In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (8 page)

"My son does not know him, but he admires his work immensely," my
mother explained.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed M. de Norpois, inspiring me with doubts
of my own intelligence far more serious than those that ordinarily
distracted me, when I saw that what I valued a thousand thousand times
more than myself, what I regarded as the most exalted thing in the
world, was for him at the very foot of the scale of admiration. "I do
not share your son's point of view. Bergotte is what I call a
flute–player: one must admit that he plays on it very agreeably,
although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all
is said, it is no more than that, and that is nothing very great.
Nowhere does one find in his enervated writings anything that could be
called construction. No action—or very little—but above all no
range. His books fail at the foundation, or rather they have no
foundation at all. At a time like the present, when the
ever–increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for
reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations, and
is on the eve, very probably, of undergoing others more drastic still,
when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side,
you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer
should be something else than a fine intellect which makes us forget,
amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that
we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians,
those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that
this is a blasphemy against the sacrosanct school of what these
gentlemen term 'Art for Art's sake,' but at this period of history
there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a
harmonious manner. Not that Bergotte's manner is not now and then
quite attractive. I have no fault to find with that, but taken as a
whole, it is all very precious, very thin, and has very little
virility. I can now understand more easily, when I bear in mind your
altogether excessive regard for Bergotte, the few lines that you
shewed me just now, which it would have been unfair to you not to
overlook, since you yourself told me, in all simplicity, that they
were merely a childish scribbling." (I had, indeed, said so, but I did
not think anything of the sort.) "For every sin there is forgiveness,
and especially for the sins of youth. After all, others as well as
yourself have such sins upon their conscience, and you are not the
only one who has believed himself to be a poet in his day. But one can
see in what you have shewn me the evil influence of Bergotte. You will
not, of course, be surprised when I say that there was in it none of
his good qualities, since he is a past–master in the art—incidentally
quite superficial—of handling a certain style of which, at your age,
you cannot have acquired even the rudiments. But already there is the
same fault, that paradox of stringing together fine–sounding words and
only afterwards troubling about what they mean. That is putting the
cart before the horse, even in Bergotte's books. All those Chinese
puzzles of form, all these deliquescent mandarin subtleties seem to me
to be quite futile. Given a few fireworks, let off prettily enough by
an author, and up goes the shout of genius. Works of genius are not so
common as all that! Bergotte cannot place to his credit—does not
carry in his baggage, if I may use the expression—a single novel that
is at all lofty in its conception, any of those books which one keeps
in a special corner of one's library. I do not discover one such in
the whole of his work. But that does not exclude the fact that, with
him, the work is infinitely superior to the author. Ah! there is a man
who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an
author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an
individual who corresponded less to his—more pretentious, more
pompous, less fitted for human society. Vulgar at some moments, at
others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like
a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not—such is your
Bergotte. He has the most confused mind, alembicated, what our
ancestors called a
diseur de phébus
, and he makes the things that he
says even more unpleasant by the manner in which he says them. I
forget for the moment whether it is Loménie or Sainte–Beuve who tells
us that Vigny repelled people by the same eccentricity. But Bergotte
has never given us a
Cinq–Mars
, or a
Cachet Rouge
, certain pages
of which are regular anthology pieces."

Paralysed by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the
fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same
time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an
essay or merely to devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious
once again of my intellectual nullity and that I was not born for a
literary life. Doubtless in the old days at Combray certain
impressions of a very humble order, or a few pages of Bergotte used to
plunge me into a state of musing which had appeared to me to be of
great value. But this state was what my poem in prose reflected; there
could be no doubt that M. de Norpois had at once grasped and had seen
through the fallacy of what I had discovered to be beautiful simply by
a mirage that must be entirely false since the Ambassador had not been
taken in by it. He had shewn me, on the other hand, what an infinitely
unimportant place was mine when I was judged from outside,
objectively, by the best–disposed and most intelligent of experts. I
felt myself to be struck speechless, overwhelmed; and my mind, like a
fluid which is without dimensions save those of the vessel that is
provided for it, just as it had been expanded a moment ago so as to
fill all the vast capacity of genius, contracted now, was entirely
contained in the straitened mediocrity in which M. de Norpois had of a
sudden enclosed and sealed it.

"Our first introduction—I speak of Bergotte and myself——" he
resumed, turning to my father, "was somewhat beset with thorns (which
is, after all, only another way of saying that it was not lacking in
points). Bergotte—some years ago, now—paid a visit to Vienna while
I was Ambassador there; he was presented to me by the Princess
Metternich, came and wrote his name, and expected to be asked to the
Embassy. Now, being in a foreign country as the Representative of
France, to which he has after all done some honour by his writings, to
a certain extent (let us say, to be quite accurate, to a very slight
extent), I was prepared to set aside the unfavourable opinion that I
hold of his private life. But he was not travelling alone, and he
actually let it be understood that he was not to be invited without
his companion. I trust that I am no more of a prude than most men,
and, being a bachelor, I was perhaps in a position to throw open the
doors of the Embassy a little wider than if I had been married and the
father of a family. Nevertheless, I must admit that there are depths
of degradation to which I should hesitate to descend, while these are
rendered more repulsive still by the tone, not moral, merely—let us
be quite frank and say moralising,—that Bergotte takes up in his
books, where one finds nothing but perpetual and, between ourselves,
somewhat wearisome analyses, torturing scruples, morbid remorse, and
all for the merest peccadilloes, the most trivial naughtinesses (as
one knows from one's own experience), while all the time he is shewing
such an utter lack of conscience and so much cynicism in his private
life. To cut a long story short, I evaded the responsibility, the
Princess returned to the charge, but without success. So that I do
not suppose that I appear exactly in the odour of sanctity to the
gentleman, and I am not sure how far he appreciated Swann's kindness
in inviting him and myself on the same evening. Unless of course it
was he who asked for the invitation. One can never tell, for really he
is not normal. Indeed that is his sole excuse."

"And was Mme. Swann's daughter at the dinner?" I asked M. de Norpois,
taking advantage, to put this question, of a moment in which, as we
all moved towards the drawing–room, I could more easily conceal my
emotion than would have been possible at table, where I was held fast
in the glare of the lamplight.

M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember; then:
"Yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, of course,
I remember now that she was introduced to me before dinner as the
daughter of our Amphitryon. I may tell you that I saw but little of
her; she retired to bed early. Or else she went out to see a friend—I
forget. But I can see that you are very intimate with the Swann
household."

"I play with Mlle. Swann in the Champs–Elysées, and she is
delightful."

"Oh! so that is it, is it? But I assure you, I thought her charming. I
must confess to you, however, that I do not believe that she will ever
be anything like her mother, if I may say as much without wounding you
in a vital spot."

"I prefer Mlle. Swann's face, but I admire her mother, too,
enormously; I go for walks in the Bois simply in the hope of seeing
her pass."

"Ah! But I must tell them that; they will be highly flattered."

While he was uttering these words, and for a few seconds after he had
uttered them, M. de Norpois was still in the same position as anyone
else who, hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his
family as respectable stockbrokers, of his house as a fine house,
imagined that I would speak just as readily of another man equally
intelligent, of other stockbrokers equally respectable, of another
house equally fine; it was the moment in which a sane man who is
talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that his companion is mad.
M. de Norpois knew that there was nothing unnatural in the pleasure
which one derived from looking at pretty women, that it was a social
convention, when anyone spoke to you of a pretty woman with any
fervour, to pretend to think that he was in love with her, and to
promise to further his designs. But in saying that he would speak of
me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like an Olympian
deity who has taken on the fluidity of a breath of wind, or rather the
aspect of the old greybeard whose form Minerva borrows, to penetrate,
myself, unseen, into Mme. Swann's drawing–room, to attract her
attention, to occupy her thoughts, to arouse her gratitude for my
admiration, to appear before her as the friend of an important person,
to seem to her worthy to be invited by her in the future and to enter
into the intimate life of her family), this important person who was
going to make use, in my interests, of the great influence which he
must have with Mme. Swann inspired in me suddenly an affection so
compelling that I had difficulty in restraining myself from kissing
his gentle hands, white and crumpled, which looked as though they had
been left lying too long in water. I even sketched in the air an
outline of that impulsive movement, but this I supposed that I alone
had observed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly
on what scale his words or his gestures are apparent to others. Partly
from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we
enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions
formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to
extend, we imagine that the accessories of our speech and attitudes
scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory
of those with whom we converse, It is, we may suppose, to a prompting
of this sort that criminals yield when they 'touch up' the wording of a
statement already made, thinking that the new variant cannot be
confronted with any existing version. But it is quite possible that,
even in what concerns the millennial existence of the human race, the
philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is
destined to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which
would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in
which the moralist of the "Paris column" says to us of an event, of a
work of art, all the more forcibly of a singer who has enjoyed her
'crowded hour': "Who will remember this in ten years' time?" overleaf
does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions speak often of a
fact, in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit,
which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is now known again in
its entirety? Is it not, perhaps, just the same in our brief life on
earth? And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois,
who was also calling there, had seemed to me the most solid support
that I could hope to find, because he was the friend of my father,
indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and besides, by his
profession and upbringing, trained to discretion, when, after the
Ambassador had gone, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long
ago when he had seen the moment in which I was just going to kiss his
hands, not only did I colour up to the roots of my hair but I was
stupefied to learn how different from all that I had believed were not
only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the
constituents of his memory: this tittle–tattle enlightened me as to
the incalculable proportions of absence and presence of mind, of
recollection and forgetfulness which go to form the human
intelligence; and I was as marvellously surprised as on the day on
which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero's books, that we
had an exact list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite to
his hunts, a thousand years before the Birth of Christ.

"Oh, sir," I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would
inform Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, "if you would
do that, if you would speak of me to Mme. Swann, my whole life would
not be long enough for me to prove my gratitude, and that life would
be all at your service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do
not know Mme. Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her."