The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Page 14
My distress had suddenly dissipated; my father’s decisions, Pia’s feelings, my enemies’ cunning still weighed on me but no longer crushed me: they were like a natural and irrelevant necessity. The contradiction of that dark resplendence, the miracle of that enchanted respite for my ills, inspired no defiance in me, no dread; instead I was swept up, deluged, inundated by a growing bliss and finally awakened by its delicious intensity. I opened my eyes. Splendid and pallid, my dream spread out all around me. The wall I was resting against was brightly lit, and the shadow of its ivy was as sharp as at four in the afternoon. The leaves of a silver poplar glistened as they were turned over by a faint breeze. Whitecaps and white sails were visible on the water, the sky was clear, the moon had risen. For brief moments, wispy clouds drifted across the moon, where they were tinted with blue nuances, their pallor as deep as the jelly of a medusa or the heart of an opal. Brightness shone everywhere, but my eyes could not catch it. The darkness persisted even on the grass, which was glowing almost like a mirage. The woods and a trench were absolutely black. All at once, a slight rustle awakened slowly like a misgiving, then swelled quickly and seemed to roll over the forest. It was the shuddering of leaves crumpled by the breeze. One by one I heard them surging like waves against the vast silence of the entire night. Then the rustle itself waned and died out.
In the grassy strip running ahead of me between the two dense lines of oaks, a river of brightness appeared to flow, contained between those two embankments of gloom. The moonlight, conjuring up the gatekeeper’s lodge, the foliage, a sail from the night where they had been demolished, failed to arouse them. In this dreamlike hush, the moon illuminated only the hazy phantoms of their shapes without distinguishing their contours, which made them so real for me in the daytime, which oppressed me with the certainty of their presence and the perpetuity of their trivial surroundings. The lodge without a door, the foliage without a trunk, almost without leaves, the sail without a boat, appeared to be not so much a cruelly undeniable and monotonously habitual reality as the strange, inconsistent, and luminous dreams of slumbering trees plunging into darkness. Never, indeed, had the woods slept so profoundly; I sensed that the moon had taken advantage of their slumber so that it might silently begin that grand, pale, and gentle celebration in the sky and the sea.
My sadness had vanished; I could hear my father scolding me, Pia mocking me, my enemies hatching plots, and none of that seemed real. The sole reality was in that unreal light, and I invoked it with a smile. I did not understand what inscrutable resemblance united my sorrows with the solemn mysteries celebrated in the woods, in the sky, and on the sea, but I sensed that their explanation, their consolation, their forgiveness were proffered, and that it made no difference that my mind did not share the secret since my heart understood it so well. I called my holy mother by her name, Night; my sadness had recognized her immortal sister in the moon, the moon shone on the transfigured sorrows of night, and melancholy had arisen in my heart, where the clouds had dissipated.
TWO
Then I heard footsteps. Assunta was coming toward me, her white face looming over a huge, dark coat. She murmured to me: “I was afraid you’d be cold; my brother was in bed, I’ve come back.” I approached her; I was shivering; she pulled me inside her coat and, to keep its folds around me, she slipped her arm around my neck. We walked a few paces under the trees, in the profound darkness. Something flared up before us; I had no time to back up; I wanted to move aside, thinking we were bumping into a trunk, but the obstacle slid under our feet—we had strolled into the moon. I drew Assunta’s head close to mine. She smiled; I started crying; I saw that she was crying too. Then we realized that the moon was crying and that its sadness was consistent with our own. The sweet and poignant flashes of its light went to our very hearts. Like us it was crying, and, as we do nearly always, it cried without knowing why, but with such intense feelings that its sweet and irresistible despair swept along the woods, the fields, the sky (which was again reflected in the sea), and my heart, which at last saw clearly into its heart.
The Source of Tears in Past Loves
When novelists or their heroes contemplate their lost loves, their ruminations, so poignant for the reader, are, alas, quite artificial. There is a gap between the immensity of our past love and the absoluteness of our present indifference, of which we are reminded by a thousand material details: a name recalled in conversation, a letter rediscovered in a drawer, an actual encounter with the person, or, even better, the act of possessing her after the fact, so to speak. In a work of art, the contrast may be so distressing, so full of restrained tears, but in life our response is cold, precisely because our present state is indifference and oblivion, our beloved and our love please us at most aesthetically, and because agitation and the ability to suffer have disappeared along with love. Thus the agonizing melancholy of this contrast is only a moral truth. This melancholy would also become a psychological reality were a writer to place it at the start of the passion he describes and not after its end.
Often, indeed, when, warned by our experience and sagacity (and despite the protests of the heart, which has the sentiment or rather the illusion that our love will last forever) that someday we will be utterly unconcerned about this woman, the very thought of whom currently sustains our life: we will be as indifferent to her as we are now to all other women. . . . We will hear her name without painful pleasure, we will see her handwriting without trembling, we will not change our route in order to catch sight of her in the street, we will run into her without anxiety, we will possess her without delirium. Then, despite the absurd and powerful presentiment that we will always love her, that certain prescience will make us weep; and love, the love that has risen over us once again like a divine, an infinitely woeful and mysterious morning, will spread a bit of its huge, strange, and profound horizons before our anguish, a bit of its bewitching desolation. . . .
Friendship
When you feel sorrowful, it is good to lie down in the warmth of your bed, and, quelling all effort and resistance and burying even your head under the covers, you surrender completely, moaning, like branches in the autumn wind. But there is an even finer bed, redolent with divine fragrances. It is our sweet, our deep, our inscrutable friendship. That is where I cozily rest my heart when the world turns sad and icy. Enveloping even my mind in our warm affection, perceiving nothing beyond that, and no longer wanting to defend myself, disarmed, but promptly fortified and made invincible by the miracle of our affection, I weep for my sorrow, and for my joy at having a safe place to hide my sorrow.
Ephemeral Efficacy of Grief
Let us be thankful to the people who bring us happiness; they are the enchanting gardeners who make our souls blossom. But let us be even more grateful to cruel or merely indifferent women, to unkind friends who have caused us grief. They have devastated our hearts, which are now littered with unrecognizable wreckage; they have uprooted tree trunks and mutilated the most delicate boughs like a ravaging wind that has nevertheless sown a few good seeds for an uncertain harvest.
By smashing all the bits of happiness that concealed our greatest misery from ourselves, by turning our hearts into bare, melancholy courtyards, they have enabled us to finally contemplate our hearts and judge them. Mournful plays are similarly good for us; we must therefore regard them as far superior to cheerful plays, which stave off our hunger instead of satisfying it: the bread that should nourish us is bitter. In a happy life, the destinies of our fellow men never appear to us in their true light: they are either masked by self-interest or transfigured by desire. But in the detachment we gain from suffering in life and from the sentiment of painful beauty on stage, other men’s destinies and even our own empower our attentive souls to hear the eternal but unheard voice of duty and truth. The sad work of a true artist speaks to us in that tone of people who have suffered, who force anyone who has suffered to drop everything and listen.
Alas! What sentiment has brought it removes capricio
usly, and sadness, more sublime than gaiety, is not as enduring as virtue. By this morning we have forgotten last night’s tragedy, which elevated us so high that we could view our lives in their entirety and their reality with sincere and clear-sighted compassion. Within a year perhaps we will get over a woman’s betrayal, a friend’s death. Amid this wreckage of dreams, this scattering of withered happiness, the wind has sown the good seed under a deluge of tears, but they will dry too soon for the seed to germinate.
In Praise of Bad Music
(After a performance of François de Curel’s L’Invitée)
Detest bad music but do not make light of it. Since it is played, or rather sung, far more frequently, far more passionately than good music, it has gradually and far more thoroughly absorbed human dreams and tears. That should make it venerable for you. Its place, nonexistent in the history of art, is immense in the history of the emotions of societies. Not only is the respect—I am not saying love—for bad music a form of what might be called the charity of good taste, or its skepticism, it is also the awareness of the important social role played by music. How many ditties, though worthless in an artist’s eyes, are among the confidants chosen by the throng of romantic and amorous adolescents. How many songs like “Gold Ring” or “Ah, slumber, slumber long and deep,” whose pages are turned every evening by trembling and justly famous hands, are soaked with tears from the most beautiful eyes in the world: and the purest maestro would envy this melancholy and voluptuous homage of tears, the ingenious and inspired confidants that ennoble sorrow, exalt dreams, and, in exchange for the ardent secret that is confided in them, supply the intoxicating illusion of beauty.
Since the common folk, the middle class, the army, the aristocracy have the same mailmen—bearers of grief that strikes them or happiness that overwhelms them—they have the same invisible messengers of love, the same beloved confessors. These are the bad composers. The same annoying jingle, to which every well-born, well-bred ear instantly refuses to listen, has received the treasure of thousands of souls and guards the secret of thousands of lives: it has been their living inspiration, their consolation, which is always ready, always half-open on the music stand of the piano—and it has been their dreamy grace and their ideal. Certain arpeggios, certain reentries of motifs have made the souls of more than one lover or dreamer vibrate with the harmonies of paradise or the very voice of the beloved herself. A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dream that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.
Lakeside Encounter
Yesterday, before going to dine in the Bois de Boulogne, I received a letter from Her: after a week she was responding rather coldly to my desperate letter, notifying me that she feared she could not say goodbye to me before leaving. And I, yes, rather coldly replied that it was better this way, and I wished her a pleasant summer. Then I dressed and I rode across the Bois in an open carriage. I felt extremely sad, but calm. I was determined to forget, I had made up my mind: it was a matter of time.
As my carriage turned into the lakeside drive, I spotted a lone woman slowly walking at the far end of the small path that circles the lake fifty meters from the drive. At first I could barely make her out. She waved casually at me, and then I recognized her despite the distance between us. It was she! I waved back for a long time. And she continued to gaze at me as if wanting me to halt and take her along. I did nothing of the kind, but I soon felt an almost exterior agitation pounce upon me and grip me firmly. “I guessed right!” I exclaimed. “For some unknown reason she’s always feigned indifference toward me. She loves me, the dear thing.”
An infinite happiness, an invincible certainty came over me; I felt dizzy and I burst into sobs. The carriage was approaching Armenonville; I dried my eyes, and the gentle greeting of her hand passed over them as if also to dry their tears, and her softly questioning eyes fixed on mine, asking if I could take her along.
When I arrived at the dinner, I was radiant. My happiness spread to each person in hearty, blissful, thankful amiability: nobody had the slightest inkling what hand unknown to them—the little hand that had waved to me—had kindled this great fire of my joy, its radiance visible to everyone; and my sense of their unawareness of that hand added the charm of secret sensual delights to my happiness. We were waiting only for Madame de T., and she soon arrived. She is the most insignificant person I know and, though somewhat attractive, the most unpleasant. But I was too happy not to forgive each individual for his faults, his ugliness, and I went over to her with an affectionate smile.
“You were less friendly just now,” she said.
“Just now?” I said, astonished. “Just now? But I haven’t seen you.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t recognize me? It’s true you were far away. I was strolling along the lake, you drove by proudly in your carriage, I waved at you and I wanted to ride with you so as not to be late.”
“You mean that was you?” I exclaimed and in my despair I repeated several times: “Oh, do please forgive me, please forgive me!”
“How unhappy he looks! My compliments, Charlotte,” said the mistress of the house. “But you can cheer up, she’s with you now.”
I was crushed; my entire happiness was destroyed.
All well and good! But the most horrible part of it was that it was not as if it had not been. Even after I realized my mistake, that loving image of the woman who did not love me altered my conception of her for a long time. I attempted a reconciliation, I forgot about her less quickly, and, struggling to find solace for my distress by imagining that those were her hands as I had originally felt, I often closed my eyes to evoke those little hands, which had waved to me, which would have so nicely dried my eyes, so nicely cooled my brow—those little gloved hands, which she gently held out by the lake, as frail symbols of peace, love, and reconciliation, while her sad and questioning eyes seemed to ask me to take her along.
Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, “There is a fire over there,” certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror. But sometimes even carefree and cheerful people have eyes that are vast and somber like grief, as if a filter had been stretched between the soul and the eyes so that all the live content of the soul had virtually seeped into the eyes. Warmed solely by the fervor of their egoism (that attractive fervor of egoism, to which people are drawn as strongly as they are alienated by inflammatory passion), the parched soul is henceforth nothing but an artificial palace of intrigues. However, their eyes, which endlessly burn with love, and which a dew of languor will water, set aglow, cause to float, and drown without extinguishing them—those eyes will astonish the universe with their tragic blaze. Twin spheres that are now independent of the soul, spheres of love, ardent satellites of an eternally frozen world, those spheres will continue to cast an unwonted and deceptive shimmer until the death of these false prophets, these perjurers, whose promise of love the heart will not keep.
The Stranger
Dominique had settled next to the extinguished fire, waiting for his guests. Every evening he would invite some aristocrat to come for supper together with men of wit; and since he was rich, well-born, and charming, he was never alone. The candles had not yet been lit, and the daylight was dying sadly in the room. All at once he heard a voice, a distant and intimate voice, saying to him: “Dominique”; and at the mere sound of it, so far and so near, “Dominique,” he froze with fear. He had never heard that voice before, and yet he recognized it so clearly, his remorse recognized so clearly the voice of a victim, a noble victim that he had immolated. He tried to remember some ancient crime he had committed, but non
e came to mind. Yet the tone of that voice reproached him for a crime, a crime he had probably committed without realizing it, but for which he was responsible—as attested by his fear and sadness. Upon raising his eyes he saw, standing before him, grave and familiar, a stranger with a vague and gripping demeanor. Uttering a few respectful words, Dominique bowed to the stranger’s obvious and melancholy authority.
“Dominique, am I the only person you won’t invite to supper? You have some wrongs to right with me, ancient wrongs. Then I will teach you how to get along without other people, who will no longer come when you’re old.”
“I invite you to supper,” Dominique replied with a warm gravity that surprised him.
“Thank you,” said the stranger.
No crest was inscribed in the stone on his ring, nor had wit frosted his words with its glittering needles. However, the gratitude in his firm, brotherly gaze intoxicated Dominique with unknown happiness.
“But if you wish to keep me here, you have to dismiss your other guests.”
Dominique heard them knocking at the door. The candles were unlit; the room was pitch-black.
“I can’t dismiss them,” Dominique replied, “I can’t be alone.”