The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (5 page)

Overpowered again by the pleasure that hovered around them in the fragrance of their
kisses and the memory of their caresses, the two of them pounced on each other, closing
their eyes, those cruel eyes that showed them the distress of their souls; they did
not want to see that distress, and he, especially, closed his eyes with all his strength,
like a remorseful executioner who senses that his arm would tremble the instant it
struck if, rather than imagine his victim provoking his rage and forcing him to satisfy
it, he could look him in the face and feel his pain for a moment.

The night had come, and she was still in his room, her eyes blank and tearless. Without
saying a word, she left, kissing his hand with passionate sadness.

He, however, could not sleep, and if he dozed off for a moment, he shuddered when
feeling upon himself the desperate and entreating eyes of the gentle victim. Suddenly
he pictured her as she must be now: sleepless, too, and feeling so alone. He dressed
and walked softly to her room, not daring to make a sound for fear of awakening her
if she slept, yet not daring to return to his room, where the sky and the earth and
his soul were suffocating him under their weight. He stayed there, at her threshold,
believing at every moment that he could not hold back for another instant and that
he was about to go in. But then he was terrified at the thought of disturbing her
sweet oblivion, the sweet and even breathing that he could perceive; he was terrified
at the thought of cruelly delivering her to remorse and despair instead of letting
her find a moment’s peace beyond
their clutches; he stayed there at the threshold, either sitting or kneeling or lying.
In the morning, Baldassare, chilled but calm, went back to his room, slept for a long
time, and woke up with a deep sense of well-being.

They strained their ingenuity to ease one another’s consciences; they grew accustomed
to remorse, which diminished, to pleasure, which also grew less intense; and when
he returned to Sylvania, he, like her, had only a pleasant and slightly cool memory
of those cruel and blazing minutes.

When Alexis, on his fourteenth birthday, went to see his uncle Baldassare, he did
not, although anticipating them, fall prey to the violent emotions of the previous
year. In developing his strength, the incessant rides on the horse his uncle had given
him had lulled the boy’s jangled nerves and aroused in him that constant spirit of
good health, a sensation accompanying youth as a dim inkling of the depth of its resources
and the power of its joyfulness. Under the breeze stirred up by his gallop, he felt
his chest swelling like a sail, his body burning like a winter fire, and his forehead
as cool as the fleeing foliage that wreathed him when he charged by; and then, upon
returning home, he tautened his body under cold water or relaxed it for long periods
of savory digestion; whereby all these experiences augmented his life forces, which,
after being the tumultuous pride of Baldassare, had abandoned him forever, to gladden
younger souls that they would someday desert in turn.

Nothing in Alexis could now falter because of his uncle’s feebleness, could die because
of his uncle’s imminent death. The joyful humming of the nephew’s blood in his veins
and of
his desires in his mind drowned out the sick man’s exhausted complaints. Alexis had
entered that ardent period in which the body labors so robustly at raising its palaces
between the flesh and the soul that the soul quickly seems to have vanished, until
the day when illness or sorrow has slowly undermined the barriers and transcended
the painful fissure, allowing the soul to reappear. Alexis was now accustomed to his
uncle’s fatal disease as we are to all things that last around us; and because he
had once made his nephew cry as the dead make us cry, the boy, even though his uncle
was still alive, treated him like a dead man: he had begun to forget him.

When his uncle said to him that day, “My little Alexis, I’m giving you the carriage
along with the second horse,” the boy grasped what his uncle was thinking: “Otherwise
you may never get the carriage”; and Alexis knew that it was an extremely sad thought.
But he did not feel it was sad, for he no longer had room for profound sadness.

Several days later, the boy, while reading, was struck by the description of a villain
who was unmoved by the most poignant affection of a dying man who adored him.

That night, the fear of being the villain, in whom he thought he saw his own portrait,
kept him from falling asleep. The next day, however, he had such a wonderful horseback
ride, worked so well, and felt, incidentally, so much affection for his living relatives
that he went back to enjoying himself without scruples and sleeping without remorse.

Meanwhile the Viscount of Sylvania, who could no longer walk, now seldom left his
castle. His friends and his family were with him all day, and he could own up to the
most blameworthy folly, the most absurd extravagance, state the most flagrant paradox,
or imply the most shocking fault without his kinsmen reproaching him or his friends
joking or disagreeing with him. It was as if they had tacitly absolved him of any
responsibility for his deeds and words. Above all they seemed to be trying to keep
him from hearing the last sounds, to muffle with sweetness, if not drown out with
tenderness, the final creakings of his body, from which life was ebbing.

He spent long and charming hours reclining and having a tête-à-tête with himself,
the only guest he had neglected to ask to supper in his lifetime. He tried to adorn
his suffering body, to lean in resignation on the windowsill, gazing at the sea, a
melancholy joy. With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long
time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this
world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from
him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful. His imagination already
sketched his farewell to Duchess Oliviane, his great platonic friend, whose salon
he had ruled even though it brought together all the grandest noblemen, the most glorious
artists, and the finest minds in Europe. He felt he could already read the account
of his final conversation with the duchess:

“. . . The sun was down, and the sea, glimpsed through the apple trees, was mauve.
As airy as pale, faded wreaths and as persistent as regrets, blue and rosy cloudlets
drifted along the horizon. A melancholy row of poplars sank into the shadows, their
resigned tops remaining in a churchly rose; the final rays, tinting the branches without
touching the trunks, attached garlands of light to these balustrades of darkness.
The breeze blended the three scents of ocean, wet leaves, and milk. Never had the
Sylvanian countryside softened the evening melancholy more voluptuously.

“ ‘I loved you very much, but I gave you so little, my poor friend,’ she said.

“ ‘What are you talking about, Oliviane? What do you mean you gave me so little? You
gave all the more the less I asked of you, and actually a lot more than if our senses
had played any part in our affection. I worshiped you and, as supernatural as a madonna
and as gentle as a wet nurse, you cradled me. I loved you with an affection whose
keen sagacity was never marred by any hope for carnal pleasure. What an incomparable
friendship you gave me in exchange, what an exquisite tea, a conversation that was
adorned in a natural way, and how many bunches of fresh roses! You alone, with your
maternal and expressive hands, knew how to cool my feverish forehead, drip honey between
my parched lips, and place noble images in my life.

“ ‘My dear friend, give me your hands and let me kiss them.’ ”

With all his senses and all his heart he still loved Pia, the little Syracusian princess,
who was smitten with a furious and invincible love for Castruccio, and it was her
indifference to Baldassare that occasionally reminded him of a crueler reality which,
however, he struggled to forget. Until the last few days, he had attended some festivities,
where, sauntering with her on his arm, he thought he could humiliate his rival; but
even when strolling at her side, the viscount sensed that her deep eyes were distracted
by another love, which she tried to conceal only out of pity for the sick man. And
now even that was beyond him. The movements of his legs had become so unhinged that
he could no longer go out. However, she came by frequently and, as if joining the
others in their vast conspiracy of gentleness, she spoke to him incessantly with an
ingenious tenderness that was never again belied, as it had been in the past, by the
cry of her indifference or the avowal of her anger. And from her more than from anyone
else, he felt the appeasement created by that gentleness spreading over him and delighting
him.

But then one day, as Baldassare was rising from his chair to go to the dining table,
his astonished domestic saw him walking much better. He sent for the physician, who
put off his diagnosis. The next day Baldassare walked normally. A week later, he was
allowed to go out. His friends and his relatives felt an immense hope. The doctor
believed that a simple and curable nervous disease might have at first shown the symptoms
of general paralysis, which were now indeed starting to disappear. He presented his
speculations to Baldassare as a certainty:

“You are saved!”

The condemned man expressed a deep-felt joy upon learning of his reprieve. But after
an interval of great improvement, a sharp anxiety began to pierce his joy, which
had already been weakened by the brief habituation. He was sheltered from the inclemencies
of life in that propitious atmosphere of encompassing gentleness, of forced rest and
free meditation, and the desire for death began obscurely germinating inside him.
He was far from suspecting it, and he felt only a dim anxiety at the thought of starting
all over, enduring the blows to which he was no longer accustomed, and losing the
affection that surrounded him. He also confusedly felt that it was wrong to seek forgetfulness
in pleasure or action now that he had gotten to know himself, the brotherly stranger
who, while watching the boats plowing the sea, had conversed with him for hours on
end, so far and so near: in himself. As if now feeling the awakening of a new and
unfamiliar love of native soil, like a young man who is ignorant of the location of
his original homeland, he yearned for death, whereas he had initially felt he was
going into eternal exile.

He voiced an idea, and Jean Galeas, who knew that Baldassare was cured, disagreed
violently and poked fun at him. His sister-in-law, who had been visiting him every
morning and every evening for two months, had not shown up in two days. This was too
much! He had long since grown unused to the burden of life and he did not want to
shoulder it again. For life had not recaptured him with its charms. His strength was
restored and, with it, all his desires to live; he went out, began living again, and
died a second time for himself. At the end of a month the symptoms of general paralysis
recurred. Little by little, as in the past, walking became difficult, impossible,
gradually enough for him to adjust to his return to death and to have time to look
the other way. His relapse did not even have the quality of the first attack, at the
end of which he had started to withdraw from life, not in order to see it in its reality
but to view it like a painting. Now, on the contrary, he grew more and more egotistical,
irascible, desperately missing the pleasures he could no longer enjoy.

His sister-in-law, whom he loved tenderly, was the only person to sweeten his approaching
end, for she came by several times a day with Alexis.

One afternoon, when she was en route to see the viscount, and her carriage had almost
arrived, the horses bolted; she was violently flung to the ground, then trampled by
a horseman who was galloping past; unconscious, with a fractured skull, she was carried
into Baldassare’s home.

The coachman, who was unscathed, promptly announced the accident to the viscount,
who turned livid. He clenched his teeth, his blazing eyes bulged out of their sockets,
and in a dreadful fit of anger he railed and ranted against the coachman, on and on;
but apparently his violent outburst was meant to smother a painful cry for help, which
could be softly heard during the pauses. It was as if an invalid were moaning next
to the furious viscount. Soon, these moans, initially faint, drowned out his shrieks
of rage, and the sobbing man collapsed into a chair.

Next he wanted to wash his face so that his sister-in-law would not be upset by the
traces of his grief. The domestic sadly shook his head; the injured woman had not
regained consciousness. The viscount spent two desperate days and nights at his sister-in-law’s
bedside. She might die at any moment. The second night, the doctor attempted a hazardous
operation. By the third morning her fever had abated, and the patient smiled at Baldassare,
who, unable to restrain his tears, wept and wept for joy. When death had inched toward
him bit by bit, he had refused to face it; now he suddenly found himself in its presence.
Death had terrified him by threatening his most prized possession; the viscount had
pleaded with death, had moved it to mercy.