractive even when wearing old-fashioned garments. It may, incidentally, have been deliberate coquetry. Certain all-too-crude ideas might have snuffed out her mind the way certain colors, which she banned from herself, would have obliterated her complexion.

  Honoré had sketched these various figures rapidly for his handsome neighbor, and so good-naturedly that despite their profound differences, they all seemed alike: the brilliant Señora de Torreno, the witty Duchess de D., the beautiful Madame Lenoir. He had neglected their sole common trait, or rather the same collective madness, the same prevalent epidemic with which all of them were stricken: snobbery. Of course, depending on the given character, it differed greatly with each person, so that it was a far cry from the imaginative and poetic snobbery of Madame Lenoir to the conquering snobbery of Señora de Torreno, who was as greedy as a functionary trying to climb to the top. And yet that terrible woman was capable of rehumanizing herself. Her neighbor at the dinner had just told her that he had admired her little daughter at the Parc Monceau. She had instantly broken her indignant silence. This obscure bookkeeper had aroused her pure and grateful liking, which she might have been incapable of feeling for a prince, and now they were chatting away like old friends.

  Madame Fremer presided over the conversations with a visible satisfaction brought on by her sense of the lofty mission she was performing. Accustomed to introducing great writers to duchesses, she viewed herself as a sort of omnipotent foreign minister, who displays a sovereign spirit even in ce
remonial etiquette. In the same way, a spectator at the theater, while digesting his dinner, judges, and therefore looks down at, the performers, the audience, the author, the rules of dramatic art, and genius. The conversation, incidentally, was taking a rather harmonious course. The dinner had reached the point at which the men touch the knees of the women or question them about their literary preferences according to their temperament and education, according, above all, to the individual lady.

  For an instant a snag seemed unavoidable. When, with the imprudence of youth, Honoré’s handsome neighbor attempted to insinuate that Heredia’s oeuvre might contain more substance than was generally claimed, the diners, whose habits of thinking were upset, grew surly. But since Madame Fremer promptly exclaimed, “On the contrary, those things are nothing but admirable cameos, gorgeous enamels, flawless goldsmithery,” vivacity and contentment returned to all faces.

  A discussion about anarchists was more serious. But Madame Fremer, as if resigned and bowing to a fateful law of nature, slowly said: “What good does it all do? There will always be rich people and poor people.” And, struck by this truth and delivered from their scruples, all these people, of whom the poorest had a private annual income of at least a hundred thousand francs, drained their final flutes of champagne with hearty cheerfulness.

  After Dinner

  Honoré, sensing that the melange of wines was making his head spin, left without saying goodbye, picked up his coat downstairs, and walked along the Champs-Élysées. He was extremely joyful. The barriers of impossibility, which close off the field of reality to our dreams and desires, were shattered, and his thoughts drifted exuberantly through the unattainable, fired by their own movement.

  He was drawn by the mysterious avenues that stretch between all human beings and at the ends of which an unsuspected sun of delight or desolation goes down every evening. He instantly and irresistibly liked each person he thought about, and one by one he entered the streets where he might hope to encounter them, and had his expectations come true, he would have gone up to the unknown or indifferent person without fear and with a delicious thrill. With the collapse of a stage set that had stood too nearby, life spread out far away in all the magic of its novelty and mystery, across friendly, beckoning landscapes. And the regret that this was the mirage or reality of only a single evening filled him with despair; he would never again do anything but dine and drink so well in order to see such beautiful things. He suffered only for being unable to immediately reach all the sites that were scattered here and there in the infinity of the faraway perspective. Then he was struck by the noise of his slightly threatening and exaggerated voice, which for the last quarter hour had kept repeating: “Life is sad, it’s idiotic” (that last word was underlined by a sharp gesture of his right arm, and he noticed the brusque movement of his cane). He mournfully told himself that those mechanically spoken words were a rather banal translation of similar visions, which, he thought, might not perhaps be expressed.

  “Alas! It’s probably only the intensity of my pleasure or regret that’s increased a hundredfold, but the intellectual content has remained as is. My happiness is skittish, personal, untranslatable for others, and if I were writing at this moment, my style would have the same qualities, the same defects, alas, and the same mediocrity as always.” However, the physical well-being he felt kept him from pursuing those thoughts and immediately granted him the supreme consolation: oblivion.

  He had reached the boulevards. People were passing to and fro, and he offered them his friendship, certain of their reciprocity. He felt like their glorious center of attention; he opened his overcoat to show them the so very becoming whiteness of his shirt and the dark-red carnation in his buttonhole. That was how he offered himself to the admiration of the passersby, to the affection he so voluptuously shared with them.

  REGRETS, REVERIES THE COLOR OF TIME

  So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  The Tuileries

  At the Garden of the Tuileries this morning, the sun dozed off on all the stone steps, one by one, like a blond youth whose light sleep is promptly interrupted by the passing of a shadow. Young sprouts are greening against the old palace walls. The breath of the enchanted wind mingles the fresh scent of the lilacs with the fragrance of the past. The statues, which, in our public squares, are as terrifying as lunatics, dream here in the bowers like sages under the lustrous verdure that protects their whiteness. The basins, with the blue sky basking in their depths, shine like eyes. From the terrace on the edge of the water we see a hussard riding by, as if in another era, from the old quarter of the Quai d’Orsay on the opposite bank. The morning glories spill wildly from the vases, which are crowned with geraniums. Blazing with sunshine, the heliotrope burns its perfumes. In front of the Louvre the hollyhocks soar up as slender as masts, as noble and graceful as columns, and blushing like young girls. Iridescent with sunlight and sighing with love, the water jets spurt toward the sky. At the end of the terrace a stone horseman, galloping furiously without budging, his lips glued to a joyful trumpet, embodies all the ardor of spring.

  But now the sky is darkening; it is about to rain. The basins, where no azure is shining anymore, are like blank eyes or vases full of tears. The absurd water jet, whipped by the breeze, raises its now ludicrous hymn more and more swiftly toward the sky. The futile sweetness of the lilacs is infinitely sad. And over there, riding hell for leather, the immobile and furious motion of his marble feet urging on his charger in its fixed and dizzying gallop, the oblivious horseman keeps endlessly blasting his trumpet against the black sky.

  Versailles

  A canal that inspires dreams in the most inveterate chatterboxes the instant they draw near, and where I am always happy whether I feel cheerful or mournful.

  —GUEZ DE BALZAC IN A LETTER TO MONSIEUR DE LAMOTHE-AIGRON

  The exhausted autumn, no longer warmed by the meager sunshine, is losing its final colors one by one. The extreme ardor of its foliage, blazing so intensely as to maintain the glorious illusion of a sunset throughout the afternoons and even the mornings, is now extinguished. Only the dahlias, the French marigolds, and the yellow, violet, white, and pink chrysanthemums are still glowing on the somber and desolate face of autumn. At six in the evening, when you walk across the uniformly gray and naked Tuileries under the equally gloomy sky, where, branch for branch, the black trees sketch their profound and delicate despair, an abruptly spotted bed of those autumn flowers brightens richly in the dusk, inflicting a voluptuous violence on our eyes, which are accustomed to those ashen horizons.

  The morning hours are gentler. The sun still shines intermittently, and, leaving the terrace by the edge of the water and going down the vast stone stairway before me, I can still see my shadow descending the steps one by one. After so many others (especially Mssrs. Maurice Barrès, Henri de Régnier, and Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac), I would hesitate to utter your name, Versailles, your grand name, sweet and rusty, the royal cemetery of foliage, of vast marbles and waters, a truly aristocratic and demoralizing place, where we are not even troubled by remorse that the lives of so many workers merely served to refine and expand not so much the joys of another age as the melancholy of our own. After so many others I would hesitate to utter your name, and yet how often have I drunk from the reddened cup of your pink marble basins, drunk to the dregs, savoring the delirium, the intoxicating bittersweetness of these waning autumn days. In the distance the earth, mixed with faded leaves and rotted leaves, always seemed to be a tarnished yellow and violet mosaic.

  Passing close to the Hameau and pulling up my overcoat collar against the wind, I heard the cooing of doves. I was intoxicated everywhere by the fragrance of blessed palms as on Palm Sunday. How could I still pick a slender nosegay of spring in
these gardens ransacked by autumn? On the water the wind crumpled the petals of a shivering rose. In this vast defoliation of the Trianon, only the slight arch of a small white geranium bridge raised its flowers above the icy water, their heads scarcely bowed by the wind.

  Granted, ever since I inhaled the sea breeze and the salt air in the sunken roads of Normandy, ever since I glimpsed the ocean shining through the branches of blossoming rhododendrons, I have known about everything that the closeness of water can add to the charms of vegetation. But what more virginal purity in this sweet, white geranium, leaning with graceful restraint over the chilly waters among their banks of dead leaves. Oh, silvery old age of woods still green, oh, weeping branches, ponds and pools that a pious gesture has placed here and there, like urns offered up to the melancholy of the trees!

  Stroll

  Despite the pure sky and the already hot sunshine, the wind was still as cold, the trees were still as bare as in winter. To light a fire I had to cut down one of the branches that I thought were dead, but the sap spurted out, soaking my arm up to the elbow and exposing a tumultuous heart under the frozen bark of the tree. In between the trunks the bare winter soil was covered with anemones, cowslips, and violets, while the streams, yesterday still gloomy and empty, were now filled with a blue, vivid, tender sky basking in the watery depths. Not the pale, weary sky of lovely October evenings, a sky stretching out on the watery bottom, virtually dying there of love and melancholy, but an intense and blazing sky on the tender and cheerful azure, from which grays, blues, and pinks kept flashing by: not the shadows of pensive clouds, but the dazzling and slippery fins of a perch, an eel, or a smelt. Drunk with joy, they scooted between sky and grass, through their meadows and forests, which were all brilliantly enchanted, like ours, by the resplendent genius of spring. And the waters, gliding coolly over their heads, between their gills, and under their bellies, hurried too, singing and gaily chasing the sunbeams.