The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (22 page)

You have preserved the creases inflicted on you by her joyful or nervous hand; and
perhaps you still imprison the tears of grief induced by a book or by life; and the
daylight that brightened or wounded her eyes gave you that warm color. I touch you
all atremble, fearful of your revelations, worried by your silence. Alas! Perhaps,
like you, bewitching and fragile beings, she was the indifferent and unconscious witness
to her own grace. Her most genuine beauty may have been in my desire. She lived her
life, but I may have been the only one to dream it.

Moonlight Sonata

More than by the fatiguing trip, I was exhausted by my memory and by frightened thoughts
of my father’s demands, of Pia’s indifference, and of my enemies’ relentlessness.
During the day, my mind had been diverted by Assunta’s company, her singing, her gentleness
toward me, whom she barely knew, her white, brown, and rosy beauty, her fragrance
persisting in the blusters of the ocean wind, the feather in her hat, the pearls around
her neck. But toward nine at night, feeling overwhelmed, I asked her to take the carriage
back on her own and leave me to rest a
bit in the fresh air. We had almost reached Honfleur; the place was well chosen: it
was located against a wall, by the gateway to a double avenue lined with huge trees
that shielded against the wind, and the air was mild. Assunta agreed and left. I stretched
out on the grass, facing the gloomy sky; lulled by the murmuring sea, which I could
hear behind me but not discern in the darkness, I shortly dozed off.

Soon I dreamed that in front of me the sunset was illuminating the distant sand and
sea. Twilight was thickening, and it seemed to me that these were a sunset and a twilight
like any twilight and any sunset. Then I was handed a letter; I tried to read it,
but I was unable to make out anything. Only now did I realize it was very dark out
despite the impression of intense and diffuse light. This sunset was extraordinarily
pale, lustrous without brightness, and so much darkness gathered on the magically
illuminated sand that I had to make an arduous effort merely to recognize a seashell.
In this twilight, the kind special to dreams, the sun, ill and faded, appeared to
be setting on a polar beach.

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.

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.