The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (27 page)

The sea will always fascinate those people in whom the disgust with life and the enticement
of mystery have preceded their first distress, like a foreboding of reality’s inability
to satisfy them. People who need rest before so much as experiencing any fatigue will
be consoled and vaguely excited by the sea. Unlike the earth, the sea does not bear
the traces of human works and human life. Nothing remains on the sea, nothing passes
there except in flight, and how quickly the wake of a ship disappears! Hence the sea’s
great purity, which earthly things do not have. And this virginal water is far more
delicate than the hardened earth, which can be breached only by a pick. With a clear
sound a child’s footstep in water leaves a deep wake, and the united tinges of the
water are broken for a moment; then, every vestige is wiped away, and the sea is once
more calm as it was on the earliest days of the earth. The man who is weary of earthly
paths or who, before even trying them, can guess how harsh and vulgar they are will
be seduced by the pale lanes of the sea, which are more dangerous and more inviting,
more uncertain and more forlorn. Everything here is more mysterious, even those huge
shadows that sometimes float peacefully across the sea’s naked fields, devoid of houses
and shade, and that are stretched by the clouds, those celestial hamlets, those tenuous
boughs.

The sea has the magic of things that never fall silent at night, that permit our anxious
lives to sleep, promising us that everything will not be obliterated, comforting us
like the glow of a night-light that makes little children feel less alone. Unlike
the earth, the sea is not separated from the sky; it always harmonizes with the colors
of the sky and it is deeply stirred by its most delicate nuances. The sea radiates
under the sun and seems to die with it every evening. And when the sun has vanished,
the sea keeps longing for it, keeps preserving a bit of its luminous reminiscence
in the face of the uniformly somber earth. It is the moment of the sun’s melancholy
reflections, which are so gentle that you feel your heart melting at the very sight
of them. Once the night has almost fully thickened, and the sky is gloomy over the
blackened earth, the sea still glimmers feebly—who knows by what mystery, by what
brilliant relic of the day, a relic buried beneath the waves.

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life;
yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving,
a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The
sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of
things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of
the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them,
the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between
its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies
of all things.

September 1892

Seascape

In regard to words whose meanings I have lost: perhaps I should have them repeated
by all those things that have long since had a path leading into me, a path that has
been abandoned for years
but that could be taken anew, and that I am certain is not blocked forever. I would
have to return to Normandy, not make much of an effort, but simply head for the sea.
Or rather, I would stroll along one of the woodland paths from which, now and then,
one can catch glimpses of the sea, and where the breeze mingles the smells of salt,
wet leaves, and milk. I would ask nothing of all those things of infancy. They are
generous to the child they have known since birth; they would, on their own, reteach
him the forgotten things. Everything, and above all its fragrance, would announce
the sea, but I would not have seen it as yet. . . . I would hear it faintly. I would
walk along a once familiar hawthorn-lined path, feeling deeply moved and also fearing
that a sudden slash in the hedge might reveal my invisible yet present friend, the
madwoman who laments forever, the old, melancholy queen, the sea. All at once I would
see it; it would be on one of those somnolent days under a glaring sun, when the sea
reflects the sky, which is as blue as the water, but paler. White sails like butterflies
would be resting on the motionless surface, unwilling to budge as if fainting in the
heat. Or else, quite the opposite, the sea would be choppy and yellow under the sun,
like a vast field of mud, with huge swells that, from so far away, would appear inert
and crowned with dazzling snow.

Sails in the Harbor

In the harbor, long and narrow like a watery roadway between the just slightly elevated
wharves, where the evening lights shone, the passersby paused near the assembled ships
and stared as if at noble strangers who have arrived on the previous day and are now
ready to leave. Indifferent to the curiosity they excited in the crowd, apparently
disdaining its lowness or simply ignorant of its language, the ships maintained their
silent and motionless impetus at the watery inn where they had halted for a night.
The solidity of each stem spoke no less about the long voyages still to come than
its damage spoke about the distress
already suffered on these gliding lanes, which are as old as the world and as new
as the passage that plows them and that they do not survive. Fragile and resistant,
they were turned with sad haughtiness toward the Ocean, over which they loom and in
which they are virtually lost. The marvelous and skillful intricacies of the riggings
were mirrored in the water the way a precise and prescient intelligence lunges into
the uncertain destiny that sooner or later will shatter it. They had only recently
withdrawn from the terrible and beautiful life into which they would plunge back tomorrow,
and their sails were still limp after the bellying wind; their bowsprits veered across
the water as the ships had veered yesterday in their gliding, and from prow to poop,
the curving of their hulls seemed to preserve the mysterious and sinuous grace of
their furrowing wakes.

“My little tree, my little donkey, my mother, my brother, my country, my little God,
my little stranger, my little lotus, my little seashell, my darling, my little plant,
go away, let me get dressed, and I’ll join you on Rue de la Baume at eight
P.M
. Please do not arrive after eight-fifteen because I’m very hungry.”

She wanted to close her bedroom door on Honoré, but he then said, “Neck!” and she
promptly held out her neck with an exaggerated docility and eagerness that made him
burst out laughing:

“Even if you didn’t want to,” he said, “there would still be small special friendships
between your neck and my lips, between your ears and my moustache, between your hands
and my hands. I’m certain those friendships wouldn’t stop if we fell out of love.
After all, even though I’m not speaking to my cousin Paule, I can’t prevent my footman
from going and chatting with her chambermaid every evening. My lips move toward your
neck of their own accord and without my consent.”

They were now a step apart. Suddenly their gazes met and locked as they tried to rivet
the notion of their love in each other’s eyes. She stood like that for a second, then
collapsed on a chair, panting as if she had been running. And, pursing their lips
as if for a kiss, they said, almost simultaneously and with a grave exaltation:

“My love!”

Shaking her head, she repeated, in a sad and peevish tone:

“Yes, my love.”

She knew he could not resist that small movement of her head; he swept her up in his
arms, kissed her, and said slowly, “Naughty girl!” and so tenderly that her eyes moistened.

The clock struck seven-thirty. He left.

Returning home, Honoré kept repeating to himself: “My mother, my brother, my country”—he
halted. “Yes, my country. . . . My little seashell, my little tree”; and he could
not help laughing when saying those words, which he and she had so quickly gotten
accustomed to using—those little words that can seem empty and that he and she filled
with infinite meaning. Entrusting themselves, without thinking, to the inventive and
fruitful genius of their love, they had gradually been endowed, by this genius, with
their own private language, just as a nation is supplied with arms, games, and laws.

While dressing for dinner, he automatically kept his mind focused on the moment when
he would see her again, the way an acrobat already touches the still faraway trapeze
toward which he is flying, or the way a musical phrase seems to reach the chord that
will resolve it and that draws the phrase across the full distance between them, draws
it by the very force of the desire that heralds the force and summons it. That was
how Honoré had been dashing through life for a year now, hurrying from morning to
the afternoon hour when he would see her. And his days were actually composed not
of twelve or thirteen different hours, but of four or five half-hours, of his anticipation
and his memories of them.

Honoré had been in Princess Alériouvre’s home for several minutes when Madame Seaune
arrived. She greeted the mistress
of the house and the various guests and she seemed not so much to bid Honoré good
evening as to take his hand the way she might have done in the middle of a conversation.
Had their affair been common knowledge, one might have assumed that they had arrived
simultaneously and that she had waited at the door for several minutes to avoid entering
with him. But they could have spent two whole days apart (which had never once happened
during that year) and yet not have experienced the joyous surprise of finding each
other again—the surprise that is at the basis of every friendly greeting; for, unable
to spend five minutes without thinking about one another, they could never meet by
chance because they never separated.

During dinner, whenever they conversed with one another, they showed more vivacity
and gentleness than two friends, but a natural and majestic respect unknown among
lovers. They thus seemed like those gods who, according to fable, lived in disguise
among human beings, or like two angels whose fraternal closeness exalts their joy
but does not diminish the respect inspired by the common nobility of both their origin
and their mysterious blood. In experiencing the power of the roses and irises that
languidly reigned over the table, the air gradually became imbued with the fragrance
of the tenderness exhaled naturally by Honoré and Françoise. At certain moments, the
air seemed to embalm the room with a violence that was more delicious than its usual
sweetness, a violence that nature had refused to let the flowers moderate, any more
than it permits heliotropes to moderate their perfume in the sun or blossoming lilacs
their perfume in the rain.