The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (21 page)

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.