The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (17 page)

My sweetest impressions are of the years when she returned to Les Oublis, summoned
by my illness. Not only was she paying me an extra visit, on which I had not counted,
but she was all sweetness and tenderness, pouring them out, on and on, without disguise
or constraint. Even in those times when they were not yet sweetened and softened by
the thought that they would someday be lacking, her sweetness and tenderness meant
so much to me that the joys of convalescence always saddened me to death: the day
was coming when I would be sound enough for my mother to leave, and until then, I
was no longer sick enough to keep her from reviving her severity, her unlenient justice.

One day, the uncles I stayed with at Les Oublis had failed to tell me that my mother
would be arriving; they had concealed the news because my second cousin had dropped
by to spend a few hours with me, and they had feared I might neglect him in my joyful
anguish of looking forward to my mother’s visit. That ruse may have been the first
of the circumstances that, independent of my will, were the accomplices of all the
dispositions for evil that I bore inside myself, like all children of my age, though
to no higher degree. That second cousin, who was fifteen (I was fourteen), was already
quite depraved, and he taught me things that instantly gave me thrills of remorse
and delight. Listening to him, letting his hands caress mine, I reveled in a joy that
was poisoned at its very source; soon I mustered the strength to get away from him
and I fled into the park with a wild need for my mother, who I knew was, alas, in
Paris, and against my will I kept calling to her along the garden trails.

All at once, while passing an arbor, I spotted her sitting on a bench, smiling and
holding out her arms to me. She lifted her veil to kiss me, I flung myself against
her cheeks and burst into
tears; I wept and wept, telling her all those ugly things that required the ignorance
of my age to be told, and that she knew how to listen to divinely, though failing
to grasp them and softening their significance with a goodness that eased the weight
on my conscience. This weight kept easing and easing; my crushed and humiliated soul
kept rising lighter and lighter, more and more powerful, overflowing—I was all soul.

A divine sweetness was emanating from my mother and from my recovered innocence. My
nostrils soon inhaled an equally fresh and equally pure fragrance. It came from a
lilac bush, on which a branch hidden by my mother’s parasol was already in blossom,
suffusing the air with an invisible perfume. High up in the trees the birds were singing
with all their might. Higher still, among the green tops, the sky was so profoundly
blue that it almost resembled the entrance to a heaven in which you could ascend forever.
I kissed my mother. Never have I recaptured the sweetness of that kiss. She left the
next day, and that departure was crueler than all the ones preceding it. Having once
sinned, I felt forsaken not only by joy but also by the necessary strength and support.

All these separations were preparing me, in spite of myself, for what the irrevocable
separation would be someday, even if, back then, I never seriously envisaged the possibility
of surviving my mother. I had resolved to kill myself within a minute after her death.
Later on, absence taught me far more bitter lessons: that you get accustomed to absence,
that the greatest abatement of the self, the most humiliating torment is to feel that
you are no longer tormented by absence. However, those lessons were to be contradicted
in the aftermath.

I now think back mainly to the small garden where I breakfasted with my mother amid
countless pansies. They had always seemed a bit sad, as grave as coats-of-arms, but
soft and velvety, often mauve, sometimes violet, almost black, with graceful and mysterious
yellow patterns, a few utterly white and of a frail innocence. I now pick them all
in my memory, those pansies; their sadness has increased because they have been understood,
their velvety sweetness has vanished forever.

How could all this fresh water of memories have spurted once again and flowed through
my impure soul of today without getting soiled? What virtue does this morning scent
of lilacs have that it can pass through so many foul vapors without mingling and weakening?
Alas!—my soul of fourteen reawakens not only inside me but, at the same time, far
away from me, outside me. I do know that it is no longer my soul and that it does
not depend on me to become my soul again. Yet back then it never occurred to me that
I would someday regret its loss. It was nothing but pure; I had to make it strong
and able to perform the highest tasks in the future. At Les Oublis, after my mother
and I, during the hot hours of the day, visited the pond with its flashes of sunlight
and sparkling fish, or strolled through the fields in the morning or the evening,
I confidently dreamed about that future, which was never beautiful enough for her
love or my desire to please her. And if not my willpower, then at least the forces
of my imagination and my emotion were stirred up inside me, tumultuously calling for
the destiny in which they would be realized, and repeatedly striking the wall of my
heart as if to open it and dash outside myself, into life.

If, then, I jumped with all my strength, if I kissed my mother a thousand times, running
far ahead like a young dog or indefinitely lagging behind to pick cornflowers and
red poppies, which I brought her, whooping loudly—if I did all those things, it was
less for the pleasure of strolling and gathering flowers than for the joy of pouring
out the happiness of feeling all this life within me about to gush forth, to spread
out infinitely, in more immense and more enchanting vistas than the far horizon of
the woods and the sky, a horizon that I yearned to reach in a single leap. Bouquets
of clover, of poppies, of cornflowers—if I carried you away with blazing eyes, with
quivering ecstasy, if you made me laugh and cry, it was because I entwined you with
all my hopes, which now,
like you, have dried, have decayed, and, without blossoming like you, have returned
to dust.

What distressed my mother was my lack of will. I always acted on the impulse of the
moment. So long as the impulse came from my mind or my heart, my life, though not
perfect, was not truly bad. My mother and I were preoccupied chiefly with the realization
of all my fine projects for work, calm, and reflection, because we felt—she more distinctly,
I confusedly but intensely—that this realization would only be an image projected
into my life, the image of the creation, by me and in me, of the willpower that she
had conceived and nurtured. However, I always kept putting it off until tomorrow.
I gave myself time, I occasionally grieved at watching time pass, but so much time
still lay before me! Yet I was a bit scared, and I obscurely felt that my habit of
doing without willpower was starting to weigh down on me more and more strongly as
the years accumulated; and I sadly suspected that there would be no sudden change,
and that I could scarcely count on an utterly effortless miracle to transform my life
and create my will. Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely
what I could not have without willpower: a will.

During my sixteenth year I suffered a crisis that left me sickly. To divert me, my
family had me debut in society. Young men got into the habit of calling on me. One
of them was perverse and wicked. His manners were both gentle and brash. He was the
one I fell in love with. My parents found out, but to keep me from suffering all too
much, they did not force his hand. Spending all my time thinking about him when I
did not see him, I finally
lowered myself by imitating him as much as was possible for me. He beguiled me almost
by surprise into doing wrong, then he got me accustomed to having bad thoughts which
I had no will to resist—willpower being the only force capable of driving them back
to the infernal darkness from which they emerged.

When love was gone, habit took its place, and there was no lack of immoral young men
to exploit it. As accessories to my sins, they also justified them to my conscience.
Initially I felt atrocious remorse; I made confessions that were not understood. My
friends talked me out of dwelling on the matter with my father. They gradually persuaded
me that all girls were doing the same and that parents were simply feigning ignorance.
As for the lies I was incessantly obliged to tell, my imagination soon embellished
them as silences that I had to maintain about an ineluctable necessity. At this time,
I no longer really lived; I still dreamed, still thought, still felt.

To divert and expel all those evil desires, I began socializing rather intensely.
The dessicating pleasure of high society accustomed me to living in perpetual company,
and, together with my taste for solitude, I lost the secret of the joys that I had
previously been given by nature and art. Never have I attended so many concerts as
during those years. Never have I felt music less profoundly, engrossed as I was in
my desire to be admired in an elegant box. I listened and I heard nothing. If I did
happen to hear something, I no longer saw everything that music can unveil. My outings
were likewise virtually stricken with sterility. The things that had once sufficed
to make me happy all day long—a bit of sunshine yellowing the grass, the fragrance
that wet leaves emit with the final drops of rain—all these things had, like myself,
lost their sweetness and gaiety. Woods, skies, water seemed to turn away from me,
and if, alone with them and face to face, I questioned them uneasily; they no longer
murmured those vague responses that had once delighted me. The divine guests announced
by the voices of water, foliage, and sky deign to visit only those hearts that are
purified by living in themselves.

Because I was seeking an inverse remedy and because I did not have the courage to
want the real remedy, which was so close and, alas, so far from me, inside me, I again
yielded to sinful pleasures, believing that I could thereby rekindle the flame that
had been extinguished by society. My efforts were useless. Held back by the pleasure
of pleasing, I kept putting off, from day to day, the final decision, the choice,
the truly free act, the option for solitude. I did not renounce either of those two
vices in favor of the other. I combined them. What am I saying? Intent on smashing
through all the barriers of thinking and feeling that would have stopped the next
vice, each vice also appeared to summon it. I would go into society to calm down after
committing a sin, and I sinned again the instant I was calm.

It was at that terrible moment, after my loss of innocence and before my remorse of
today, at that moment, when I was less worthy than at any other moment of my life,
that I was most appreciated by everybody. I had been shrugged off as a silly, pretentious
girl; now, on the contrary, the ashes of my imagination were fancied by society, which
reveled in them.

While I kept committing the worst crime against my mother, people viewed me as a model
daughter because of my tender and respectful conduct with her. After the suicide of
my thoughts, they admired my intelligence; they doted on my mind. My parched imagination,
my dried-up sensitivity were enough for the people who were the thirstiest for an
intellectual life—their thirst being as artificial and mendacious as the source from
which they believed they were quenching it! Yet no one suspected the secret crime
of my life, and everyone regarded me as an ideal girl. How many parents told my mother
that if I had had a lesser standing, and if they could have dared to consider me,
they would have desired no other wife for their sons! Nonetheless, in the depths of
my obliterated conscience, I felt desperately ashamed of those undeserved praises;
but my shame never reached the surface, and I had fallen so low that I was indecent
enough to repeat them to and laugh at them with the accomplices of my crimes.