The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (32 page)

She said mysteriously, with an infinite sweetness of gratitude: “You are generous.”
She then quickly murmured with an air of boredom, the way one disdains commonplace
details even while expressing them: “You know, despite everyone’s secrecy, it dawned
on me that you’ve all been anxiously trying to determine who fired the bullet, which
couldn’t be extracted and
which brought on my illness. I’ve always hoped that this bullet wouldn’t be discovered.
Fine, now that the doctor appears certain, and you might suspect innocent people,
I’ll make a clean breast of it. Indeed, I prefer to tell you the truth.” With the
tenderness she had shown when starting to speak about her imminent death, so that
her tone of voice might ease the pain that her words would cause, she added: “In one
of those moments of despair that are quite natural in any truly
living
person, it was I who . . . wounded myself.”

I wanted to go over and embrace her, but much as I tried to control myself, when I
reached her, my throat felt strangled by an irresistible force, my eyes filled with
tears, and I began sobbing. She, at first, dried my tears, laughed a bit, consoled
me gently as in the past with a thousand lovely words and gestures. But from deep
inside her an immense pity for herself and for me came welling up, spurting toward
her eyes—and flowed down in burning tears. We wept together. The accord of a sad and
vast harmony. Her pity and mine, blending into one, now had a larger object than ourselves,
and we wept about it, voluntarily, unrestrainedly. I tried to drink her poor tears
from her hands. But more tears kept streaming, and she let them benumb her. Her hand
froze through like the pale leaves that have fallen into the basins of fountains.
And never had we known so much grief and so much joy.

To M. Winter

Last year I spent some time in T., at the Grand Hôtel, which, standing at the far
end of the beach, faces the sea. Because of the rancid fumes coming from the kitchens
and from the waste water, the luxurious banality of the tapestries, which offered
the sole variation on the grayish nudity of the walls and complemented this
exile
decoration, I was almost morbidly depressed; then one day, with a gust that threatened
to become a tempest, I was walking along a corridor to my room, when I was stopped
short by a rare and delectable scent. I found it impossible to analyze, but it was
so richly and so complexly floral that someone must have denuded whole fields, Florentine
fields, I assumed, merely to produce a few drops of that fragrance. The sensual bliss
was so powerful that I lingered there for a very long time without moving on; beyond
the crack of a barely open door, which was the only one through which the perfume
could have wafted, I discovered a room that, despite my limited glimpse, hinted at
the presence of the most exquisite personality. How could a guest, at the very heart
of this nauseating hotel, have managed to sanctify such a pure chapel, perfect such
a refined boudoir, erect an isolated tower of ivory and fragrance? The sound of footsteps,
invisible from the hallway, and, moreover, an almost religious reverence prevented
me from nudging the
door any further. All at once, the furious wind tore open a poorly attached corridor
window, and a salty blast swept through in broad and rapid waves, diluting, without
drowning, the concentrated floral perfume. Never will I forget the fine persistence
of the original scent adding its tonality to the aroma of that vast wind. The draft
had closed the door, and so I went downstairs. But as my utterly annoying luck would
have it: when I inquired about the inhabitants of room 47 (for those chosen beings
had a number just like anyone else), all that the hotel director could provide were
obvious pseudonyms. Only once did I hear a grave and trembling, solemn and gentle
male voice calling “Violet,” and a supernaturally enchanting female voice answering
“Clarence.” Despite those two British names, they normally seemed, according to the
hotel domestics, to speak French—and without a foreign accent. Since they took their
meals in a private room, I was unable to see them. One single time, in vanishing lines
so spiritually expressive, so uniquely distinct that they remain for me one of the
loftiest revelations of beauty, I saw a tall woman disappearing, her face averted,
her shape elusive in a long brown and pink woolen coat. Several days later, while
ascending a staircase that was quite remote from the mysterious corridor, I smelled
a faint, delicious fragrance, definitely the same as the first time. I headed toward
that hallway and, upon reaching that door, I was numbed by the violence of fragrances,
which boomed like organs, growing measurably more intense by the minute. Through the
wide-open door the unfurnished room looked virtually disemboweled. Some twenty small,
broken phials lay on the parquet floor, which was soiled by wet stains. “They left
this morning,” said the domestic, who was wiping the floor, “and they smashed the
flagons so that nobody could use their perfumes, since they couldn’t fit them in their
trunks, which were crammed with all the stuff they bought here. What a mess!” I pounced
on a flagon that had a few final drops. Unbeknown to the mysterious travelers, those
drops still perfume my room.

In my humdrum life I was exalted one day by perfumes exhaled by a world that had been
so bland. They were the troubling
heralds of love. Suddenly love itself had come, with its roses and its flutes, sculpting,
papering, closing, perfuming everything around it. Love had blended with the most
immense breath of the thoughts themselves, the respiration that, without weakening
love, had made it infinite. But what did I know about love itself? Did I, in any way,
clarify its mystery, and did I know anything about it other than the fragrance of
its sadness and the smell of its fragrances? Then, love went away, and the perfumes,
from shattered flagons, were exhaled with a purer intensity. The scent of a weakened
drop still impregnates my life.

Madeleine de Gouvres had just arrived in Madame Lawrence’s box. General de Buivres
asked:

“Who are your escorts tonight? Avranches, Lepré? . . .”

“Avranches, yes,” replied Madame Lawrence. “As for Lepré, I didn’t dare.”

Nodding toward Madeleine, she added:

“She’s very hard to please, and since it would have practically meant a new acquaintanceship
for her . . .”

Madeleine protested. She had met Monsieur Lepré several times and found him charming;
once she had even had him over for lunch.

“In any case,” Madame Lawrence concluded, “you have nothing to regret, he is very
nice, but there is nothing remarkable about him, and certainly not for the most spoiled
woman in Paris. I can quite understand that the close friendships you have make you
hard to please.”

Lepré was very nice but very insignificant: that was the general view. Madeleine,
feeling that this was not entirely her opinion, was amazed; but then, since Lepré’s
absence did not cause her any keen disappointment, she did not like him enough to
be perturbed. In the auditorium, heads had turned in her direction; friends were already
coming to greet her and compliment her. This was nothing new, and yet, with the obscure
clear-sightedness of a jockey during a race or of an actor during a performance, she
felt that tonight she was triumphing more fully and more easily than usual. Wearing
no jewels, her yellow tulle bodice strewn with cattleyas, she had also pinned a few
cattleyas to her black hair, and these blossoms suspended garlands of pale light from
that dark turret. As fresh as her flowers and equally pensive, she evoked, with the
Polynesian charm of her coiffure, Mahenu in Pierre Loti’s play
The Island of Dreams
, for which Reynaldo Hahn had composed the music. Soon her regret that Lepré had not
seen her like this blended with the happy indifference with which she mirrored her
charms of this evening in the dazzled eyes that reflected them reliably and faithfully.

“How she loves flowers,” cried Madame Lawrence, gazing at her friend’s bodice.

She did love them, in the ordinary sense that she knew how beautiful they were and
how beautiful they made a woman. She loved their beauty, their gaiety, and their sadness,
too, but externally, as one of their ways of expressing their beauty. When they were
no longer fresh, she would discard them like a faded gown.

All at once, during the first intermission, several moments after General de Buivres
and the Duke and Duchess d’Alériouvres had said good night, leaving her alone with
Madame Lawrence, Madeleine spotted Lepré in the orchestra. She saw that he was having
the attendant open the box.

“Madame Lawrence,” said Madeleine, “would you permit me to invite Monsieur Lepré to
stay here since he is alone in the orchestra?”

“All the more gladly since I’m going to be obliged to leave in an instant, my dear;
you know you gave me permission.
Robert is a bit under the weather. Would you like me to ask Monsieur Lepré?”

“No, I’d rather do it myself.”

Throughout intermission, Madeleine let Lepré chat with Madame Lawrence. Leaning on
the balustrade and gazing into the auditorium, she pretended to ignore them, certain
that she would soon enjoy his presence all the more when she was alone with him.

Madame Lawrence went off to put on her coat.

“I would like to invite you to stay with me during the next act,” said Madeleine with
an indifferent amiability.

“That’s very kind of you, Madame, but I can’t; I am obliged to leave.”

“Why, I’ll be all alone,” said Madeleine in an urgent tone; then suddenly, wanting
almost unconsciously to apply the maxims of coquetry in the famous line from Carmen,
“If I don’t love you, you’ll love me,” she went on:

“Oh, you’re quite right, and if you have an appointment, don’t keep them waiting.
Good night, Monsieur.”

With a friendly smile she tried to compensate for what struck her as the implicit
harshness of her permission. However, that harshness was impelled by her violent desire
to keep him here, by the bitterness of her disappointment. Aimed at anyone else, her
advice to leave would have been pleasant.

Madame Lawrence came back.

“Well, he’s leaving; I’ll stay with you so you won’t be alone. Did you have a tender
farewell?”

“Farewell?”

“I believe that at the end of this week he’s starting his long tour of Italy, Greece,
and Asia Minor.”

A child who has been breathing since birth without ever noticing it does not know
how essential the unheeded air that gently swells his chest is to his life. Does he
happen to be suffocating in a convulsion, a bout of fever? Desperately straining his
entire being, he struggles almost for his life, for his lost tranquillity, which he
will regain only with the air from which he did not realize his tranquillity was inseparable.

Similarly, the instant Madeleine learned of Lepré’s departure, of which she had been
unaware, she understood only what had entered into his leaving as she felt everything
that was being torn away from her. And with a painful and gentle despondency, she
gazed at Madame Lawrence without resenting her any more than a poor, suffocating patient
resents his asthma while, through eyes filled with tears, he smiles at the people
who pity him but cannot help him. All at once Madeleine rose:

“Come, my dear, I don’t want you to get home late on my account.”

While slipping into her coat, she spotted Lepré, and in the anguish of letting him
leave without her seeing him again, she hurried down the stairs.

“I’m devastated—especially since Monsieur Lepré is going abroad—to think he could
assume he might offend me.”

“Why, he’s never said that,” replied Madame Lawrence.

“He must have: since you assume it, he must assume it as well.”

“Quite the contrary.”

“I tell you it’s true,” Madeleine rejoined harshly. And as they caught up with Lepré,
she said:

“Monsieur Lepré, I expect you for dinner on Thursday, at eight
P.M
.”

“I’m not free on Thursday, Madame.”

“Then how about Friday?”

“I’m not free on Friday either.”

“Saturday?”

“Saturday would be fine.”

“But darling, you’re forgetting that you’re to dine with Princess d’Avranches on Saturday.”

“Too bad, I’ll cancel.”

“Oh! Madame, I wouldn’t want that,” said Lepré.

“I want it,” cried Madeleine, beside herself. “I’m not going to Fanny’s no matter
what, I never had any intention of going.”

Once home again, Madeleine, slowly undressing, reviewed the events of the evening.
Upon reaching the moment when Lepré had refused to stay with her for the last act,
she turned
crimson with humiliation. The most elementary coquetry as well as the most stringent
dignity commanded her to show him an extreme coldness after that. Instead, that threefold
invitation on the stairway! Indignant, she raised her head proudly and appeared so
beautiful to herself in the depth of the mirror that she no longer doubted that he
would love her. Unsettled and disconsolate only because of his imminent departure,
she pictured his affection, which he—she did not know why—wanted to conceal from her.
He was going to confess it to her, perhaps in a letter, quite soon, and he would probably
put off his departure, he would sail with her. . . . What? . . . She must not think
about that. But she could see his handsome, loving face approaching her face, asking
her to forgive him. “You naughty boy!” she said. But then, perhaps he did not love
her as yet; he would leave without having time to fall in love with her. . . . Disconsolate,
she lowered her head, and her eyes fell upon her bodice, upon the even more languishing
eyes of the wilted blossoms, which seemed ready to weep under their withered eyelids.
The thought of the brevity of her unconscious dream about him, of the brevity of their
happiness if ever it materialized, was associated for her with the sadness of those
flowers, which, before dying, languished on the heart that they had felt beating with
her first love, her first humiliation, and her first sorrow.