The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Page 8

  “Let us have the courage to hide our conclusions from the fashionable world: otherwise we would be viewed as nitpickers, we would frighten everyone, and they would all dislike us. Let us be reassuring rather than unnerving. Our originality would do us enough harm as it is. We should even conceal it. In society we can also not talk about literature.”

  But other things are important there.

  “How do we greet people? With a deep bow or simply a nod, slowly or quickly, just as we are or bringing our heels together, walking over or standing still, pulling in the small of the back or transforming it into a pivot? Should the hands drop alongside the body, should they hold your hat, should they be gloved? Should the face remain earnest or should you smile for the length of the greeting? And how do you immediately recover your gravity once the greeting is done?”

  Introductions were also difficult.

  With whose name should you start? Should you gesture toward the person you are naming or should you merely nod at him or should you remain motionless with an air of indifference? Should you greet an old man and a young man in the same way, a locksmith and a prince, an actor and an academician? The affirmative answer satisfied Pécuchet’s egalitarian ideas, but shocked Bouvard’s common sense.

  And what about correct titles?

  You said “monsieur” to a baron, a viscount, or a count; however, “Good day, monsieur le marquis” sounded groveling and “Good day, marquis” too free and easy—given their age. They would resign themselves to saying “prince” and “monsieur le duc,” even though they found the latter usage revolting. When it came to the highnesses, they floundered. Bouvard, gratified by the thought of his future connections, imagined a thousand sentences in which this appellation would appear in all its forms; he accompanied it with a faint and blushing smile, inclining his head slightly and hopping about. But Pécuchet declared that he would lose the thread, get more and more confused, or else laugh in the prince’s face. In short, to avoid embarrassment, they would steer clear of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, that bastion of aristocracy. However, the Faubourg seeps in everywhere and looks like a compact and isolated whole purely from a distance! . . .

  Besides, titles are respected even more in the world of high finance, and as for the foreign adventurers, their titles are legion. But according to Pécuchet, one should be intransigent with pseudo-noblemen and make sure not to address them with a “de” even on envelopes or when speaking to their domestics. Bouvard, more skeptical, saw this as a more recent mania that was nevertheless as respectable as that of the ancient lords. Furthermore, according to Bouvard and Pécuchet, the nobility had stopped existing when it had lost its privileges. Its members were clerical, backward, read nothing, did nothing, and were as pleasure-seeking as the bourgeoisie; Bouvard and Pécuchet found it absurd to respect them. Frequenting them was possible only because it did not exclude contempt.

  Bouvard declared that in order to know where they would socialize, toward which suburbs they would venture once a year, where their habits and their vices could be found, they would first have to draw up an exact plan of Parisian society. The plan, said Bouvard, would include Faubourg Saint-Germain, financiers, foreign adventurers, Protestant society, the world of art and theater, the official world, and the learned world. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, in Pécuchet’s opinion, concealed the libertinage of the Old Regime under the guise of rigidity. Every nobleman had mistresses, plus a sister who was a nun, and he conspired with the clergy. They were brave, debt-ridden; they ruined and scourged usurers and they were inevitably the champions of honor. They reigned by dint of elegance, invented preposterous fashions, were exemplary sons, gracious to commoners and harsh toward bankers. Always clutching a sword or with a woman in pillion, they dreamed of restoring the monarchy, were terribly idle, but not haughty with decent people, sent traitors packing, insulted cowards, and with a certain air of chivalry they merited our unshakable affection.

  On the other hand, the eminent and sullen world of finance inspires respect but also aversion. The financier remains careworn even at the wildest ball. One of his numberless clerks keeps coming to report the latest news from the stock exchange even at four in the morning; the financier conceals his most successful coups and his most horrible disasters from his wife. You never know whether he is a mogul or a swindler: he switches to and fro without warning; and despite his immense fortune, he ruthlessly evicts a poor tenant for being in arrears with his rent and refuses to grant him an extension unless he wants to use the tenant as a spy or sleep with his daughter. Moreover, the financier is always in his carriage, dresses without taste, and habitually wears a pince-nez.

  Nor did Bouvard and Pécuchet feel any keener love for Protestant society: it is cold, starchy, gives solely to its own poor, and is made up exclusively of pastors. Their temples look too much like their homes, and a home is as dreary as a temple. There is always a pastor for lunch; the servants admonish their employers with biblical verses; Protestants fear merriment too deeply not to have something to hide; and when conversing with Catholics, they reveal their undying grudge about the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

  The art world, equally homogeneous, is quite different; every artist is a humbug, estranged from his family, never wears a top hat, and speaks a special language. He spends his life outsmarting bailiffs who try to dispossess him and finding grotesque disguises for masked balls. Nevertheless artists constantly produce masterpieces, and for most of them their overindulgence in wine and women is the sine qua non of their inspiration if not their genius; they sleep all day, go out all night, work God knows when, and, with their heads always flung back, their limp scarves fluttering in the wind, they perpetually roll cigarettes.

  The theater world is barely distinct from the art world: there is no family life on any level; theater people are eccentric and inexhaustibly generous. Actors, while vain and jealous, help their fellow players endlessly, applaud their successes, adopt the children of consumptive or down-on-their-luck actresses, and are precious in society, although, being uneducated, they are often sanctimonious and always superstitious. Actors at subsidized theaters are in a class of their own; entirely worthy of our admiration, they would deserve a more honorable place at the table than a general or a prince; they nurture feelings expressed in the masterpieces they perform on our great stages. Their memory is prodigious and their bearing perfect.

  As for the Jews, Bouvard and Pécuchet, though unwilling to banish them (for one must be liberal), admitted that they hated being with them; in their younger days Jews had all sold opera glasses in Germany; in Paris (with a piety that, incidentally, both men, as impartial observers, felt was all to their credit) the Jews zealously maintained special practices, an unintelligible vocabulary, and butchers of their own race. All Jews had hooked noses, exceptional intelligence, and vile souls devoted purely to self-interest; their women, on the contrary, were beautiful, a bit flabby, but capable of the loftiest sentiments. How many Catholics ought to emulate them! But why were their fortunes always incalculable and concealed? Furthermore they formed a kind of vast secret society, like the Jesuits and the Freemasons. They had—no one knew where—inexhaustible treasures in the service of some enemies or other, with a dreadful and mysterious goal.

  Musical Tastes

  Already disgusted with bicycles and paintings, Bouvard and Pécuchet now seriously took up music. But, although the everlasting champion of tradition and order, Pécuchet let himself be hailed as the utmost enthusiast of off-color songs and Le Domino noir; on the other hand, Bouvard, a revolutionary if ever there was one, turned out to be—it must be admitted—a resolute Wagnerian. Truth to tell, he had never laid eyes on a single score by the “Berlin brawler” (as he was cruelly nicknamed by Pécuchet, always patriotic and uninformed); after all, one cannot hear Wagner’s scores in France, where the Conservatory is dying of its own routine, between Colonne, who babbles, and Lamoureux, who spells out everything; nor were those scores p
layed in Munich, which did not maintain tradition, or in Bayreuth, which had been unendurably contaminated by snobs. It was nonsense trying to play a Wagnerian score on the piano: the theatrical illusion was necessary, as were the lowering of the orchestra and the darkness of the auditorium. Nevertheless, the prelude to Parsifal, ready to dumbfound visitors, was perpetually open on the music stand of Bouvard’s piano, between the photographs of César Franck’s penholder and Botticelli’s Primavera.

  The “Song of Spring” had been carefully torn out from the Valkyrie. On the first page of the roster of Wagner’s operas, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser had been indignantly crossed out by a red pencil. Of the early operas Rienzi alone prevailed. Disavowing Rienzi had become banal; it was time—Bouvard keenly sensed—to establish the opposite view. Gounod made him laugh and Verdi shout. Less, assuredly, than Erik Satie—who could disagree? Beethoven, however, struck Bouvard as momentous, like a Messiah. Bouvard himself, without stooping, could salute Bach as a forerunner. Saint-Saëns lacks substance and Massenet form, he endlessly repeated to Pécuchet, in whose eyes, quite the contrary, Saint-Saëns had nothing but substance and Massenet nothing but form.

  “That is why one of them instructs us and the other charms us, but without elevating us,” Pécuchet insisted.

  For Bouvard both composers were equally despicable. Massenet had a few ideas, but they were coarse, and besides, ideas had had their day. Saint-Saëns revealed some craftsmanship, but it was old-fashioned. Uninstructed about Gaston Lemaire, but playing with contrasts in their lessons, they eloquently pitted Chausson and Cécile Chaminade against one another. Moreover, Pécuchet and, though it was repugnant to his aesthetics, Bouvard himself gallantly yielded to Madame Chaminade the first place among composers of the day, for every Frenchman is chivalrous and always lets women go first.

  It was the democrat in Bouvard even more than the musician who proscribed the music of Charles Levadé; was it not an obstruction of progress to linger over Madame de Girardin’s poems in the age of steam, universal suffrage, and the bicycle? Furthermore, as an advocate for the theory of art for art’s sake, for playing without nuances and singing without modulation, Bouvard declared that he could not stand hearing Levadé sing: he was too much the musketeer, the jokester, with the facile elegance of an antiquated sentimentalism.

  However, the topic of their liveliest debates was Reynaldo Hahn. While his close friendship with Massenet, endlessly eliciting Bouvard’s cruel sarcasm, pitilessly marked Hahn as the victim of Pécuchet’s passionate predilections, Hahn had the knack of exasperating Pécuchet by his reverence for Verlaine, an admiration shared, incidentally, by Bouvard. “Set Jacques Normand to music, Sully Prudhomme, the Viscount of Borrelli. There is, thank goodness, no shortage of poets in the land of the troubadours,” he added patriotically. And, divided between the Teutonic sonority of Hahn’s last name and the southern ending of Reynaldo, his first name, and preferring to execute him out of hatred for Wagner rather than absolving him on behalf of Verdi, Pécuchet, turning to Bouvard, rigorously concluded:

  “Despite the efforts of all your fine gentlemen, our beautiful land of France is a land of clarity, and French music will be clear or it will not be,” Pécuchet stated, pounding on the table for emphasis.

  “A plague on your eccentricities from across the Channel and on your mists from across the Rhine—do not always look beyond the Vosges,” he added, his glare bristling with hints, “unless you are defending our fatherland. I doubt whether the Valkyrie can be liked even in Germany. . . . But for French ears it will always be the most hellish of tortures—and the most cacophonous!—plus the most humiliating for our national pride. Moreover, doesn’t this opera combine the most atrocious dissonance with the most revolting incest? Your music, sir, is full of monsters, and all one can do is keep inventing. In nature herself—the mother of simplicity, after all—you like only the horrible. Doesn’t Monsieur Delafosse write melodies on bats, so that the composer’s aberration will compromise his old reputation as a pianist? Why didn’t he choose some nice bird? Melodies on sparrows would at least be quite Parisian; the swallow has lightness and grace, and the lark is so eminently French that Caesar, they say, placed roasted larks on the helmets of his soldiers. But bats!!! The Frenchman, ever thirsty for openness and clarity, will always detest this sinister animal. Let it pass in Monsieur Montesquiou’s verses—as the fantasy of a blasé aristocrat, which we can allow him in a pinch. But in music! What’s next—a Requiem for Kangaroos? . . .” This good joke brightened Bouvard up. “Admit that I’ve made you laugh,” said Pécuchet (with no reprehensible smugness, for an awareness of its merit is permissible in a good mind). “Let’s shake, you’re disarmed!”

  *Needless to say, the opinions ascribed here to Flaubert’s two famous characters are by no means those of the author.

  THE MELANCHOLY SUMMER

  OF MADAME DE BREYVES

  Ariadne, my sister, you, wounded by

  love,

  You died on the shores where you had

  been abandoned.

  —RACINE: PHAEDRA, ACT I, SCENE 3

  That evening, Françoise de Breyves wavered for a long time between Princess Élisabeth d’A.’s party, the Opera, and the Livrays’ play.

  At the home where she had just dined with friends, they had left the table over an hour ago. She had to make up her mind.

  Her friend Geneviève, who was to drive back with her, was in favor of the princess’s soirée, whereas, without quite knowing why, Madame de Breyves would have preferred either of the two other choices, or even a third: to go home to bed. Her carriage was announced. She was still undecided.

  “Honestly,” said Geneviève, “this isn’t nice of you. I understand that Rezké will be singing, and I’d like to hear him. You act as if you’d suffer serious consequences by going to Élisabeth’s soirée. First of all, I have to tell you that you haven’t been to a single one of her grand soirées this year, and considering you’re friends, that’s not very nice of you.”

  Since her husband had died four years ago, leaving her a widow at twenty, Françoise had done almost nothing without Geneviève and she liked pleasing her. She did not resist her entreaties much longer, and, after bidding good night to the host and hostess and to the other guests, who were all devastated at having enjoyed so little of one of the most sought-after women in Paris, Françoise told her lackey:

  “To Princess d’A.”

  The princess’s soirée was very boring. At one point Madame de Breyves asked Geneviève:

  “Who is that young man who escorted you to the buffet?”

  “That’s Monsieur de Laléande, whom, incidentally, I don’t know at all. Would you like me to introduce him to you? He asked me to, but I was evasive, because he’s very unimportant and boring, and since he finds you very pretty, you won’t be able to get rid of him.”

  “Then let’s not!” said Françoise. “Anyway, he’s a bit homely and vulgar, despite his rather beautiful eyes.”

  “You’re right,” said Geneviève. “And besides, you’ll be running into him often, so knowing him might be awkward for you.”

  Then she humorously added:

  “Of course, if you want a more intimate relationship with him, you’re passing up a wonderful opportunity.”

  “Yes, a wonderful opportunity,” said Françoise, her mind already elsewhere.

  “Still,” said Geneviève, no doubt filled with remorse for being such a disloyal go-between and pointlessly depriving this young man of a pleasure, “it’s one of the last soirées of the season, an introduction wouldn’t carry much weight, and it might be a nice thing to do.”

  “Fine then, if he comes back this way.”

  He did not come back. He was across from them, at the opposite end of the drawing room.

  “We have to leave,” Geneviève soon said.

  “One more minute,” said Françoise.

  And as a caprice, especially out of a desire to flirt with this young man, who was bound to fin
d her very lovely, she gave him a lingering look, then averted her eyes, then gazed at him again. She tried to make her eyes seem tender; she did not know why, for no reason, for pleasure, the pleasure of charity, of a little vanity, and also gratuity, the pleasure of carving your name into a tree trunk for a passerby whom you will never see, the pleasure of throwing a bottle into the ocean. Time flowed by, it was getting late; Monsieur de Laléande headed toward the door, which remained open after he passed through, so that Madame de Breyves could spot him holding out his ticket at the far end of the cloakroom.

  “It’s time we left, you’re right,” she told Geneviève.

  They rose. But as luck would have it, a friend needed to say something to Geneviève, who therefore left Françoise alone in the cloakroom. The only other person there was Monsieur de Laléande, who could not find his cane. Françoise, amused, gave him a final look. He came very near her, his elbow slightly grazing hers, and, when closest to her, with radiant eyes, and still appearing to be searching, he said:

  “Come to my home, 5 Rue Royale.”

  She had hardly foreseen this, and Monsieur de Laléande was now so absorbed in hunting for his cane that afterwards Françoise never knew for certain whether it had not been a hallucination. Above all, she was very frightened, and since Prince d’A. chanced to come along at that moment, she called him over: she wished to make an appointment with him for an outing tomorrow and she talked volubly. During that conversation Monsieur de Laléande left. Geneviève reappeared an instant later, and the two women departed. Madame de Breyves told her friend nothing; she was still shocked and flattered, yet basically very indifferent. Two days after that, when she happened to recall the incident, she began to doubt that Monsieur de Laléande had really spoken those words. She tried but was unable to remember fully; she believed she had heard them as if in a dream and she told herself that the elbow movement had been an accidental blunder. Then she no longer thought spontaneously about Monsieur de Laléande, and when she happened to hear his name mentioned, she swiftly imagined his face and forgot all about the quasi-hallucination in the cloakroom.