Read The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Online
Authors: Joachim Neugroschel
Thus their affection, for not being secret, was all the more mysterious. Anyone could
draw close to it as to those inscrutable and defenseless bracelets on the wrists of
a woman in love—bracelets on which unknown yet visible characters spell out the name
that makes her live or die, bracelets that incessantly offer the meaning of those
characters to curious and disappointed eyes that cannot grasp it.
“How much longer will I love her?” Honoré mused to himself as he rose from the table.
He remembered the brevity of all
the passions that, at their births, he had believed immortal, and the certainty that
this passion would eventually come to an end cast a gloom on his tender feelings.
Then he remembered what he had heard that very morning, at mass, when the priest had
been reading from the Gospel: “Jesus stretched forth his hand and told them: This
is my brother, and also my mother, and all my brethren.” Trembling, Honoré had, for
an instant, lifted up his entire soul to God, very high, like a palm tree, and he
had prayed: “Lord! Lord! Grant me Your grace and let me love her forever! Lord! This
is the only favor I ask of you. Lord, You can do it, make me love her forever!”
Now, in one of those utterly physical moments, when the soul takes a backseat to the
digesting stomach, the skin enjoying a recent ablution and some fine linen, the mouth
smoking, the eyes reveling in bare shoulders and bright lights, he repeated his prayer
more indolently, doubting a miracle that would upset the psychological law of his
fickleness, which was as impossible to flout as the physical laws of weight or death.
She saw his preoccupied gaze, stood up, and approached him without his noticing; and
since they were quite far from the others, she said in that drawling, whimpering tone,
that infantile tone which always made him laugh—she said as if he had just spoken:
“What?”
He laughed and said:
“Don’t say another word or I’ll kiss you—do you hear?—I’ll kiss you right in front
of everybody!”
First she laughed, then, resuming her dissatisfied pouting in order to amuse him,
she said:
“Yes, yes, that’s very good, you weren’t thinking of me at all!”
And he, seeing her laugh, replied: “How well you can lie!” And he gently added: “Naughty,
naughty!”
She left him and went to chat with the others. Honoré mused: “When I feel my heart
retreating from her, I will try to delay it so gently that she won’t even feel it.
I will always be just as tender, just as respectful. When a new love replaces my love
for her in my heart, I will conceal it from her as carefully as I now conceal the
occasional pleasures that my body, and it alone, savors without her.” (He glanced
at Princess Alériouvre.) And as for Françoise, he would gradually allow her to attach
her life elsewhere, with other bonds. He would not be jealous; he himself would designate
the men who appeared capable of offering her a more decent or more glorious homage.
The more he pictured Françoise as a different woman, whom he would not love, but all
of whose spiritual charms he would relish wisely, the more noble and effortless the
sharing seemed. Words of sweet and tolerant friendship, of lovely generosity in giving
the worthiest people our most precious possessions—those words flowed softly to his
relaxed lips.
At that instant, Françoise, noticing it was ten o’clock, said good night and left.
Honoré escorted her to her carriage, kissed her imprudently in the dark, and went
back inside.
Three hours later, Honoré was walking home, accompanied by Monsieur de Buivres, whose
return from Tonkin had been celebrated that evening. Honoré was questioning him about
Princess Alériouvre, who, widowed approximately at the same time, was far more beautiful
than Françoise. While not being in love with the princess, Honoré would have delighted
in possessing her if he could have been certain that Françoise would not find out
and be made unhappy.
“Nobody knows anything about her,” said Monsieur de Buivres, “or at least nobody knew
anything when I left Paris, for I haven’t seen anyone since my return.”
“So all in all there were no easy possibilities tonight,” Honoré concluded.
“No, not many,” Monsieur de Buivres replied, and since Honoré had reached his door,
the conversation was about to end there, when Monsieur de Buivres added:
“Except for Madame Seaune, to whom you must have been introduced, since you attended
the dinner. If you wanted to, it would be very easy. But as for me, I wouldn’t be
interested!”
“Why, I’ve never heard anyone say what you’ve just said,” Honoré rejoined.
“You’re young,” replied de Buivres. “Come to think of it, there was someone there
tonight who had quite a fling with her—there’s no denying it, I think. It’s that little
François de Gouvres. He says she’s quite hot-blooded! But it seems her body isn’t
all that great, and he didn’t want to continue. I bet she’s living it up somewhere
at this very moment. Have you noticed that she always leaves a social function early?”
“Well, but now that she’s a widow, she lives in the same house as her brother, and
she wouldn’t risk having the concierge reveal that Madame comes home in the middle
of the night.”
“Come on, old chum! There’s a lot you can do between ten
P.M
. and one
A.M
.! Oh well, who knows?! Anyhow it’s almost one o’clock, I’d better let you turn in.”
De Buivres rang the bell himself; a second later, the door opened; de Buivres shook
hands with Honoré, who said goodbye mechanically, entered, and simultaneously felt
a wild need to go back out; but the door had closed heavily behind him, and there
was no light aside from the candle waiting for him and burning impatiently at the
foot of the staircase. He did not dare awaken the concierge in order to reopen the
door for him, and so he went up to his apartment.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
—B
EAUMONT AND
F
LETCHER
Life had greatly changed for Honoré since the night when Monsieur de Buivres had made
certain comments (among so many others) similar to those that Honoré himself had so
often heard or stated with indifference, and which now rang in his ears during the
day, when he was alone, and all through the night. He had instantly questioned Françoise,
who loved him too deeply and suffered too deeply from his distress to so much as dream
of taking offense; she swore that she had never deceived him and that she would never
deceive him.
When he was near her, when he held her little hands, to which he softly recited:
You lovely little hands that will close my eyes,
when he heard her say, “My brother, my country, my beloved,” her voice lingering endlessly
in his heart with the sweetness of childhood bells, he believed her. And if he did
not feel as happy as before, at least it did not seem impossible that his convalescent
heart should someday find happiness. But when he was far away from Françoise, and
also at times when, being near her, he saw her eyes glowing with fires that he instantly
imagined as having been kindled at other times (who knows?—perhaps yesterday as they
would be tomorrow), kindled by someone else; when, after yielding to a purely physical
desire for another woman and recalling how often he had yielded and had managed to
lie to Françoise without ceasing to love her, he no longer found it absurd to assume
that she was lying to him, that, in order to lie to him it was not even necessary
to no longer love him—to assume that before knowing him she had thrown herself upon
others with the ardor that was burning him now—and it struck him as more terrible
that the ardor he inspired in her did not appear sweet, because he saw her with the
imagination, which magnifies all things.
Then he tried to tell her that he had deceived her; he tried not out of vengeance
or a need to make her suffer like him, but so that she would tell him the truth in
return, a need above all to stop feeling the lie dwelling inside him, to expiate the
misdeeds of his sensuality, since, for creating an object for his jealousy, it struck
him at times that it was his own lies and his own sensuality that he was projecting
onto Françoise.
It was on an evening, while strolling on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, that he tried
to tell her he had deceived her. He was appalled to see her turn pale, collapse feebly
on a bench, and, worse still, when he reached toward her, she pushed his
hand away, not angrily but gently, in sincere and desperate dejection. For two days
he believed he had lost her, or rather that he had found her again. But this sad,
glaring, and involuntary proof of her love for him did not suffice for Honoré. Even
had he achieved the impossible certainty that she had never belonged to anyone but
him, the unfamiliar agony his heart had experienced the evening Monsieur de Buivres
had walked him to his door—not a kindred agony or the memory of that agony, but that
agony itself—would not have faded, even if someone had demonstrated to him that his
agony was groundless. Similarly, upon awakening, we still tremble at the memory of
the killer whom we have already recognized as the illusion of a dream; and similarly,
an amputee feels pain all his life in the leg he no longer has.
He would walk all day, wear himself out on horseback, on a bicycle, in fencing—all
in vain; he would meet Françoise and escort her home—all in vain: in the evening he
would gather peace, confidence, a honey sweetness from her hands, her forehead, her
eyes, and then, calmed, and rich with the fragrant provision, he would go back to
his apartment—all in vain: no sooner had he arrived than he started to worry; he quickly
turned in so as to fall asleep before anything could spoil his happiness. Lying gingerly
in the full balm of this fresh and recent tenderness, which was barely one hour old,
his happiness was supposed to last all night, until the next morning, intact and glorious
like an Egyptian prince; but then de Buivres’s words, or one of the innumerable images
Honoré had formed since hearing those words, crept into his mind, and so much for
his sleep. This image had not yet appeared, but he felt it was there, about to surface;
and, steeling himself against it, he would relight the candle, read, and struggle
interminably to stuff the meanings of the sentences into his brain, leaving no empty
spaces, so that the ghastly image would not find an instant, would not find even the
tiniest nook to slip into.
But all at once, the image had stolen in, and now he could not make it leave; the
gates of his attention, which he had been holding shut with all his strength, to the
point of exhaustion, had been opened by surprise; the gates had then closed again,
and he would be spending the entire night with that horrible companion. So it was
sure, it was done with: this night like all the others, he would not catch a wink
of sleep. Fine, so he went to the bromide bottle, took three spoonfuls, and, certain
he would now sleep, terrified at the mere notion of doing anything but sleeping, come
what may, he began thinking about Françoise again, with dread, with despair, with
hate. Profiting from the secrecy of their affair, he wanted to make bets on her virtue
with other men, sic them upon her; he wanted to see if she would yield; he wanted
to try to discover something, know everything, hide in a bedroom (he remembered doing
that for fun when he was younger) and watch everything. He would not bat an eyelash
since he would have asked facetiously (otherwise, what a scandal! What anger!); but
above all on her account, to see if, when he asked her the next day, “You’ve never
cheated on me?” she would reply, “Never,” with that same loving air. She might perhaps
confess everything and actually would have succumbed only because of his tricks. And
so that would have been the salutary operation to cure his love of the illness that
was killing him, the way a parasitical disease kills a tree (to be certain he only
had to peer into the mirror, which was dimly lit by his nocturnal candle). But no,
for the image would keep recurring, so much more powerful than the images of his imagination
and with what forceful and incalculable blows to his poor head—he did not even dare
picture it.
Then, all at once, he would think about her, about her sweetness, her tenderness,
her purity, and he wanted to weep about the outrage that he had, for a moment, considered
inflicting on her. The very idea of suggesting that to his boon companions!
Soon he would feel the overall shudder, the feebleness one experiences several minutes
before sleep induced by bromide. Suddenly perceiving nothing, no dream, no sensation,
between his last thought and this one, he would say to himself: “What? I haven’t slept
yet?” But then seeing it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours he
had been possessed by bromidic sleep without savoring it.
He would wait for the stabbing pains in his head to weaken a bit; then he would rise
and, so that Françoise would not find him too ugly, he would try in vain to liven
up his worn-out eyes, restore some color to his haggard face by dousing it with cold
water and taking a walk. Leaving home, he went to church, and there, sagging and exhausted,
with all the final, desperate strength of his failing body, which wanted to be revitalized,
rejuvenated, his sick and aging heart, which wanted to be healed, his mind, which,
endlessly harassed and gasping, wanted peace, he prayed to God—God, whom, scarcely
two months ago, he had asked to grant Honoré the grace of letting him love Françoise
forever. He now prayed to God with the same force, always with the force of that love,
which had once, certain of its death, asked to live, and which now, too frightened
to live, begged for death; and Honoré implored God to grant him the grace of not loving
Françoise anymore, not loving her too much longer, not loving her forever, to enable
him to finally picture her in someone else’s arms without suffering, for now he could
not picture her except in someone else’s arms. And perhaps he would stop picturing
her like that if he could picture it without suffering.