In Search of Lost Time (53 page)

The Baron promised to go and pay the visit that Swann wanted after he had driven him to the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where Swann arrived soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening in the rue La Pérouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to everything that did not concern Odette, and in particular to the accoutrements of fashionable life, which gave them the charm that is to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire, appears to us as itself alone. As soon as he descended from the carriage, in the foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic life which hostesses like to offer their guests on ceremonial occasions and in which they seek to respect accuracy in costume and setting, Swann enjoyed the sight of the descendants of Balzac's ‘tigers',
⁸⁶
the grooms, who normally followed along on the daily outing, now hatted and booted and posted outside in front of the house on the soil of the avenue, or in front of the stables, like gardeners lined up at the entrances to their flower-beds. The particular tendency he had always had to look for analogies between living people and portraits in museums was still active but in a more constant and general way; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached from it, which
presented itself to him as a series of pictures. In the hall which in the old days, when he went out regularly into society, he would walk into wrapped in his overcoat and leave in his tails, but without knowing what had happened there, his mind having been, during the few moments he had stayed there, either still at the party he had just left, or already at the party he was about to be shown into, for the first time he noticed, woken by the unexpected arrival of the late guest, the scattered pack of tall, magnificent, idle footmen sleeping here and there on benches and chests who, raising their noble, sharp, greyhound profiles, stood up and gathered in a circle around him.

One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect and rather like the executioner in certain Renaissance paintings depicting torture scenes, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things. But the hardness of his steely look was compensated for by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that as he approached Swann he seemed to be showing contempt for his person and consideration for his hat. He took it with a care to which the exactness of his balance gave something meticulous, and with a delicacy which was rendered almost touching by the evidence of his strength. Then he passed it to one of his assistants, new and timid, who expressed the terror he felt by casting wild glances in all directions and displayed the agitation of a captive animal in the first hours of its domestication.

A few steps away, a sturdy fellow in livery mused motionless, statuesque, useless, like the purely decorative warrior one sees in the most tumultuous paintings by Mantegna,
⁸⁷
lost in thought, leaning on his shield, while others beside him rush forward and slaughter one another; detached from his group of companions as they pressed around Swann, he seemed as resolved to take no part in this scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel sea-green eyes, as if it were the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint John. He seemed in fact to belong to that race which has vanished – or which perhaps never existed except in the altarpiece of San Zeno and the frescoes of the Erimitani, where Swann had come in contact with it and where it dreams on still – and which issued from the impregnation of an ancient statue by one of the Master's Paduan models or some Albrecht Dürer Saxon.
⁸⁸
And the locks of his red hair, crimped by
nature but glued by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in the Greek sculpture which the painter from Mantua studied so constantly and which, if out of all creation it depicts only man, is at least able to derive from his simple forms richnesses so varied, as though borrowed from all of living nature, that a head of hair, in the smooth rolls and sharp beaks of its curls, or in the superimposition of the threefold flowering diadem of its tresses, looks at once like a bundle of seaweed, a nestful of doves, a band of hyacinths and a coil of snakes.

Still others, also colossal, stood on the steps of a monumental staircase to which their decorative presence and marmoreal immobility might have induced one to give the same name as the one in the Ducal Palace – ‘Staircase of the Giants' – and which Swann began to climb with the sad thought that Odette had never ascended it. Oh, with what joy by contrast would he have gone up the dark, evil-smelling and rickety flights to the little retired dressmaker's, in whose ‘fifth floor' he would have been so happy to pay more than the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opéra for the right to spend the evening when Odette came there, and even on the other days, so as to be able to talk about her, live among the people she was in the habit of seeing when he was not there and who because of that seemed to him to harbour something, of his mistress's life, that was more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious. Whereas in the old dressmaker's pestilential and longed-for staircase, since there was no second, service stair, one saw in the evening in front of each door an empty, dirty milk-can set out in readiness on the mat, on the magnificent and disdained staircase which Swann was mounting at that moment, on either side, at different levels, in front of each anfractuosity formed in the wall by the window of the lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the domestic service which they directed and paying homage to the guests on their behalf, a concierge, a majordomo, a steward (good people who lived the rest of the week somewhat independent in their domains, dined there at home like small shopkeepers and by tomorrow would perhaps be in the bourgeois service of a doctor or manufacturer), heedful not to fail to carry out the instructions they had been given before being allowed to put on the dazzling livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel very much at ease, stood under
the arcature of their portals with a stately glitter tempered by common good nature, like saints in their niches; and an enormous usher, dressed as though he were in church, struck the flagstones with his staff as each new arrival passed. Having reached the top of the staircase up the length of which he had been followed by a wan-faced servant with a little bunch of hair tied in a cadogan
⁸⁹
at the back of his head, like a Goya
⁹⁰
sexton or a scrivener in an old play, Swann passed in front of a desk where valets, seated like notaries in front of great registers, stood up and inscribed his name. He then crossed a little vestibule which – like certain rooms arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a single work of art, from which they take their name and, deliberately bare, contain nothing else – displayed at its entrance, like some precious effigy by Benvenuto Cellini
⁹¹
representing a watchman, a young footman, his body bent slightly forward, lifting from his red gorget a face even redder from which burst forth torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, and who, piercing with his impetuous, vigilant, distracted gaze the Aubusson tapestries hung before the drawing-room where people were listening to music, appeared, with a military impassiveness or a supernatural faith – an allegory of alarm, incarnation of alertness, commemoration of the call to arms – to be watching, angel or sentinel, from the tower of a castle or cathedral, for the appearance of the enemy or the hour of Judgment. Now Swann had only to enter the concert-room, the doors of which an usher loaded with chains was opening for him with a bow, as he would have handed over to him the keys to a city. But he thought of the house in which he might have been at that very moment, if Odette had permitted it, and the memory he glimpsed of an empty milk-can on a doormat wrung his heart.

Swann rapidly recovered his sense of how ugly men could be, when, beyond the tapestry hangings, the spectacle of the servants was followed by that of the guests. But even the ugliness of these faces, though he knew it so well, seemed new to him since their features – instead of being signs useable in a practical way for the identification of a certain person who had until then represented a cluster of pleasures to pursue, of worries to avoid, or of courtesies to pay – now rested, coordinated only by aesthetic relations, in the autonomy of their lines.
And in these men in the midst of whom Swann found himself hemmed in, even the monocles that many wore (and which, formerly, would at the very most have allowed Swann to say that they wore a monocle), having now been released from signifying a habit, the same for everyone, each appeared to him with a sort of individuality. Maybe because he did not regard Général de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréauté, who were talking to each other just inside the door, as more than two figures in a painting, whereas for a long time they had been useful friends who had introduced him to the Jockey Club and supported him in duels, the general's monocle, stuck between his eyelids like a shell-splinter in his vulgar, scarred, overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it blinded like the Cyclops' single eye, appeared to Swann like a monstrous wound that might have been glorious to receive, but that was indecent to show off; whereas the one that M. de Bréauté added, as a badge of festivity, to the pearl grey gloves, the opera hat, and the white tie, and substituted for the familiar lorgnette (as Swann himself did) for going out in society, bore, glued to its other side, like a natural history specimen under a microscope, an infinitesimal gaze teeming with friendliness that smiled constantly at the loftiness of the ceilings, the beauty of the preparations, the interest of the programmes and the quality of the refreshments.

– Well now, here you are! Why, it's been an eternity since we last saw you, said the Général to Swann and, noticing his drawn features and concluding from this that it was perhaps a grave illness that had kept him away from society, he added: ‘You look quite well, you know!' while M. de Bréauté asked: ‘My dear, what in the world are you doing here?' of a society novelist who had just settled into the corner of his eye a monocle which was his only organ of psychological investigation and pitiless analysis and answered with an air of mystery and self-importance, rolling the
r
:

– I am observing!

The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minuscule, had no border and, requiring a constant painful clenching of the eye, where it was incrusted like a superfluous cartlilage whose presence was inexplicable and whose material was exquisite, gave the Marquis's face a melancholy delicacy, and made women think he was capable of suffering greatly
in love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, surrounded by a gigantic ring, like Saturn, was the centre of gravity of a face which regulated itself at each moment in relation to it, a face whose quivering red nose and thick-lipped sarcastic mouth attempted by their grimaces to equal the unceasing salvoes of wit sparkling from the disk of glass, and saw itself preferred to the handsomest eyes in the world by snobbish and depraved young women in whom it inspired dreams of artifical charms and a refinement of voluptuousness; and meanwhile, behind his own, M. de Palancy, who, with his big, round-eyed carp's head, moved about slowly in the midst of the festivities unclenching his mandibles from moment to moment as though seeking to orient himself, merely seemed to be transporting with him an accidental and perhaps purely symbolic fragment of the glass of his aquarium, a part intended to represent the whole, reminding Swann, a great admirer of Giotto's
Vices
and
Virtues
at Padua, of Injustice, next to whom a leafy bough evokes the forests in which his lair is hidden.

Swann had walked on into the room, at the insistence of Mme de Saint-Euverte, and in order to hear a melody from
Orphée
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that was being performed by a flautist, had placed himself in a corner where unfortunately his only view was of two mature ladies seated next to each other, the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, spent all their time at parties, clutching their bags and followed by their daughters, looking for each other as though in a railway-station and did not rest easy until they had reserved, with a fan or a handkerchief, two seats side by side: Mme de Cambremer, since she had very few acquaintances, being all the happier to have a companion, Mme de Franquetot, who was in contrast extremely well connected, believing there was something elegant, something original, about showing all her fine friends that she preferred, to their company, an obscure lady with whom she shared memories of her youth. Full of a melancholy irony, Swann watched them as they listened to the piano intermezzo (‘Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds' by Liszt)
⁹³
which had come after the flute melody, and as they followed the vertiginous playing of the virtuoso, Mme de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes wild as if the keys over which he ran with such agility were a series of trapezes from which he might fall from a height
of eighty metres, and at the same time casting at her neighbour looks of astonishment, of denial which signified: ‘This is not to be believed, I would never have thought a man could do this,' Mme de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a strong musical education, marking time with her head transformed into the arm of a metronome of which the amplitude and rapidity of oscillations from one shoulder to the other had become such (with that sort of frenzy and abandon in the eyes characteristic of a kind of suffering which is no longer aware of itself nor tries to control itself and says ‘I can't help it!') that she kept snagging her solitaires in the straps of her bodice and was obliged to straighten the black grapes she had in her hair, though without ceasing to accelerate her motion. On the other side of Mme de Franquetot, but a little in front, was the Marquise de Gallardon, occupied with her favourite thought, the alliance which she had with the Guermantes and which in the eyes of the world and in her own was the source of a good deal of glory along with some shame, the most brilliant of them keeping her a bit at a distance, perhaps because she was tiresome, or because she was spiteful, or because she was from an inferior branch, or perhaps for no reason. When she found herself next to someone she did not know, as at this moment next to Mme de Franquetot, it would pain her that the awareness she had of her kinship with the Guermantes could not be manifested outwardly in visible characters like those which, in the mosaics of the Byzantine churches, placed one below another, inscribe in a vertical column, next to a holy personage, the words that he is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation or a visit from her young cousin the Princesse des Laumes, in the six years the Princesse had been married. This thought filled her with anger, but also with pride; for, by dint of saying to people who were surprised not to see her at the home of Mme des Laumes, that it was because she would have risked meeting Princesse Mathilde
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there – for which her ultra-Legitimist family would never have forgiven her – she had ended by believing this actually was the reason she did not go to her young cousin's house. Yet she recalled having asked Mme des Laumes several times how she could contrive to meet her, but recalled it only confusedly and also more than neutralized this slightly humiliating
memory by murmuring: ‘After all it's not up to me to make the first move, I'm twenty years older than she.' Empowered by the virtue of these interior words, she proudly threw back her shoulders, which seemed detached from her bust and on which her head was positioned almost horizontally so that one was reminded of the ‘restored' head of a proud pheasant that is brought to a table with all its feathers. It was not so much that she was not stocky, mannish and plump by nature; but the insults she had received had straightened her up like those trees which, born in a bad position at the brink of a precipice, are forced to grow backwards to keep their balance. Obliged, in order to console herself for not being altogether the equal of the other Guermantes, to keep telling herself that it was because of the intransigence of her principles and her pride that she did not see them very often, this thought had ended by shaping her body and by giving her an imposing sort of presence that passed in the eyes of bourgeois women for a sign of breeding and sometimes disturbed with a fleeting desire the weary glances of the clubmen. If Mme de Gallardon's conversation had been subjected to those analyses which, by recording the greater or lesser frequency of each word, permit one to discover the key to a language in code, one would have realized that no expression, even the most ordinary, recurred in it as often as ‘at the home of my cousins the Guermantes', ‘at the home of my Aunt de Guermantes', ‘the health of Elzéar de Guermantes', ‘my cousin de Guermantes's baignoire'.
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When anyone spoke to her about a famous personage, she would answer that without knowing him personally she had met him a thousand times at the home of her Aunt de Guermantes, but she would answer this in a tone so icy and in a voice so low that it was clear that, if she did not know him personally, it was by virtue of all the ineradicable and stubborn principles which her shoulders touched behind her, like those ladders on which gymnastics instructors make you stretch out in order to develop your chest.