In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (38 page)

At that hour the three young men in dinner-jackets could be observed waiting for the young woman, who was as usual late but presently, wearing a dress that was almost always different and one of a series of scarves chosen to gratify some special taste in her lover, after having rung for the lift from her landing, would emerge from it like a doll coming out of its box. And then all four, finding that the international phenomenon of the “de luxe” hotel, having taken root at Balbec, had blossomed there in material luxury rather than in food that was fit to eat, climbed into a carriage and went off to dine a mile away in a little restaurant of repute where they held endless discussions with the cook about the composition of the menu and the cooking of its various dishes. During their drive, the road bordered with apple-trees that led out of Balbec was no more to them than the distance that must be traversed—barely distinguishable in the darkness from that which separated their homes in Paris from the Café Anglais or the Tour d’Argent—before they arrived at the fashionable little restaurant where, while the rich young man’s friends envied him because he had such a smartly dressed mistress, the latter’s scarves hung before the little company a sort of fragrant, flowing veil, but one that kept it apart from the outer world.

Alas for my peace of mind, I had none of the detachment that all these people showed. To many of them I gave constant thought; I should have liked not to pass unobserved by a man with a receding forehead and eyes that dodged between the blinkers of his prejudices and his upbringing, the grandee of the district, who was none other than the brother-in-law of Legrandin. He came every now and then to see somebody at Balbec, and on Sundays, by reason of the weekly garden-party that his wife and he gave, robbed the hotel of a large number of its occupants, because one or two of them were invited to these entertainments and the others, so as not to appear not to have been invited, chose that day for an expedition to some distant spot. He had had, as it happened, an exceedingly bad reception at the hotel on the first day of the season, when the staff, freshly imported from the Riviera, did not yet know who or what he was. Not only was he not wearing white flannels, but, with old-fashioned French courtesy and in his ignorance of the ways of grand hotels, on coming into the hall in which there were ladies sitting, he had taken off his hat at the door, with the result that the manager had not so much as raised a finger to his own in acknowledgment, concluding that this must be someone of the most humble extraction, what he called “sprung from the ordinary.” The notary’s wife alone had felt attracted to the stranger, who exhaled all the starched vulgarity of the really respectable, and she had declared, with the unerring discernment and the indisputable authority of a person for whom the highest society of Le Mans held no secrets, that one could see at a glance that one was in the presence of a gentleman of great distinction, of perfect breeding, a striking contrast to the sort of people one usually saw at Balbec, whom she condemned as impossible to know so long as she did not know them. This favourable judgment which she had pronounced on Legrandin’s brother-in-law was based perhaps on the lacklustre appearance of a man about whom there was nothing to intimidate anyone; perhaps also she had recognised in this gentleman farmer with the look of a sacristan the Masonic signs of her own clericalism.

Even though I knew that the young men who went past the hotel every day on horseback were the sons of the shady proprietor of a fancy goods shop whom my father would never have dreamed of knowing, the glamour of “seaside life” exalted them in my eyes to equestrian statues of demi-gods, and the best thing that I could hope for was that they would never allow their proud gaze to fall upon the wretched boy who was myself, who left the hotel dining-room only to sit upon the sands. I should have been glad to arouse some response even from the adventurer who had been king of a desert island in the South Seas, even from the young consumptive, of whom I liked to think that he concealed beneath his insolent exterior a shy and tender heart, which might perhaps have lavished on me, and on me alone, the treasures of its affection. Besides (contrary to what is usually said about travelling acquaintances) since being seen in certain company can invest us, in a watering-place to which we shall return another year, with a coefficient that has no equivalent in real social life, there is nothing that, far from keeping resolutely at a distance, we cultivate with such assiduity after our return to Paris as the friendships that we have formed by the sea. I was concerned about the impression I might make on all these temporary or local celebrities whom my tendency to put myself in the place of other people and to re-create their state of mind made me place not in their true rank, that which they would have occupied in Paris for instance and which would have been quite low, but in that which they must imagine to be theirs and which indeed was theirs at Balbec, where the want of a common denominator gave them a sort of relative superiority and unwonted interest. Alas, none of these people’s contempt was so painful to me as that of M. de Stermaria.

For I had noticed his daughter the moment she came into the room, her pretty face, her pallid, almost bluish complexion, the distinctiveness in the carriage of her tall figure, in her gait, which suggested to me, with reason, her heredity, her aristocratic upbringing, all the more vividly because I knew her name—like those expressive themes invented by musicians of genius which paint in splendid colours the glow of fire, the rush of water, the peace of fields and woods, to audiences who, having glanced through the programme in advance, have their imaginations trained in the right direction. “Pedigree,” by adding to Mlle de Stermaria’s charms the idea of their origin, made them more intelligible, more complete. It made them more desirable also, advertising their inaccessibility as a high price enhances the value of a thing that has already taken our fancy. And its stock of heredity gave to her complexion, in which so many selected juices had been blended, the savour of an exotic fruit or of a famous vintage.

Now, chance had suddenly put into our hands, my grandmother’s and mine, the means of acquiring instantaneous prestige in the eyes of all the other occupants of the hotel. For on that first afternoon, at the moment when the old lady came downstairs from her room, producing, thanks to the footman who preceded her and the maid who came running after her with a book and a rug that she had forgotten, a marked effect upon all who beheld her and arousing in each of them a curiosity from which it was evident that none was so little immune as M. de Stermaria, the manager leaned across to my grandmother and out of kindness (as one might point out the Shah or Queen Ranavalo to an obscure onlooker who could obviously have no sort of connexion with such mighty potentates, but might all the same be interested to know that he had been standing within a few feet of one) whispered in her ear, “The Marquise de Villeparisis!” while at the same moment the old lady, catching sight of my grandmother, could not repress a start of pleased surprise.

It may be imagined that the sudden appearance, in the guise of a little old woman, of the most powerful of fairies would not have given me more pleasure, destitute as I was of any means of access to Mlle de Stermaria, in a strange place where I knew no one: no one, that is to say, for any practical purpose. Aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know, even without looking for them in the works of the old masters, like Swann. Thus it happened that in the first few days of our visit to Balbec I had succeeded in encountering Legrandin, Swann’s hall porter, and Mme Swann herself, transformed respectively into a waiter, a foreign visitor whom I never saw again, and a bathing superintendent. And a sort of magnetisation attracts and retains so inseparably, one beside another, certain characteristics of physiognomy and mentality, that when Nature thus introduces a person into a new body she does not mutilate him unduly. Legrandin turned waiter kept intact his stature, the outline of his nose, part of his chin; Mme Swann, in the masculine gender and the calling of a bathing superintendent, had been accompanied not only by her familiar features but even by certain mannerisms of speech. Only she could be of little if any more use to me, standing upon the beach there in the red sash of her office, and hoisting at the first gust of wind the flag which forbade us to bathe (for these superintendents are prudent men, seldom knowing how to swim), than she would have been in that fresco of the
Life of Moses
in which Swann had long ago identified her in the person of Jethro’s daughter. Whereas this Mme de Villeparisis was her real self; she had not been the victim of a magic spell which had robbed her of her power, but was capable, on the contrary, of putting at the disposal of mine a spell which would multiply it a hundredfold, and thanks to which, as though I had been swept through the air on the wings of a fabulous bird, I was about to cross in a few moments the infinitely wide social gulf which separated me—at least at Balbec—from Mlle de Stermaria.

Unfortunately, if there was one person who, more than anyone else, lived shut up in a world of her own, it was my grandmother. She would not even have despised me, she would simply not have understood what I meant, if she had known that I attached importance to the opinions, that I felt an interest in the persons, of people the very existence of whom she never noticed and of whom, when the time came to leave Balbec, she would not remember the names. I dared not confess to her that if these same people had seen her talking to Mme de Villeparisis, I should have been immensely gratified, because I felt that the Marquise enjoyed some prestige in the hotel and that her friendship would have given us status in the eyes of Mlle de Stermaria. Not that my grandmother’s friend represented to me, in any sense of the word, a member of the aristocracy: I was too accustomed to her name, which had been familiar to my ears before my mind had begun to consider it, when as a child I had heard it uttered in conversation at home; while her title added to it only a touch of quaintness, as some uncommon Christian name would have done, or as in the names of streets, among which we can see nothing more noble in the Rue Lord Byron, in the plebeian and even squalid Rue Rochechouart, or in the Rue de Gramont than in the Rue Léonce-Reynaud or the Rue Hippolyte-Lebas. Mme de Villeparisis no more made me think of a person who belonged to a special social world than did her cousin MacMahon, whom I did not clearly distinguish from M. Carnot, likewise President of the Republic, or from Raspail, whose photograph Françoise had bought with that of Pius IX. It was one of my grandmother’s principles that, when away from home, one should cease to have any social intercourse, that one did not go to the seaside to meet people, having plenty of time for that sort of thing in Paris, that they would make one waste in polite exchanges, in pointless conversation, the precious time which ought all to be spent in the open air, beside the waves; and finding it convenient to assume that this view was shared by everyone else, and that it authorised, between old friends whom chance brought face to face in the same hotel, the fiction of a mutual incognito, on hearing her friend’s name from the manager she merely looked the other way and pretended not to see Mme de Villeparisis, who, realising that my grandmother did not want to be recognised, likewise gazed into space. She went past, and I was left in my isolation like a shipwrecked mariner who has seen a vessel apparently approaching, which has then vanished under the horizon.

She, too, had her meals in the dining-room, but at the other end of it. She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel or who came there to call, not even M. de Cambremer; indeed, I noticed that he gave her no greeting one day when, with his wife, he had accepted an invitation to lunch with the president, who, intoxicated with the honour of having the nobleman at his table, avoided his habitual friends and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so as to draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly that his signal could not be interpreted as an invitation to join the party.

“Well, I hope you’ve done yourself proud, I hope you feel smart enough,” the judge’s wife said to him that evening.

“Smart? Why should I?” asked the president, concealing his rapture in an exaggerated astonishment. “Because of my guests, do you mean?” he went on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any longer. “But what is there smart about having a few friends to lunch? After all, they must feed somewhere!”

“Of course it’s smart! They were the de Cambremers, weren’t they? I recognised them at once. She’s a Marquise. And quite genuine, too. Not through the females.”

“Oh, she’s a very simple soul, she’s charming, no standoffishness about her. I thought you were coming to join us. I was making signals to you . . . I would have introduced you!” he asserted, tempering with a hint of irony the vast generosity of the offer, like Ahasuerus when he says to Esther: “Of all my Kingdom must I give you half?”

“No, no, no, no! We lie hidden, like the modest violet.”

“But you were quite wrong, I assure you,” replied the president emboldened now that the danger point was passed. “They weren’t going to eat you. I say, aren’t we going to have our little game of bezique?”

“Why, of course! We didn’t dare suggest it, now that you go about entertaining marquises.”

“Oh, get along with you; there’s nothing so very wonderful about them. Why, I’m dining there tomorrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I mean it. Honestly, I’d just as soon stay here.”

“No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a reactionary,” cried the senior judge, laughing till the tears came to his eyes at his own joke. “But you go to Féterne too, don’t you?” he went on, turning to the notary.

“Oh, I go there on Sundays—in one door and out the other. But they don’t come and have lunch with me as they do with the president.”

M. de Stermaria was not at Balbec that day, to the president’s great regret. But he managed to say a word in season to the head waiter: