The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Read online

  The farmyard, where you went for eggs, was no less pleasant a sight. Like an inspired and prolific poet, who never refuses to spread beauty to the humblest places, which until now did not seem to share the domain of art, the sun still warmed the bountiful energy of the dung heap, of the unevenly paved yard, and of the pear tree worn down like an old serving maid.

  Now who is that regally attired personage moving gingerly among the rustic articles and farm implements, tiptoeing to avoid getting soiled? It is Juno’s bird, dazzling not with lifeless gems but with the very eyes of Argus: it is the peacock, whose fabled glory is astonishing in these surroundings. Just as on a festive day, strutting before the clusters of gaping admirers at the gate, several minutes before the arrival of the first few guests, the glittering mistress of the house, in a gown with an iridescent train, an azure gorgerin already attached to her royal throat, her aigrettes on her head, crosses the yard to issue a final order or wait for a prince of the blood, whom she must welcome right at the threshold.

  And yet this is where the peacock spends its life, a veritable bird of paradise in a barnyard, among the chickens and turkeys, like a captive Andromache spinning her wool amid female slaves, but, unlike her, never abandoning the magnificence of royal insignia and crown jewels: a radiant Apollo, whom we always recognize even when he is guarding the herds of Admetus.

  Family Listening to Music

  For music is sweet,

  It makes the soul harmonious and, like a heavenly choir,

  It rouses a thousand voices that sing in the heart.

  —VICTOR HUGO: HERNANI, ACT V, SCENE 3

  For a truly dynamic family, in which each member thinks, loves, and acts, a garden is a pleasant thing. On spring, summer, and autumn evenings, they all gather there upon completing the tasks of the day; and however small the garden, however close its hedges, the latter are not so tall as not to reveal a large stretch of sky at which everyone gazes up in wordless reveries. The child dreams about his future plans, about the house he will inhabit with his best friend, never to leave him, about the secrets of earth and life. The young man dreams about the mysterious charm of the girl he loves; the young mother about her child’s future; in the depths of these bright hours the once troubled wife discovers, behind her husband’s cold façade, a painful and poignant regret that stirs her pity. The father, watching the smoke curling up from a roof, dwells on the peaceful scenes of his past, which are transfigured by the faraway evening light; he thinks about his coming death, about his children’s lives after his death. And thus the soul of the united family rises religiously toward the sunset, while the huge fir, linden, or chestnut tree envelops the family with the blessing of exquisite fragrance or venerable shade.

  But for a truly dynamic family, in which each member thinks, loves, and acts, for a family with a soul, how much sweeter it is if, in the evening, that soul can materialize in a voice, in the clear and inexhaustible voice of a girl or a young man who has received the gift of music and song. A stranger, passing the gate of a garden in which the family holds its tongue, would fear that his approach might rouse them out of a religious dream. But if the stranger, without hearing the singing, perceived the gathering of friends and relatives listening to it, then how much more would the family appear to be attending an unseen mass—that is, despite the variety of postures, how strongly the resemblance of expressions would manifest the true unity of souls, a unity momentarily realized in their sympathy for the same ideal drama, by their communion in one and the same dream.

  At times, as the wind bends the grass and agitates the branches for a long time, a breath bows the heads or suddenly raises them again. Then, as if an invisible messenger were telling a thrilling tale, they all seem to be waiting anxiously, listening in rapture or terror to the same news, which, however, elicits diverse echoes in each person. The anguish of the music reaches its peak; its outbursts are shattered by deep plunges and followed by more desperate outbursts.

  For the old man, the lustrous infinity, the mysterious darkness of the music are the vast spectacles of life and death; for the child, they are the urgent promises of sea and land; for the lover they are the mysterious infinity; they are the luminous darkness of love. The thinker sees his mental life unroll fully; the plunges of the faltering melody are its faltering and its plunges, and its entire heart rebounds and snaps back when the melody regains its flight. The powerful murmuring of the harmonies stirs up the rich and obscure depths of his memory. The man of action pants in the melee of chords, in the gallop of vivaces; he triumphs majestically in the adagios.

  Even the unfaithful wife feels that her sin is forgiven, is lost in infinity, her sin, which also originated in the dissatisfaction of a heart that, unappeased by the usual joys, had gone astray, but only in a quest for the mystery, and whose highest aspirations are now gratified by this music, which is as full as the voices of bells.

  The musician, who, however, claims to take only technical pleasure in music, also experiences those meaningful emotions, which, however, are so thoroughly wrapped up in his concept of musical beauty as to be hidden from his sight.

  And I myself, finally, listening in music to the most expansive and most universal beauty of life and death, sea and sky, I also feel what is unique and particular in your enchantment, oh darling beloved.

  Today’s paradoxes are tomorrow’s prejudices, for today’s grossest and most disagreeable prejudices had their moment of novelty, when fashion lent them its fragile grace. Many women today wish to rid themselves of all prejudices, and by prejudices they mean principles. That is their prejudice, and it is heavy even though it adorns them like a delicate and slightly exotic flower. They believe there is no such thing as perspective depth, so they put everything in the same plane. They enjoy a book or life itself like a beautiful day or like an orange. They talk about the “art” of a dressmaker and the “philosophy” of “Parisian life.” They would blush to classify anything, to judge anything, to say: This is good, this is bad.

  In the past, when a woman behaved properly, it was the revenge of her morals, that is, her mind, over her instinctive nature. Nowadays, when a woman behaves properly, it is the revenge of her instinctive nature over her morals—that is, her theoretical immorality (look at the plays of Mssrs. Halévy and Meilhac). In an extreme loosening of all moral and social bonds, women drift to and fro between that theoretical immorality and their instinctive righteousness. All they seek is pleasure, and they find it only when they do not seek it, when they are in a state of voluntary inaction. In books this skepticism and dilettantism would shock us like an old-fashioned adornment. But women, far from being the oracles of intellectual fashions, are actually their belated parrots. Even today, dilettantism still pleases them and suits them. While it may cloud their judgment and hamstring their conduct, one cannot deny that it lends them an already withered but still appealing grace. They make us rapturously feel whatever ease and sweetness existence may have in highly refined civilizations.

  In their perpetual embarcation for a spiritual Cythera—where they will celebrate not so much their dulled senses as the imagination, the heart, the mind, the eyes, the nostrils, the ears—women add some voluptuous delight to their attitudes. And I assume that the most faithful portraitists of our time will not depict them with any great tension or rigidity. Their lives emit the sweet perfume of unbound hair.

  Ambition is more intoxicating than fame; desire makes all things blossom, possession wilts them; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even if living it means dreaming it, though both less mysteriously and less vividly, in a murky and sluggish dream, like the straggling dream in the feeble awareness of ruminant creatures. Shakespeare’s plays are more beautiful when viewed in your study than when mounted on a stage. The poets who have created imperishably loving women have often known only mediocre barmaids, while the most envied voluptuaries do not understand the life that they lead or, rather, that leads them.

  I knew a little ten-year-old boy who
, in poor health and with a precocious imagination, had devoted a purely cerebral love to an older girl. He would sit at his window for hours, waiting for her to pass, weeping if he did not see her, weeping even more if he did see her. He would spend very rare, very brief moments with her. He could no longer sleep or eat. One day he threw himself out the window. At first, people believed that his despair at never approaching his sweetheart had driven him to suicide. But then they learned that he had just had a very long chat with her: she had been extremely kind to him. So everyone assumed he had renounced the insipid days that remained of his life after that euphoria, which he might never have a chance to relive. However, from secrets he had often confided in a friend people finally inferred that he had been disappointed whenever he saw the sovereign of his dreams; but once she was gone, his fertile imagination granted the absent girl all her former power, and he again desired to see her.

  Each time, he tried to blame the accidental reason for his disappointment on the imperfection of circumstances. After that final conversation, when his already skillful imagination had carried his sweetheart to the supreme perfection of which her nature was capable, the boy, desperately comparing that imperfect perfection with the absolute perfection by which he lived, by which he died, threw himself out the window. Subsequently, having become an idiot, he lived a very long life, but his fall had cost him all memory of his soul, his mind, the voice of his sweetheart, whom he would run into without seeing her. She, despite pleas and threats, married him and died several years later without ever getting him to recognize her.

  Life is like that little sweetheart. We dream it and we love it in dreaming it. We should not try to live it: otherwise, like that little boy, we will plunge into stupidity, though not at one swoop, for in life everything degenerates by imperceptible nuances. At the end of ten years we no longer recognize our dreams; we deny them, we live, like a cow, for the grass we are grazing on at the moment. And who knows if our wedding with death might not lead to our conscious immortality?

  “Captain,” said his orderly several days after the preparation of the cottage, where the retired officer was to live until his death (which his heart condition would not keep waiting for long). “Captain, now that you can no longer make love or fight, perhaps some books might distract you a little. What should I buy for you?”

  “Buy me nothing; no books; they can’t tell me anything as interesting as the things I’ve done. And since I don’t have much time left, I don’t want anything to distract me from my memories. Hand me the key to my large chest; its contents are what I’ll be reading every day.”

  And he took out letters, a whitish, sometimes tinted sea of letters: some very long, some consisting of a single line, on a card, with faded flowers, objects, brief notes he had jotted down to recall the momentary surroundings where he had received them, and photographs that had spoiled despite precautions, like relics worn out by the very piety of the faithful: they kiss them too often. And all those things were very old, and there were some from women who had died and others whom he had not seen in over ten years.

  Among all those things there were the slight but clear-cut traces of sensuality or affection tied to the least minutiae of the circumstances of his life, and it was like an immense fresco that, without narrating his life, depicted it, but only in its most passionate hues and in a very hazy and yet very particular manner, with a great and touching power. There were memories of kisses on the mouth—a fresh mouth in which he had unhesitatingly left his soul and which had since turned away from him—reminiscences that made him weep and weep. And although quite feeble and disillusioned, he felt a good, warm thrill upon gulping down a few of those still living memories, like a glass of fiery wine that had ripened in the sun, which had devoured his life; it was the kind of thrill that spring gives our convalescences and winter’s hearth our weaknesses. The feeling that his old, worn body had nevertheless blazed with similar flames—blazed with similar devouring flames—brought a renewal to his life. Then, musing that the things lying down full-length upon him were simply the enormous, moving shadows, which, elusive, alas, would all soon intermingle in the eternal night, he began weeping again.

  And, while knowing that those were nothing but shadows, shadows of flames, which had hurried off to burn somewhere else, which he would never see again, he nevertheless started worshiping them, lending them a cherished existence that contrasted with imminent and absolute oblivion. And all those kisses and all that kissed hair and all those things made up of tears and lips, of caresses poured out like heady wine, of despairs gathering like music or like evening for the bliss of being infinitely permeated with mystery and destinies: the adored woman, who had possessed him so thoroughly that nothing had existed for him but whatever had served his adoration; she had possessed him so thoroughly and was now slipping away, so vague that he no longer held on to her, no longer held on to even the perfume wafting from the fleeing folds of her cloak. He convulsively tried to revive all those things, resurrect them, and pin them like butterflies. And it grew more difficult each time. And he still had caught none of the butterflies; but each time, his fingers had rubbed off a smidgen of the glamour of their wings; or rather, he saw them in the mirror, he vainly banged on the mirror to touch them, but only dimmed it slightly more each time, and he saw the butterflies only as indistinct and less enchanting. And nothing could cleanse that tarnished mirror of his heart now that the purifying breath of youth or genius would no longer pass over it—by what unknown law of our seasons, what mysterious equinox of our autumn . . . ?

  And each time, he felt less sorrow about losing them—those kisses on those lips, and those endless hours, and those fragrances that had once made him delirious.

  And he sorrowed for sorrowing less, and then even that sorrow faded. Then all sorrows drifted away, all; he did not have to banish pleasures: clutching their flowering branches and without looking back, they had long since fled on their winged heels, fled this dwelling which was no longer young enough for them. Then, like all human beings, he died.

  Relics

  I have bought everything of hers that was for sale: I had wanted to be her lover, but she refused to even chat with me for an instant. I have the small deck of cards with which she amused herself every evening, her two marmosets, three novels bearing her coat-of-arms on their boards, and her dog. Oh, you delights, dear leisures of her life: without even relishing them as I would have done, without even desiring them, you had all her freest, most secret, and most inviolable hours; you did not feel your happiness and you cannot describe it.

  Cards, which she handled every evening with her closest friends, which saw her bored or laughing, which witnessed the start of her romance and which she put down so as to kiss the man who came to play with her every evening after that; novels, which she opened or closed in bed at the whim of her fancy or fatigue, which she selected according to her momentary caprice or her dreams, novels, to which she confided her dreams, which mingled with the dreams they expressed, and which helped her to dream her own dreams better—have you retained nothing about her, and will you tell me nothing?

  Novels, because she too imagined the lives of your characters and of your poet; cards, because in her own way she, together with you, felt the calm and sometimes the fever of vivid intimacy—novels, have you kept nothing of her mind, which you diverted or imbued, nothing of her heart, which you unburdened or consoled?

  Cards, novels, which she held so often, which lay so long on her table; you queens, kings, or jacks, who were the motionless guests at her most reckless parties; you heroes and heroines of novels, who, near her bed and under the crossed lights of her lamp and her eyes, dreamed your dream, silent yet full of voices—you could not have allowed all the perfume to evaporate, all the fragrance with which you were permeated by the air in her room, the fabrics of her frocks, the touch of her hands or her knees.

  You have preserved the creases inflicted on you by her joyful or nervous hand; and perhaps you still impris
on the tears of grief induced by a book or by life; and the daylight that brightened or wounded her eyes gave you that warm color. I touch you all atremble, fearful of your revelations, worried by your silence. Alas! Perhaps, like you, bewitching and fragile beings, she was the indifferent and unconscious witness to her own grace. Her most genuine beauty may have been in my desire. She lived her life, but I may have been the only one to dream it.

  Moonlight Sonata

  ONE

  More than by the fatiguing trip, I was exhausted by my memory and by frightened thoughts of my father’s demands, of Pia’s indifference, and of my enemies’ relentlessness. During the day, my mind had been diverted by Assunta’s company, her singing, her gentleness toward me, whom she barely knew, her white, brown, and rosy beauty, her fragrance persisting in the blusters of the ocean wind, the feather in her hat, the pearls around her neck. But toward nine at night, feeling overwhelmed, I asked her to take the carriage back on her own and leave me to rest a bit in the fresh air. We had almost reached Honfleur; the place was well chosen: it was located against a wall, by the gateway to a double avenue lined with huge trees that shielded against the wind, and the air was mild. Assunta agreed and left. I stretched out on the grass, facing the gloomy sky; lulled by the murmuring sea, which I could hear behind me but not discern in the darkness, I shortly dozed off.

  Soon I dreamed that in front of me the sunset was illuminating the distant sand and sea. Twilight was thickening, and it seemed to me that these were a sunset and a twilight like any twilight and any sunset. Then I was handed a letter; I tried to read it, but I was unable to make out anything. Only now did I realize it was very dark out despite the impression of intense and diffuse light. This sunset was extraordinarily pale, lustrous without brightness, and so much darkness gathered on the magically illuminated sand that I had to make an arduous effort merely to recognize a seashell. In this twilight, the kind special to dreams, the sun, ill and faded, appeared to be setting on a polar beach.