The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (24 page)

“Choose quickly,” said the stranger, pleading and haughty.

Dominique went to open the door, and at the same time he asked the stranger, without
daring to turn his head: “Just who are you?”

And the stranger, the stranger who was already disappearing, said: “Habit, to which
you are again sacrificing me tonight, will be stronger tomorrow thanks to the blood
of the wound that you’re inflicting on me in order to nourish that habit. And more
imperious for being obeyed yet again, habit will turn you away from me slightly more
each day and force you to increase my suffering. Soon you will have killed me. You
will never see me again. Yet you’ll have owed me more than you owe the others, who
will shortly abandon you. I am inside you and yet I am forever remote from you; I
almost no longer exist. I am your soul, I am yourself.”

The guests had entered. The company stepped into the dining room, and Dominique wanted
to describe his conversation with the visitor, who had disappeared; but given the
overall boredom and the obvious strain it put on the host to remember an almost faded
dream, Girolamo interrupted him—to the great satisfaction of everyone, including even
Dominique—and drew the following conclusion:

“One should never be alone; solitude breeds melancholy.”

Then they resumed drinking; Dominique chatted gaily but without joy, though flattered
by the dazzling company.

Dream

It takes no effort for me to recall what my opinion of Madame Dorothy B. was last
Saturday (three days ago). As luck would have it, people talked about her that day,
and I was forthright in saying that I found her to be devoid of charm and wit. I believe
she is twenty-two or twenty-three. Anyway, I barely know her, and whenever I thought
about her, no vivid memory ruffled my mind, so that all I had before my eyes was the
letters of her name.

On Saturday I went to bed quite early. But around two
A.M
., the wind blasted so hard that I had to get up and close a loose shutter that had
awakened me. I mused about the brief sleep I had enjoyed, and I was delighted that
it had been so refreshing, with no distress, no dreams. As soon as I lay back down,
I drifted off again. But after an indeterminable stretch of time, I started waking
up little by little—or rather, I was roused little by little into the world of dreams,
which at first was blurry, like the real world when we normally awaken, but then the
world of dreams cleared up. I was in Trouville, lying on the beach, which doubled
as a hammock in an unfamiliar garden, and a woman was gently studying me. It was Madame
Dorothy B. I was no more surprised than I am when waking up in the morning and recognizing
my bedroom. Nor was I astonished at my companion’s supernatural charm and at the ecstasy
of both sensual and spiritual adoration caused by her presence. We looked at each
other in a profound rapport, experiencing a great miracle of glory and happiness,
a miracle of which we were fully aware, to which she was a party, and for which I
was infinitely grateful to her.

But she said to me: “You’re crazy to thank me, wouldn’t you have done the same for
me?”

And the feeling (it was, incidentally, a perfect certainty) that I would have done
the same for her intensified my joy into delirium as the manifest symbol of the most
intimate union. She signaled mysteriously with her finger and smiled. And, as if I
had been both in her and in me, I knew that the signal meant: “Do all your enemies,
all your adversities, all your regrets, all your weaknesses matter anymore?”

And without my uttering a word, she heard me reply that she had easily vanquished
everything, destroyed everything, voluptuously cast a spell on my suffering. And she
approached me, caressed my neck, and slowly turned up the ends of my moustache. Then
she said to me: “Now let’s go to the others, let’s enter life.” I was filled with
superhuman joy and I felt strong enough to make all this virtual happiness come true.
She wanted to give me a flower and from between her breasts she
drew a yellow and pale-pink rosebud and slipped it into my buttonhole. Suddenly I
felt my intoxication swell with a new delight. The rose in my buttonhole had begun
exhaling its scent of love, which wafted up to my nostrils.

I saw that my joy was causing Dorothy an agitation that I could not understand. Her
eyes (I was certain of it because of my mysterious awareness of her specific individuality)—her
eyes shivered with the faint spasm that occurs a second before the moment of weeping,
and at that precise moment it was my eyes that filled with tears, her tears I might
say. She drew nearer, turning her face up to my cheek, and I could contemplate the
mysterious grace of her head, its captivating vivacity, and, with her tongue darting
out between her fresh, smiling lips, she gathered all my tears on the edges of her
eyes. Then she swallowed my tears with a light whisking of her lips, a noise that
I experienced as an unknown kiss, more intimately troubling than if it had touched
my lips directly.

I awoke with a start, recognized my room, and, the way lightning in a nearby storm
is promptly followed by thunder, a dizzying reminiscence of happiness fused with,
rather than preceded, the shattering certainty that this happiness was mendacious
and impossible. However, despite all my reasoning, Dorothy B. was no longer the woman
she had been for me only yesterday. The slight ripple left in my memory by our casual
contact was nearly effaced, as if by a powerful tide that leaves unknown vestiges
behind when it ebbs. I felt an immense desire, doomed in advance, to see her again;
I instinctively needed to write to her and was prudently wary of doing so. When her
name was mentioned in conversation, I trembled, yet it evoked the insignificant image
that would have accompanied her before that night, and while I was as indifferent
to her as to any commonplace socialite, she drew me more irresistibly than the most
cherished mistresses or the most intoxicating destiny. I would not have lifted a finger
to see her and yet I would have given my life for the other “her.”

Each hour blurs a bit more of my memory of that dream, which is already quite distorted
by this telling. I can make out
less and less of my dream; it is like a book that you want to continue reading at
your table when the declining day no longer provides enough light, when the night
falls. In order to see it a bit clearly, I am obliged to stop thinking about it for
a moment, the way you are obliged to squint in order to discern a few letters in the
shadowy book. Faded as my dream may be, it still leaves me in deep agitation, the
foam of its wake or the voluptuousness of its perfume. But my agitation will likewise
dissipate, and I will be perfectly calm when I run into Madame B. And besides, why
speak to her about things to which she is a stranger?

Alas! Love passed over me like that dream, with an equally mysterious power of transfiguration.
And so, you who know the woman I love, you who were not in my dream, you cannot understand
me; therefore do not try to give me advice.

Memory’s Genre Paintings

We have certain reminiscences that are like the Dutch paintings in our minds, genre
pictures in which the people, often of a modest station, are caught at a very simple
moment of their lives, with no special events, at times with no events whatsoever,
in a framework that is anything but grand and extraordinary. The charm lies in the
naturalness of the figures and the simplicity of the scene, whereby the gap between
picture and spectator is suffused with a soft light that bathes the scene in beauty.

My regimental life was full of these scenes, which I lived through naturally, with
no keen joy or great distress, and which I recall affectionately. I remember the rustic
settings, the naïveté of some of my peasant comrades, whose bodies remained more beautiful,
more agile, their minds more down-to-earth, their hearts more spontaneous, their characters
more natural than those of the young men with whom I associated before and after.
I also remember the calmness of a life in which activity is
regulated more and imagination controlled less than anywhere else, in which pleasure
accompanies us all the more constantly because we never have time to flee it by dashing
to find it. Today all those things unite, turning that phase of my life into a series
of small paintings—interrupted, it is true, by lapses, but filled with happy truth
and magic over which time has spread its sweet sadness and its poetry.

Ocean Wind in the Country

In the garden, in the grove, across the countryside, the wind devotes a wild and useless
ardor to dispersing the blasts of sunshine, furiously shaking the branches in the
copse, where those blasts first came crashing down, while the wind pursues them from
the copse all the way to the sparkling thicket, where they are now quivering, palpitating.
The trees, the drying linens, the peacock spreading its tail stand out in the transparent
air as blue shadows, extraordinarily sharp, and flying with all winds, but not leaving
the ground, like a poorly launched kite. Because of the jumble of wind and light,
this corner of Champagne resembles a coastal landscape. When we reach the top of this
path, which, burned by light and breathless with wind, rises in full sunshine toward
a naked sky, will we not see the ocean, white with sun and foam? You had come as on
every morning, with your hands full of flowers and with soft feathers dropped on the
path in mid-flight by a ring dove, a swallow, or a jay. The feathers on my hat are
trembling, the poppy in my buttonhole is losing its petals, let us hurry home.

The house groans in the wind like a ship; we hear the bellying of invisible sails,
the flapping of invisible flags outside. Keep that bunch of fresh roses on your lap
and let my heart weep in your clasping hands.

The Pearls