In Search of Lost Time (18 page)

I was sometimes dragged away from my reading, in the middle of the afternoon, by the gardener's daughter, who would run like a lunatic, overturning an orange tree in its tub as she went by, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth and shouting, ‘They're coming, they're coming!' so that Françoise and I should run out too and not miss any of the show. This was on the days when the regiment passed through Combray on its way to garrison manoeuvres, generally going down the rue de Sainte-Hildegarde. While our servants, sitting in a row on chairs outside the railings, watched the people of Combray taking their Sunday walk and allowed themselves to be watched in turn, the gardener's daughter through a slit left between two distant houses in the avenue de la Gare had caught sight of the glitter of helmets. The servants had rushed to bring in their chairs, for when the cuirassiers paraded down the rue Sainte-Hildegarde, they filled its entire breadth, and the cantering horses grazed the houses, covering pavements submerged like banks that offer too narrow a bed to a torrent unleashed.

– Poor children, said Françoise, having barely reached the railings and already in tears; poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a meadow; the very thought of it gives me a shock, she added, putting her hand on her heart, where she had received that
shock
.

– A fine sight, isn't it, Madame Françoise, all these youngsters with no care for their lives? said the gardener to get a ‘rise' out of her.

He had not spoken in vain:

– No care for their lives? Well, now, what should we care for if we don't care for our lives, the only gift the dear Lord never gives us twice over? Alas, dear God! It's quite true, though, they don't care! I saw them in '70; in those wretched wars they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing more nor less than madmen; and then they're not worth the rope to hang them with; they're not men any more,
they're lions. (For Françoise, the comparison of a man to a lion, which she pronounced lie-on, was not at all complimentary.)

The rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see anything coming from far off, and it was through that slit between the two houses in the avenue de la Gare that we saw more and more new helmets flowing and shining in the sun. The gardener wanted to know if there were many more still to come, and he was thirsty, because the sun was beating down. So, all of a sudden, his daughter, leaping out as though from a place besieged, would sally forth, gain the corner of the street, and after braving death a hundred times, come back to us bringing, along with a carafe of licorice water, the news that there were at least a thousand of them coming without a break from the direction of Thiberzy and Méséglise. Françoise and the gardener, reconciled, would discuss what action should be taken in case of war.

– You see, Françoise, said the gardener, revolution would be better, because when they declare a revolution, it's only them that wants to that goes.

– Well now, at least I can understand that, it's more honest.

The gardener believed that when war was declared they would stop all the railway trains.

– Of course! So we doesn't run off, said Françoise.

And the gardener: ‘Oh, they're clever ones!' because he would not admit that war was not a kind of bad trick that the State tried to play on the people, and that if only they had the means to do it, there was not a single person who would not have run away from it.

But Françoise would hurry back to my aunt, I would return to my book, the servants would settle in front of the gate again to watch as the dust subsided along with the emotion roused by the soldiers. Long after calm had descended, an unaccustomed flow of people out walking would continue to darken the streets of Combray. And in front of each house, even those where it was not the custom, the servants or even the masters, sitting and watching, would festoon the sill with a border as dark and irregular as the border of sea-weed and shells whose crêpe and embroidery are left on the shore by a strong tide after it recedes.

Except on those days, however, I could usually read in peace. But
the interruption and the commentary that a visit of Swann's once produced as I was in the midst of reading a book by an author quite new to me, Bergotte, had the consequence that for a long time afterwards it was not against a wall adorned with spikes of violet flowers, but against a quite different background, before the portal of a Gothic cathedral, that the image now appeared of one of the women I dreamed of.

I had heard Bergotte mentioned for the first time by a friend of mine older than I whom I greatly admired, Bloch. When he heard me admit how much I admired ‘La Nuit d'Octobre',
¹²
he had exploded in laughter as noisy as a trumpet and said to me: ‘Beware this rather low fondness of yours for the Honourable de Musset. He's an extremely pernicious individual and a rather sinister brute. I must admit, however, that he and even our man Racine did, each of them, in the course of their lives, make one fairly rhythmical line of verse that also has in its favour what I believe to be the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing. They are: ‘
La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camyre
' and ‘
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé
.'
¹³
They were pointed out to me in defence of those two rogues in an article by my very dear master, old Leconte, acceptable to the Immortal Gods. Speaking of which, here's a book I don't have time to read right now which is recommended, it seems, by that colossal fellow. I've been told he considers the author, the Honourable Bergotte, to be a most subtle individual; and even though he may evince, at times, a goodness of heart rather hard to explain, for me his word is a Delphic Oracle. Do read these lyrical pieces of prose, therefore, and if the titanic rhymester who composed ‘Bhagavat' and ‘Le Lévrier de Magnus'
¹⁴
has spoken the truth, by Apollo, you will taste, dear master, the nectarine joys of Olympos.' It was in a sarcastic tone that he had asked me to call him ‘dear master' and that he called me the same. But in reality we took a certain pleasure in this game, since we were still close to the age when one believes one creates what one names.

Unfortunately, I was unable to talk to Bloch and ask him for an explanation in order to quiet the disturbance he had caused in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I expected nothing less than a revelation of the truth) were all the finer if they meant
nothing at all. For Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first he had been made quite welcome. It was true that my grandfather claimed that each time I formed a closer attachment to one of my friends than the others and brought him home, he was always a Jew, which would not have displeased him in principle – even his friend Swann was of Jewish extraction – had he not felt that it was not from among the best that I had chosen him. And so when I brought home a new friend, he very seldom failed to hum: ‘Oh God of our Fathers' from
La Juive
¹⁵
or ‘Israel, break thy bond',
¹⁶
singing only the tune, naturally (Ti la lam talam, talim), but I was afraid my friend would know it and restore the words.

Before he saw them, simply from hearing the name, which quite often had nothing particularly Jewish about it, he would guess not only the Jewish background of those of my friends who were in fact Jewish, but even whatever might be distressing about their family.

– And what is the name of this friend of yours who's coming this evening?

– Dumont, Grandfather.

– Dumont! Oh, now I'm suspicious!

And he would sing:

Archers, faites bonne garde!
Veillez sans trêve et sans bruit;
¹⁷

And after adroitly asking us a few more specific questions, he would cry out: ‘On guard! On guard!' or, if it was the victim himself, already there, whom he had forced, by a subtle interrogation, unwittingly to confess his origins, then, to show us he no longer had any doubts, he would simply gaze at us while barely perceptibly humming:

De ce timide Israélite
Quoi, vous guidez ici les pas!
¹⁸

or:

Champs paternels, Hébron, douce vallée.
¹⁹

or else:

Oui je suis de la race élue.
²⁰

These little idiosyncrasies of my grandfather's did not imply any feeling of ill-will towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for other reasons. He had begun by irritating my father, who, noticing that he was wet, had said to him with lively interest:

– Why, Monsieur Bloch, what's the weather like? Has it been raining? I don't understand this at all, the barometer couldn't have been better.

The only answer he had drawn from him had been this:

– Monsieur, I absolutely cannot tell you if it has been raining. I live so resolutely beyond physical contingencies that my senses do not bother to notify me of them.

– Why, my poor son, that friend of yours is an idiot, my father had said to me when Bloch had gone. My goodness! He can't even tell me what the weather's like! Why, nothing's more interesting than that! He's an imbecile.

Then Bloch had displeased my grandmother because after lunch, when she said she was feeling a little indisposed, he had stifled a sob and wiped away a few tears.

– How can you tell me he's sincere, she said to me. He doesn't know me; unless he's out of his mind, of course.

And finally he had annoyed everyone because, having come for lunch an hour-and-a-half late covered with mud, instead of apologizing, he had said:

– I never allow myself to be influenced either by atmospheric perturbations or by the conventional divisions of time. I would happily instate the use of the opium pipe and the Malay kris,
²¹
but I know nothing about the use of these infinitely more pernicious and also insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella.

He would have returned to Combray despite all this. He was not, of course, the friend my parents would have wanted for me; in the end they had believed that the tears he shed over my grandmother's indisposition were not feigned; but they knew, either instinctively or
from experience, that our impulsive emotions have little influence over the course of our actions or the conduct of our lives, and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to friends, the completion of a piece of work, obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in blind habits than in those momentary transports, ardent and sterile. They would have preferred for me, instead of Bloch, companions who would have given me no more than is suitable to give one's friends, according to the laws of bourgeois morality; who would not unexpectedly send me a basket of fruits because they had been thinking of me with affection that day, but who, being incapable of tipping in my favour the correct balance of the obligations and claims of friendship by a simple impulse of their imagination and sensibility, would also not tamper with it to my detriment. Even our offences will not easily divert from their duty towards us those natures of which the model was my great-aunt, who, estranged for years from a niece to whom she never spoke, did not for this reason change the will in which she left that niece her entire fortune, because she was her closest relative and it ‘was proper'.

But I liked Bloch, my parents wanted to make me happy, the insoluble problems I posed for myself concerning the meaningless beauty of the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaé tired me more and made me more ill than further conversations with him would have done, even though my mother felt they were harmful. And he would still have been received at Combray, if, after that dinner, having just informed me – news that later had a great deal of influence on my life and made it first happier, then less happy – that every woman thought only about love and that there was not one whose resistance could not be overcome, he had not assured me that he had heard most positively that my great-aunt had had a tempestuous youth and had been known as a kept woman. I could not stop myself from repeating these remarks to my parents, he was shown the door when he returned, and when I went up to him afterwards in the street, he was extremely cold to me.

But on the subject of Bergotte what he had said was true.

In the first few days, like a melody one will become infatuated with but that one cannot yet make out, what I was to love so much in his style was not apparent to me. I could not put down the novel I was
reading by him, but thought I was interested only in the subject, as in that first period of love when you go to meet a woman every day at some gathering, some entertainment, thinking you are drawn to it by its pleasures. Then I noticed the rare, almost archaic expressions he liked to use at certain moments, when a hidden wave of harmony, an inner prelude, would heighten his style; and it was also at these moments that he would speak of the ‘vain dream of life', the ‘inexhaustible torrent of beautiful appearances', the ‘sterile and delicious torment of understanding and loving', the ‘moving effigies that for ever ennoble the venerable and charming façades of our cathedrals', that he expressed an entire philosphy, new to me, through marvellous images which seemed themselves to have awakened this harp-song which then arose and to whose accompaniment they gave a sublime quality. One of these passages by Bergotte, the third or fourth that I had isolated from the rest, filled me with a joy that could not be compared to the joy I had discovered in the first one, a joy I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster, more unified region of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions seemed to have been removed. What had happened was that, recognizing the same preference for rare expressions, the same musical effusion, the same idealist philosophy that had already, the other times, without my realizing it, been the source of my pleasure, I no longer had the impression I was in the presence of a particular passage from a certain book by Bergotte, tracing on the surface of my mind a purely linear figure, but rather of the ‘ideal passage' by Bergotte, common to all his books, to which all the analogous passages that merged with it had added a sort of thickness, a sort of volume, by which my mind seemed enlarged.