In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (9 page)

I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as
not to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not
possess. But while I was uttering them I felt that they were already
superfluous, for from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its
chilling ardour, I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador
an expression of hesitation and dissatisfaction, and in his eyes that
vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body
in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look
which one addresses to the invisible audience whom one has within
oneself at the moment when one is saying something that one's other
audience, the person whom one has been addressing—myself, in this
instance—is not meant to hear. I realised in a flash that these
phrases which I had pronounced, which, feeble as they were when
measured against the flood of gratitude that was coursing through me,
had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois and to confirm his
decision upon an intervention which would have given him so little
trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those that could
have been chosen, with diabolical malice, by persons anxious to do me
harm) the only ones that could result in making him abandon his
intention. Indeed, when he heard me speak, just as at the moment when
a stranger with whom we have been exchanging—quite pleasantly—our
impressions, which we might suppose to be similar to his, of the
passers–by, whom we have agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals
suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding
carelessly, as he runs his hand over his pocket: "What a pity, I
haven't got my revolver here; I could have picked off the lot!" M. de
Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more easy than to be
commended to Mme. Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on
the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and were consequently,
no doubt, of great difficulty, thought that the desire, apparently
normal, which I had expressed must cloak some different thought, some
suspect intention, some pre–existent fault, on account of which, in
the certainty of displeasing Mme. Swann, no one hitherto had been
willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her
from me. And I understood that this office was one which he would
never discharge, that he might see Mme. Swann daily, for years to
come, without ever mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few
days later, for some information which I required, and charged my
father to convey it to me. But he had not thought it his duty to tell
her at whose instance he was inquiring. So she would never discover
that I knew M. de Norpois and that I hoped so greatly to be asked to
her house; and this was perhaps a less misfortune than I supposed. For
the second of these discoveries would probably not have added much to
the efficacy, in any event uncertain, of the first. In Odette the idea
of her own life and of her home awakened no mysterious disturbance; a
person who knew her, who came to see her, did not seem to her a
fabulous creature such as he seemed to me who would have flung a stone
through Swann's windows if I could have written upon it that I knew M.
de Norpois; I was convinced that such a message, even when transmitted
in so brutal a fashion, would have done far more to exalt me in the
eyes of the lady of the house than it would have prejudiced her
against me. But even if I had been capable of understanding that the
mission which M. de Norpois did not perform must have remained futile,
nay, more than that, might even have damaged my credit with the
Swanns, I should not have had the courage, had he shewn himself
consenting, to release the Ambassador from it, and to renounce the
pleasure—however fatal its consequences might prove—of feeling that
my name and my person were thus brought for a moment into Gilberte's
presence, in her unknown life and home.

After M. de Norpois had gone my father cast an eye over the evening
paper; I dreamed once more of Berma. The pleasure which I had found in
listening to her required to be made complete, all the more because it
had fallen far short of what I had promised myself; and so it at once
assimilated everything that was capable of giving it nourishment,
those merits, for instance, which M. de Norpois had admitted that
Berma possessed, and which my mind had absorbed at one draught, like a
dry lawn when water is poured on it. Then my father handed me the
newspaper, pointing me out a paragraph which ran more or less as
follows:—

The performance of
Phèdre
, given this afternoon before an enthusiastic
audience, which included the foremost representatives of society and
the arts, as well as the principal critics, was for Mme. Berma, who
played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as any that
she has known in the course of her phenomenal career. We shall discuss
more fully in a later issue this performance, which is indeed an event
in the history of the stage; for the present we need only add that the
best qualified judges are unanimous in the pronouncement that such an
interpretation sheds an entirely new light on the part of Phèdre,
which is one of the finest and most studied of Racine's creations, and
that it constitutes the purest and most exalted manifestation of
dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to
witness.

Immediately my mind had conceived this new idea of "the purest and
most exalted manifestation of dramatic art," it, the idea, sped to
join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, added to
it a little of what was lacking, and their combination formed
something so exalting that I cried out within myself: "What a great
artist!" It may doubtless be argued that I was not absolutely sincere.
But let us bear in mind, rather, the numberless writers who,
dissatisfied with the page which they have just written, if they read
some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of
some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, by humming to
themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven, the melancholy of
which they compare with what they have been trying to express in
prose, are so filled with that idea of genius that they add it to
their own productions, when they think of them once again, see them no
longer in the light in which at first they appeared, and, hazarding an
act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: "After
all!" without taking into account that, into the total which
determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the
memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to
their own, but of which, in cold fact, they are not the authors; let
us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a
mistress on the evidence only of her betrayals; all those, too, who
are sustained by the alternative hopes, either of an incomprehensible
survival of death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the
wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of
the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy; or else the hope of
complete extinction which comforts them when their thoughts turn to
the misdeeds that otherwise they must expiate after death; let us bear
in mind also the travellers who come home enraptured by the general
beauty of a tour of which, from day to day, they have felt nothing but
the tedious incidents; and let us then declare whether, in the
communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds,
there is a single one of those that make us most happy which has not
first sought, a very parasite, and won from an alien but neighbouring
idea the greater part of the strength that it originally lacked.

My mother appeared none too well pleased that my father no longer
thought of 'the career' for myself. I fancy that, anxious before all
things that a definite rule of life should discipline the eccentricity
of my nervous system, what she regretted was not so much seeing me
abandon diplomacy as the prospect of my devoting myself to literature.
But "Let him alone!" my father protested; "the main thing is that a
man should find pleasure in his work. He is no longer a child. He
knows pretty well now what he likes, it is not at all probable that he
will change, and he is quite capable of deciding for himself what will
make him happy in life." That evening, as I waited for the time to
arrive when, thanks to the freedom of choice which they allowed me, I
should or should not begin to be happy in life, my father's words
caused me great uneasiness. At all times his unexpected kindnesses
had, when they were manifested, prompted in me so keen a desire to
kiss, above where his beard began, his glowing cheeks, that if I did
not yield to that desire, it was simply because I was afraid of
annoying him. And on that day, as an author becomes alarmed when he
sees the fruits of his own meditation, which do not appear to him to
be of great value since he does not separate them from himself, oblige
a publisher to choose a kind of paper, to employ a fount of type
finer, perhaps, than they deserve, I asked myself whether my desire to
write was of sufficient importance to justify my father in dispensing
so much generosity. But apart from that, when he spoke of my
inclinations as no longer liable to change, he awakened in me two
terrible suspicions. The first was that (at a time when, every day, I
regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was
still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following
morning) my existence was already begun, and that, furthermore, what
was yet to follow would not differ to any extent from what had already
elapsed. The second suspicion, which was nothing more, really, than a
variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside
the realm of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like the people
in novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me in such depression
when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my
wicker sentry–box. In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but
in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads
seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in
one's life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged,
by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the
reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty
years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at
the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty,
painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an
almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the
past. In saying of me, "He is no longer a child," "His tastes will not
change now," and so forth, my father had suddenly made me apparent to
myself in my position in Time, and caused me the same kind of
depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but
one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference
which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: "He
very seldom comes up now from the country. He has finally decided to
end his days there."

Meanwhile my father, so as to forestall any criticism that we might
feel tempted to make of our guest, said to my mother: "Upon my word,
old Norpois was rather 'typical,' as you call it, this evening, wasn't
he? When he said that it would not have been 'seemly' to ask the Comte
de Paris a question, I was quite afraid you would burst out laughing."

"Not at all!" answered my mother. "I was delighted to see a man of his
standing, and age too, keep that sort of simplicity, which is really a
sign of straightforwardness and good–breeding."

"I should think so, indeed! That does not prevent his having a shrewd
and discerning mind; I know him well, I see him at the Commission,
remember, where he is very different from what he was here," exclaimed
my father, who was glad to see that Mamma appreciated M. de Norpois,
and anxious to persuade her that he was even superior to what she
supposed, because a cordial nature exaggerates a friend's qualities
with as much pleasure as a mischievous one finds in depreciating them.
"What was it that he said, again—'With Princes one never does
know.'…?"

"Yes, that was it. I noticed it at the time; it was very neat. You can
see that he has a vast experience of life."

"The astonishing thing is that he should have been dining with the
Swanns, and that he seems to have found quite respectable people
there, officials even. How on earth can Mme. Swann have managed to
catch them?"

"Did you notice the malicious way he said: 'It is a house which is
especially attractive to gentlemen!'?"

And each of them attempted to reproduce the manner in which M. de
Norpois had uttered these words, as they might have attempted to
capture some intonation of Bressant's voice or of Thiron's in
L'Aventurière
or in the
Gendre de M. Poirier
. But of all his
sayings there was none so keenly relished as one was by Françoise,
who, years afterwards, even, could not 'keep a straight face' if we
reminded her that she had been qualified by the Ambassador as 'a chef
of the first order,' a compliment which my mother had gone in person
to transmit to her, as a War Minister publishes the congratulations
addressed to him by a visiting Sovereign after the grand review. I, as
it happened, had preceded my mother to the kitchen. For I had
extorted from Françoise, who though opposed to war was cruel, that she
would cause no undue suffering to the rabbit which she had to kill,
and I had had no report yet of its death. Françoise assured me that it
had passed away as peacefully as could be desired, and very swiftly.
"I have never seen a beast like it; it died without uttering a word;
you would have thought it was dumb." Being but little versed in the
language of beasts I suggested that the rabbit had not, perhaps, a cry
like the chicken's. "Just wait till you see," said Françoise, filled
with contempt for my ignorance, "if rabbits don't cry every bit as
much as chickens. Why, they are far noisier." She received the
compliments of M. de Norpois with the proud simplicity, the joyful and
(if but for the moment) intelligent expression of an artist when
someone speaks to him of his art. My mother had sent her when she
first came to us to several of the big restaurants to see how the
cooking there was done. I had the same pleasure, that evening, in
hearing her dismiss the most famous of them as mere cookshops that I
had had long ago, when I learned with regard to theatrical artists
that the hierarchy of their merits did not at all correspond to that
of their reputations. "The Ambassador," my mother told her, "assured
me that he knows no place where he can get cold beef and
soufflés
as
good as yours." Françoise, with an air of modesty and of paying just
homage to the truth, agreed, but seemed not at all impressed by the
title 'Ambassador'; she said of M. de Norpois, with the friendliness
due to a man who had taken her for a chef: "He's a good old soul, like
me." She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he arrived, but
knowing that Mamma hated their standing about behind doors and in
windows, and thinking that Mamma would get to know from the other
servants or from the porter that she had been keeping watch (for
Françoise saw everywhere nothing but "jealousies" and "tale–bearings,"
which played the same grim and unending part in her imagination as do
for others of us the intrigues of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had
contented herself with a peep from the kitchen window, "so as not to
have words with Madame," and beneath the momentary aspect of M. de
Norpois had "thought it was Monsieur Legrand," because of what she
called his "agelity" and in spite of their having not a single point
in common. "Well," inquired my mother, "and how do you explain that
nobody else can make a jelly as well as you—when you choose?" "I
really couldn't say how that becomes about," replied Françoise, who had
established no very clear line of demarcation between the verb 'to
come,' in certain of its meanings at least, and the verb 'to become.'
She was speaking the truth, if not the whole truth, being scarcely
more capable—or desirous—of revealing the mystery which ensured the
superiority of her jellies or her creams than a leader of fashion the
secrets of her toilet or a great singer those of her song. Their
explanations tell us little; it was the same with the recipes
furnished by our cook. "They do it in too much of a hurry," she went on,
alluding to the great restaurants, "and then it's not all done
together. You want the beef to become like a sponge, then it will
drink up all the juice to the last drop. Still, there was one of those
Cafés where I thought they did know a little bit about cooking. I
don't say it was altogether my jelly, but it was very nicely done, and
the
soufflés
had plenty of cream." "Do you mean Henry's?" asked my
father (who had now joined us), for he greatly enjoyed that restaurant
in the Place Gaillon where he went regularly to club dinners. "Oh, dear
no!" said Françoise, with a mildness which cloaked her profound
contempt. "I meant a little restaurant. At that Henry's it's all very
good, sure enough, but it's not a restaurant, it's more like
a—soup–kitchen." "Weber's, then?" "Oh, no, sir, I meant a good
restaurant. Weber's, that's in the Rue Royale; that's not a
restaurant, it's a drinking–shop. I don't know that the food they give
you there is even served. I think they don't have any tablecloths;
they just shove it down in front of you like that, with a take it or
leave it." "Ciro's?" "Oh! there I should say they have the cooking done
by ladies of the world." ('World' meant for Françoise the under–world.)
"Lord! They need that to fetch the boys in." We could see that, with
all her air of simplicity, Françoise was for the celebrities of her
profession a more disastrous 'comrade' than the most jealous, the most
infatuated of actresses. We felt, all the same, that she had a proper
feeling for her art and a respect for tradition; for she went on: "No,
I mean a restaurant where they looked as if they kept a very good
little family table. It's a place of some consequence, too. Plenty of
custom there. Oh, they raked in the coppers there, all right."
Françoise, being an economist, reckoned in coppers, where your plunger
would reckon in gold. "Madame knows the place well enough, down there
to the right along the main boulevards, a little way back." The
restaurant of which she spoke with this blend of pride and
good–humoured tolerance was, it turned out, the Café Anglais.