The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (11 page)

(The bell rings; a servant goes to open the door.)

The Good Fairy: Remember to obey me and remember that the eternity of your love depends
on it.

(The clock ticks feverishly, the fragrances of the roses waft uneasily, and the tormented
orchids lean anxiously toward Honoré; one orchid looks wicked. Honoré’s inert pen
gazes at him, sad that it cannot move. The books do not interrupt their grave murmuring.
Everything tells Honoré: Obey the fairy and remember that the eternity of your love
depends on that. . . .)

Honoré (without hesitating): Of course I will obey, how can you doubt me?

(The beloved enters; the roses, the orchids, the maidenhair ferns, the pen and the
paper, the Dresden clock, and a breathless Honoré all quiver as if in harmony with
her.)

Honoré flings himself upon her lips, shouting: “I love you!

Epilogue: It was as if he had blown out the flame of his beloved’s desire. Pretending
to be shocked by the impropriety of his action, she fled, and if ever he saw her after
that, she would torture him with a severe and indifferent glance. . . .

The Fan

Madame, I have painted this fan for you.

May it, as you wish in your retirement, evoke the vain and enchanting figures that
peopled your salon, which was so rich with graceful life and is now closed forever.

The chandeliers, whose branches all bear large, pallid flowers, illuminate objets
d’art of all eras and all countries. I was thinking about the spirit of our time as
my brush led the curious gazes of those chandeliers across the diversity of your knick-knacks.
Like them the spirit of our time has contemplated samples of thought or life from
all centuries all over the world. It has inordinately widened the circle of its excursions.
Out of pleasure, out of boredom, it has varied them as we vary our strolls; and now,
deterred from finding not even the destination but just the right path, feeling its
strength dwindling and its courage deserting it, the spirit of our time has lain down
with its face on the earth to avoid seeing anything, like a brutish beast.

Nevertheless I have painted the rays of your chandeliers delicately; with amorous
melancholy these rays have caressed so many things and so many people, and now they
are snuffed forever. Despite the small format of this picture, you may recognize the
foreground figures, all of whom the impartial artist has highlighted identically,
just like your equal sympathies: great lords, beautiful women, and talented men. A
bold reconciliation in the eyes of the world, though inadequate and unjust according
to reason; yet it turned your society into a small universe that was less divided
and more harmonious than that other world, a small world that was full of life and
that we will never see again.

I therefore would not want my fan to be viewed by an indifferent person, who has never
frequented salons like yours and who would be astonished to see “politesse” unite
dukes without arrogance and novelists without pretentiousness. Nor might he, that
stranger, comprehend the vices of this rapprochement, which, if excessive, will soon
facilitate only one exchange: that of ridiculous things. He would, no doubt, find
a pessimistic realism in the spectacle of the bergère on the right, where a great
author, to all appearances a snob, is listening to a great lord, who, dipping into
a book, seems to be
holding forth about a poem, and whose expression, if I have managed to make it foolish
enough, shows quite well that he understands nothing.

Near the fireplace you will recognize C.

He is uncorking a scent bottle and explaining to the woman next to him that he has
concentrated the most pungent and most exotic perfumes in this blend.

B., despairing of outdoing him, and thinking that the surest way to be ahead of fashion
is to be hopelessly out of fashion, is sniffing some cheap violets and glaring scornfully
at C.

As for you yourself, have you not gone on one of those artificial returns to nature?
Had those details not been too minuscule to remain distinct, I would have depicted,
in some obscure nook of your music library at that time, your now abandoned Wagner
operas, your now discarded symphonies by Franck and d’Indy and, on your piano, several
open scores by Haydn, Handel, or Palestrina.

I did not shy away from depicting you on the pink sofa. T. is seated next to you.
He is describing his new bedroom, which he artfully smeared with tar in order to suggest
the sensations of an ocean voyage, and he is disclosing all the quintessences of his
wardrobe and his furnishings.

Your disdainful smile reveals that you set no store by this feeble imagination, for
which a bare chamber does not suffice for conjuring up all the visions of the universe
and which conceives of art and beauty in such pitifully material terms.

Your most delightful friends are present. Would they ever forgive me if you showed
them the fan? I cannot say. The most unusually beautiful woman, standing out like
a living Whistler before our enchanted eyes, would recognize and admire herself only
in a portrait by Bouguereau. Women incarnate beauty without understanding it.

Your friends may say: “We simply love a beauty that is not yours. Why should it be
beauty any less than yours?”

Let them at least allow me to say: “So few women comprehend their own aesthetics.
There are Botticelli madonnas who, but for fashion, would find this painter clumsy
and untalented.”

Please accept this fan with indulgence. If one of the ghosts that have alighted here
after flitting through my memory made you weep long ago, while it was still partaking
of life, then recognize that ghost without bitterness and remember that it is a mere
shadow and that it will never make you suffer again. I could quite innocently capture
these ghosts on the frail paper to which your hand will lend wings, for those ghosts
are too unreal and too flimsy to cause any harm. . . .

No more so, perhaps, than in the days when you invited them to stave off death for
a few hours and live the vain life of phantoms, in the factitious joy of your salon,
under the chandeliers, whose branches were covered with large, pallid flowers.

Olivian

Why do people see you, Olivian, heading to the Commedia every evening? Don’t your
friends have more acumen than Pantalone, Scaramuccio, or Pasquarello? And would it
not be more agreeable to have supper with your friends? But you could do even better.
If the theater is the refuge of the conversationalist whose friend is mute and whose
mistress is insipid, then conversation, even the most exquisite, is the pleasure of
men without imagination. It is a waste of time, Olivian, trying to tell you that which
need not be shown an intelligent man by candlelight, for he sees it while chatting.
The voice of the soul and of the imagination is the only voice that makes the soul
and the imagination resonate thoroughly and happily; and had you spent a bit of the
time you have killed to please others and had you made that bit come alive, had you
nourished it by reading and reflecting at your hearth during winter and in your park
during summer, you would be nurturing the rich memory of deeper and fuller hours.
Have the courage to take up the rake and the pickax. Someday you will delight in smelling
a sweet fragrance drifting up from your memory as if from a gardener’s brimming wheelbarrow.

Why do you travel so much? The stagecoaches transport you very slowly to where your
dreams would carry you so swiftly. To reach the seashore all you need do is close
your eyes. Let people who have only physical eyes move their entire households and
settle in Puzzuoli or Naples. You say you want to complete a book there? Where could
you work better than in the city? Inside its walls you can have the grandest sceneries
that you like roll by; here you will more easily avoid the Princess di Bergamo’s luncheons
than in Puzzuoli and you will be less tempted to go on idle strolls. Why, above all,
are you so bent on enjoying the present and weeping because you fail to do so? As
a man with imagination you can enjoy only in regret or in anticipation—that is, in
the past or in the future.

That is why, Olivian, you are dissatisfied with your mistress, your summer holidays,
and yourself. As for the cause of these ills, you may have already pinpointed it;
but then why relish them instead of trying to cure them? The fact is: you are truly
miserable, Olivian. You are not yet a man, and you are already a man of letters.

Characters in the Commedia of High Society

Just as Scaramuccio is always a braggart in the commedia dell’arte, Arlecchino always
a bumpkin, Pasquino’s conduct is sheer intrigue and Pantalone’s sheer avarice and
credulity, so too society has decreed that Guido is witty but perfidious and would
not hesitate to sacrifice a friend to a bon mot; that Girolamo hoards a treasure trove
of sensitivity behind a gruff frankness; that Castruccio, whose vices should be stigmatized,
is the most loyal of friends and the most thoughtful of sons; that Iago, despite the
ten fine books he has published, remains an amateur, whereas a few bad newspaper articles
have anointed Ercole a writer; that Cesare must have ties with the police as a reporter
or a spy. Cardenio is a snob, and Pippo is nothing but a fraud despite his protestations
of friendship. As for Fortunata, it
has been settled definitively: she is a good person. The rotundity of her embonpoint
is enough of a warranty for her benevolence: how could such a fat lady be a wicked
person?

Furthermore, each of these individuals, so different by nature from the definitive
character picked out for him by society from its storehouse of costumes and characters,
deviates from that character all the more as the
a priori
conception of his qualities creates a sort of impunity for him by opening a large
credit line for his opposite defects. His immutable persona as a loyal friend in general
allows Castruccio to betray each of his friends in particular. The friend alone suffers
for it: “What a scoundrel he must be if he was dropped by Castruccio, that loyal friend!”

Fortunata can disgorge torrents of backbiting. Who would be so demented as to look
for their source in the folds of her bodice, whose hazy amplitude can hide anything?
Girolamo can fearlessly practice flattery, to which his habitual frankness lends the
charm of surprise. His gruffness to a friend can be ferocious, for it is understood
that Girolamo is brutalizing him for his friend’s own good. If Cesare asks me about
my health, it is because he plans to report on it to the doge. He has not asked me:
how cleverly he hides his cards! Guido comes up to me; he compliments me on how fine
I look. “No one is as witty as Guido,” those present exclaim in chorus, “but he is
really too malicious!”

In their true character, Castruccio, Guido, Cardenio, Ercole, Pippo, Cesare, and Fortunata
may differ from the types that they irrevocably embody in the sagacious eyes of society;
but this divergence holds no danger for them, because society refuses to see it. Still,
it does not last forever. Whatever Girolamo may do, he is a benevolent curmudgeon.
Whatever Fortunata may say, she is a good person. The absurd, crushing, and immutable
persistence of their types, from which they can endlessly depart without disrupting
their serene entrenchment, eventually imposes itself, with an increasing gravitational
pull, on these unoriginal people with their incoherent conduct; and ultimately they
are fascinated by this sole identity, which remains inflexible amid all their universal
variations.