The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Read online

  The Fickle Man

  Fabrizio, who wants to, who believes he will, love Béatrice forever, remembers that he wanted the same thing, believed the same thing when he loved Hippolyta, Barbara, and Clélie for six months. So, reviewing Béatrice’s actual qualities, he tries to find a reason to believe that after the waning of his passion he will keep visiting her; for he finds the thought of someday living without her incompatible with a sentiment that contains the illusion of its own eternalness. Besides, as a prudent egoist, he would not care to commit himself fully—with his thoughts, his actions, his intentions of the moment and all his future plans—to the companion of only some of his hours. Béatrice has a sharp mind and a good judgment: “Once I stop loving her, what pleasure I’ll feel chatting with her about others, about herself, about my vanished love for her . . .” (which will thereby be revived but converted, he hopes, into a more lasting friendship).

  But, with his passion for Béatrice gone, he lets two years pass without visiting her, without wanting to see her, without suffering from not wanting to see her. One day, when forced to visit her, he sits there fuming and stays for only ten minutes. For he dreams night and day about Giulia, who is unusually mindless but whose fair hair smells as good as a fine herb and whose eyes are as innocent as two flowers.

  Life is strangely easy and pleasant with certain people of great natural distinction, people who are witty, loving, but who are capable of all vices although they do not indulge in any vice publicly, so no one can state that they have any vice at all. There is something supple and secretive about them. Then too, their perversity adds a piquant touch to their most innocent actions such as strolling in gardens at night.

  Lost Waxes

  ONE

  I first saw you a little while ago, Cydalise, and right off I admired your blond hair, like a small gold helmet on your pure and melancholy childlike head. A slightly pale red velvet gown softened your unusual head even further, and the lowered eyelids appeared to seal its mystery forever. But then you raised your eyes; they halted on me, Cydalise, and they seemed imbued with the fresh purity of morning, of water running on the first lovely days in spring. Those eyes were like eyes that have never looked at the things that all human eyes are accustomed to reflecting—yours were virginal eyes without earthly experience.

  But upon my closer scrutiny, you expressed, above all, an air of loving and suffering, like a person whose wishes were already denied by the fairies before his birth. Even fabrics assumed a sorrowful grace on you, casting a gloom especially on your arms, which were discouraged just enough to remain simple and charming. Then I pictured you as a princess coming from very far away, down through the centuries, bored forever here and with a resigned languor: a princess wearing garments of a rare and ancient harmony, the contemplation of which would have quickly turned into a sweet and intoxicating habit for the eyes. I would have wanted you to tell me your dreams, your cares. I would have wanted to see you hold some goblet or rather one of those ewers with such proud and joyless forms, ewers that, empty in our museums today, raise their drained cups with a useless grace; and yet once, like you, they constituted the fresh sensual pleasures of Venetian banquets, whose final violets and final roses seem to be still floating in the limpid current of the foamy and cloudy glass.

  TWO

  “How can you prefer Hippolyta to the five others I’ve just named: why, they’re the most undeniably beautiful women in Verona. First of all, her nose is too long and too aquiline.”

  You can add that her complexion is too fine, that her upper lip is too narrow, and that, by pulling her mouth up too high when she laughs, it creates a very acute angle. Yet I am infinitely affected by her laughter, and the purest profiles leave me cold next to the line of her nose, which you feel is too aquiline, but which I find so exciting and so reminiscent of a bird. Her head, long as it is from her brow to her blond nape, is also slightly birdlike, as are, even more so, her gentle, piercing eyes.

  At the theater she often rests her elbows on the railing of her box: her hand, in a white glove, shoots straight up to her chin, which leans on her finger joints. Her perfect body makes her customary white gauzes swell like folded wings. She reminds you of a bird dreaming on a slender and elegant leg. It is also delightful to see her feathery fan throbbing next to her and beating its white wing. Her sons and her nephews all have, like her, aquiline noses, narrow lips, piercing eyes, and overly fine complexions, and I have never managed to meet them without being distressed when recognizing her breed, which probably descends from a goddess and a bird. Through the metamorphosis that now fetters some winged desire to this female shape, I can discern the small royal head of the peacock without the froth or the ocean-blue, ocean-green wave of the peacock’s mythological plumage glittering behind the head. She is the epitome of fable blended with the thrill of beauty.

  Snobs

  ONE

  A woman does not mask her love of balls, horse races, even gambling. She states it or simply admits it or boasts about it. But never try to make her say that she loves high society: she would vehemently deny it and blow up properly. It is the only weakness that she carefully conceals, no doubt because it is the only weakness that humbles her vanity. She is willing to depend on playing-cards but not on dukes. She does not feel inferior to anyone simply because she commits a folly; her snobbery, quite the opposite, implies that there are people to whom she is inferior or could become inferior by letting herself relax. Thus we can find a woman who proclaims the utter foolishness of high society yet devotes her mind to it, her finesse, her intelligence, whereas she could instead have written a lovely tale or ingeniously varied her lover’s pains and pleasures.

  TWO

  Clever women are so afraid they will be accused of loving high society that they never mention it by name; when pressed during a conversation, they shift into some paraphrase to avoid uttering the name of this compromising lover. They pounce, if need be, on “Elegance,” a name that diverts suspicion and seems at least to pinpoint art rather than vanity as the basis for arranging their lives. Only women who are not yet part of high society or have lost their social standing refer to it by name with the ardor of unsatisfied or abandoned mistresses. Thus, certain young women who are just beginning to ascend and certain old women who are now sliding back enjoy talking about the social standing that others have or, even better, do not have. In fact, while those women derive more pleasure from talking about the standing that others do not have, their talking about the standing that others do have nourishes them more effectively, providing their famished imaginations with more substantial fare. I have known people to thrill, more with delight than envy, at the very thought of a duchess’s family connections. In the provinces, it seems, there are female shopkeepers whose brains, like narrow cages, confine desires for social standing that are as ferocious as savage beasts. The mailman brings them Le Gaulois. The society page is devoured in the twinkling of an eye. The fidgety provincial women are sated. And for an hour their eyes glow with peace of mind, their pupils dilating with enjoyment and admiration.

  THREE: AGAINST A FEMALE SNOB

  If you were not part of high society and were told that Élianthe, young, beautiful, rich, loved as she is by friends and suitors, had suddenly broken with them all and was endlessly courting old, ugly, stupid men whom she barely knew, begging for their favors and patiently swallowing their snubs, toiling like a slave to please them, losing her mind over them, regaining it over them, becoming their friend through her attentiveness, their support in case they are poor, their mistress in case they are sensual—if you were told all that, you would wonder: Just what crime has Élianthe committed, and who are those formidable magistrates whose indulgence she must buy at any price, to whom she sacrifices her friendships, her loves, her freedom of thought, the dignity of her life, her fortune, her time, her most private female aversions? Yet Élianthe has committed no crime. The judges whom she obstinately tries to corrupt barely give her a second thought, and they wou
ld let her pure and cheerful life keep flowing tranquilly. But a terrible curse lies upon her: she is a snob.

  FOUR: TO A FEMALE SNOB

  Your soul is certainly, as Tolstoy says, a dark forest. But its trees are of a particular species; they are family trees. People call you vain? But the universe is not empty for you; it is filled with coats of arms. It is quite a dazzling and symbolic conception of the world. Yet do you not also have your chimeras in the shape and color of the ones we see painted on blazons? Are you not educated? Le Tout-Paris, the Almanach de Gotha, La Société et le High-Life have taught you the Bouillet. In reading the chronicles of the battles won by ancestors, you have found the names of the descendants whom you invite to dinner, and this mnemonic technique has taught you the entire history of France. This lends a certain grandeur to your ambitious dream, to which you have sacrificed your freedom, your hours of pleasure or reflection, your duties, your friendships, and even love. For the faces of your new friends are linked in your imagination to a long series of ancestral portraits. The family trees that you cultivate so meticulously, whose fruit you pick so joyously every year, are deeply rooted in the most ancient French soil. Your dream interlocks the present and the past. The soul of the crusades enlivens some trivial contemporary figures for you, and if you read your guest book so fervently, does not each name allow you to feel an ancient and splendid France awakening, quavering, and almost singing, like a corpse arisen from a slab decorated with armorial bearings?

  Oranthe

  You did not go to bed last night and you still have not washed this morning?

  Why proclaim it, Oranthe?

  Brilliantly gifted as you are, do you not believe that this sufficiently distinguishes you from the rest of the world, so that you need not cut such a wretched figure?

  Your creditors are harassing you, your infidelities are driving your wife to despair, putting on a tuxedo is for you like donning livery, and no one could prevent you from appearing anything but disheveled in society. At dinner you never remove your gloves to show you are not eating, and if you feel jittery at night you have your victoria hitched up and you go for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne.

  You can read Lamartine only on a snowy night and listen to Wagner only when burning Chinese cinnamon.

  Yet you are an honorable man, rich enough not to incur debts if you do not regard them as crucial to your genius; you are vulnerable enough to suffer from causing your wife a grief that you would consider it bourgeois to spare her; you do not flee social gatherings; you know how to get people to like you; and your wit, for which your long curls are not necessary, would suffice to draw attention. You have a good appetite; you eat well before attending a dinner, where you nevertheless fret and fume about going hungry. It is during your nocturnal drives, an obligation of your eccentricity, that you acquire the only illnesses from which you suffer. You have enough imagination to make snow fall or to burn Chinese cinnamon without the help of winter or an incense burner, and you are literary enough and musical enough to love Lamartine and Wagner in spirit and in reality.

  Well then! You have decked out an artist’s soul with all the bourgeois prejudices, showing us only their reverse sides without managing to put us off the scent.

  Against Frankness

  It is wise to fear Percy, Laurence, and Augustin equally. Laurence recites poems, Percy gives lectures, Augustin tells the truth. Frank Person: that is Augustin’s title, and his profession is True Friend.

  Augustin enters a drawing room; I urge you truly: be on your guard and simply do not forget that he is your true friend. Remember that he is never, any more than is Percy or Laurence, received with impunity, and that Augustin will not wait to be asked to tell you some of his truths any more than Laurence will to deliver a monologue or Percy to express his opinion of Verlaine. Augustin lets you neither wait nor interrupt because he is frank for the same reason that Laurence lectures: not for your sake, but for his own pleasure. Granted, your displeasure quickens his pleasure, just as your attention excites Laurence’s pleasure. But they could, if necessary, proceed without one or the other. Here we have three shameless rascals, who ought to be refused any encouragement—the feast if not the food of their vice.

  Still and all, they have their special audience, which keeps them alive. Indeed, Augustin the truth-teller has a very large following. His audience, led astray by conventional theater psychology and by the absurd maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” refuses to recognize that flattery is sometimes merely an outpouring of affection, and frankness the mud-slinging of a bad mood. Does Augustin practice his wickedness on a friend? In his mind this spectator vaguely compares Roman crudeness with Byzantine hypocrisy, and, his eyes all aglow with the joy of feeling better, rougher, coarser, he proudly exclaims: “He’s not the kind who’d treat you with kid gloves. . . . We have to honor him: what a true friend! . . .”

  A fashionable milieu is one in which each person’s opinion is made up of everyone else’s opinions. Does each opinion run counter to everyone else’s? Then it is a literary milieu.

  The libertine’s demand for virginity is just another form of the eternal tribute that love pays to innocence.

  After leaving the Xs you call on the Ys, and here the stupidity, the nastiness, the wretched situation of the Xs are laid bare. Filled with admiration for the acumen of the Ys, you blush to think that you originally felt any esteem for the Xs. But when you return to the Xs, they tear the Ys to pieces and more or less in the same way. Going from either home to the other means frequenting both enemy camps. But since neither foe ever hears the other’s fusillade, he believes that he alone is armed. Upon realizing that the weaponry is the same and that their strengths or rather their weaknesses are roughly equal, you stop admiring the side that shoots and you despise the side that is shot at. This is the beginning of wisdom. True wisdom would be to break with both sides.

  Scenario

  Honoré is sitting in his room. He stands up and looks at himself in the mirror:

  His Tie: You have so often loaded my knot with languor and loosened it dreamily—my expressive and slightly undone knot. You must be in love, my friend, but why are you sad? . . .

  His Pen: Yes, why are you sad? For a week now, my master, you have been overworking me, and yet I have thoroughly altered my lifestyle! I, who seemed destined for more glorious tasks, I believe that henceforth I will write only love letters, to judge by this stationery that you have just had made. However, these love letters will be sad, as presaged by the high-strung despair with which you seize me and suddenly put me down. You are in love, my friend, but why are you sad?

  Roses, Orchids, Hydrangeas, Maidenhair Ferns, Columbines (all of which fill the room): You have always loved us, but never have you rallied so many of us at once to enchant you with our proud and delicate poses, our eloquent gestures, and the poignant voices of our fragrances. For you we are certainly the very image of the fresh charms of your beloved. You are in love, my friend, but why are you sad? . . .

  Books: We were always your prudent advisors, forever questioned, forever unheeded. But while we never caused you to act, we did make you understand; nevertheless you dashed to your doom, but at least you did not struggle in the dark and as if in a nightmare: do not thrust us aside like old and now unwanted tutors. You held us in your childhood hands. Your still pure eyes gaped at us in amazement. If you do not love us for ourselves, then love us for everything we remind you of about yourself, for everything you have been, for everything you could have been, and is not “could have been” almost “have been” while you dreamed about it?

  Come listen to our familiar and admonishing voices; we will not tell you why you are in love, but we will tell you why you are sad, and if our child despairs and cries, we will tell him stories, we will lull him as we once did when his mother’s voice lent our words its gentle authority before the fire that blazed with all its sparks, with all your hopes and dreams.

  Honoré: I am in love with her and I believe I
am going to be loved. But my heart tells me that I, who used to be so fickle, I will love her forever, and my good fairy knows that I will be loved for only one month. That is why before entering the paradise of these fleeting joys I have paused at the threshold to dry my eyes.

  His Good Fairy: Dear friend, I have come from the heavens to bring you your dispensation; your happiness will depend on you. If, during one month, you play any tricks, thereby running the risk of spoiling the joys you looked forward to at the start of this love, if you disdain the woman you love, if you flirt with other women and pretend indifference, if you miss appointments with her and turn your lips away from the bosom she holds out to you like a sheaf of roses, then your shared and faithful love will be constructed for all eternity on the incorruptible foundation of your patience.

  Honoré (jumping for joy): My good fairy, I adore you and I will obey you.

  The Small Dresden Clock: Your beloved is late, my hand has already advanced beyond the minute that you have been dreaming about for so long, the minute at which your beloved was due. I fear that my monotonous tick-tock will scan your sensual and melancholy wait for a long time; though I tell time, I understand nothing about life; the sad hours follow the joyous minutes, as indistinguishable for me as bees in a hive. . . .

  (The bell rings; a servant goes to open the door.)

  The Good Fairy: Remember to obey me and remember that the eternity of your love depends on it.

  (The clock ticks feverishly, the fragrances of the roses waft uneasily, and the tormented orchids lean anxiously toward Honoré; one orchid looks wicked. Honoré’s inert pen gazes at him, sad that it cannot move. The books do not interrupt their grave murmuring. Everything tells Honoré: Obey the fairy and remember that the eternity of your love depends on that. . . .)