The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (15 page)

She had a bit of solace only when among her domestics, who admired her immensely and,
feeling her misery, served her without venturing to speak. Their respectful and mournful
silence spoke to her about Monsieur de Laléande. She reveled in their silence and
had them serve lunch very slowly in order to delay the moment when her friends would
come, when she would have to stifle her emotions. She wanted to retain the bittersweet
taste of all the sadness surrounding her because of him. She would have wanted to
see more people dominated by him, to ease her pain by feeling that what occupied so
much of her heart was taking up a little space around her; she would have liked to
have energetic beasts wasting away with her affliction. For moments at a time she
desperately yearned to write to him, have someone else write to him, bring shame upon
herself, “nothing mattered to her.”

But precisely for the sake of her love, it was better to preserve her social standing,
which could someday give her greater authority over him, if that day ever came. And
if a brief intimate relationship with him broke the spell he had cast over her (she
did not want to, she could not, believe it, even imagine it for an instant; but her
more astute mind perceived that cruel fate through the blindness of her heart), she
would remain without any support in the world. And if some other love came her way,
she would lack the resources that she at least now possessed, the power that, at their
return to Paris, would make it so easy for her to have an intimate relationship with
Monsieur de Laléande.

Trying to step back from her own feelings and examine them like an object under investigation,
she told herself: “I know he’s mediocre and I’ve always thought so. That’s my opinion
of him; it hasn’t varied. My heart may be confused now, but it can’t change my mind.
It’s only a trifle, and this trifle is what I live for. I live for Jacques de Laléande!”

But then, having spoken his name, she could see him, this time through an involuntary
and unanalyzed association, and her bliss and her sorrow were so great that she felt
that his being a trifle was unimportant since he made her feel tortures and delights
compared with which all others were nothing. And while she figured that all this would
fade once she got to know him, she gave this mirage the full realities of her pain
and her joy.

A phrase she had heard from
Die Meistersinger
, at Princess d’A.’s soirée, had the power to evoke Monsieur de Laléande with utmost
precision: “
Dem Vogel, der heut sang, dem war der Schnabel hold gewachsen
” (The bird that sang today, its beak was sweet). She had unwittingly made that phrase
his actual leitmotif and, hearing it one day at a concert in Trouville, she had burst
into tears. From time to time, not so often as to make it pall, she would lock herself
in her bedroom, to which the piano had been moved, and she would play that phrase,
closing her eyes the better to see him; it was her only intoxicating joy, ending in
disillusion; it was the opium she could not do without.

Sometimes pausing and listening to the flow of her distress the way one leans over
to hear the sweet and incessant lament of a wellspring, she would muse about her atrocious
dilemma: one alternative being her future shame, which would lead to the despair of
her loved ones; the other alternative (if she did not give in) being her eternal sorrow;
and she would curse herself for having so expertly dosed her love with the pleasure
and the pain that she had not managed to reject immediately as an unbearable poison
or to recover from subsequently. First she cursed her eyes, or perhaps before them
her detestable curiosity and coquettishness, which had made her eyes blossom like
flowers in order to tempt this young man, and had then exposed her to his glances,
some of which were like arrows and more invincibly sweet than injections of morphine
would have been.

She also cursed her imagination; it had nurtured her love so tenderly that Françoise
sometimes wondered if her imagination alone had given birth to this love, which now
tyrannized and tortured its birth-giver.

She also cursed her ingenuity, which, for better and for worse, had so skillfully
devised so many intrigues for meeting him that their frustrating impossibility may
have attached her all the more strongly to the hero of those novels; she cursed her
goodness and the delicacy of her heart, which, if
she surrendered, would corrupt the joy of her guilty love with remorse and shame.
She cursed her will, which could rear so impetuously and leap over hurdles so dauntlessly
when her desires strove toward impossible goals—her will, so weak, so pliant, so broken
not only when she was forced to disobey her desires, but also when she was driven
by some other emotion. Lastly she cursed her mind in its godliest forms, the supreme
gift that she had received and to which people, without finding its true name, have
given all sorts of names—poet’s intuition, believer’s ecstasy, profound feelings of
nature and music—which had placed infinite summits and horizons before her love, had
let them bask in the supernatural light of her love’s enchantment, and had, in exchange,
lent her love a bit of its own enchantment, and which had won over to this love all
its most sublime and most private inner life, bonding and blending with it, consecrating
to it—as a church’s collection of relics and ornaments is dedicated to the Madonna—all
the most precious jewels of her heart and her mind, her heart, whose sighs she heard
in the evening or on the sea, and whose melancholy was now the sister of the pain
inflicted on her by his total absence: she cursed that inexpressible sense of the
mystery of things, which absorbs our minds in a radiance of beauty, the way the ocean
engulfs the setting sun—for deepening her love, dematerializing it, broadening it,
making it infinite without reducing its torture, “for” (as Baudelaire said when speaking
about late afternoons in autumn) “there are sensations whose vagueness does not exclude
intensity, and there is no sharper point than that of infinity.”

It was in Trouville that I just recently encountered Madame de Breyves, whom I have
known to be happier. Nothing can cure her. If she loved Monsieur de Laléande for his
good looks or his intelligence, one could seek to find a more intelligent or better-looking
young man to divert her attention. If it were his benevolence or his love for her
that attached her to him, someone else could try to love her more faithfully. But
Monsieur de Laléande is neither good-looking nor intelligent. He has had no chance
to show her whether he is tender or brutal, neglectful or faithful. It is truly he
whom she loves and not merits or charms that could be found to the same high degree
in others; it is truly he whom she loves despite his imperfections, despite his mediocrity;
she is thus doomed to love him despite everything.
He
—does she know what that is? Only that he induces such great thrills of despair and
rapture in her that all else in her life, all other things, do not count. The most
beautiful face, the most original intelligence would not have that particular and
mysterious essence, so unique that no human being will ever repeat it in the infinity
of worlds and the eternity of time.

Had it not been for Geneviève de Buivres, who innocently got her to attend the princess’s
soirée, none of this would have happened. But the chain of circumstances linked up,
imprisoning her, the victim of an illness that has no remedy because it has no reason.
Granted, Monsieur de Laléande, who at this very moment must be leading a mediocre
life and dreaming paltry dreams on the beach of Biarritz, would be quite amazed to
learn about his other life, the one in Madame de Breyves’s soul, an existence so miraculously
intense as to subjugate and annihilate everything else: an existence just as continuous
as his own life, expressed just as effectively in actions, distinguished purely by
a keener, richer, less intermittent awareness. How amazed Monsieur de Laléande would
be to learn that he, rarely sought after for his physical appearance, is instantly
evoked wherever Madame de Breyves happens to be, among the most gifted people, in
the most exclusive salons, in the most self-contained sceneries; and how amazed he
would be to learn that this very popular woman
has no thought, no affection, no attention for anything but the memory of this intruder,
who eclipses everything else as if he alone had the reality of a person, and all other
present persons were as empty as memories and shadows.

Whether Madame de Breyves strolls with a poet or lunches at the home of an archduchess,
whether she leaves Trouville for the mountains or the countryside, reads by herself
or chats with her most cherished friend, rides horseback or sleeps, Monsieur de Laléande’s
name, his image lie upon her, delightful, truculent, unyielding, like the sky overhead.
She, who always despised Biarritz, has now gone so far as to find a distressing and
bewildering charm in everything regarding this city. She is nervous about who is there,
who will perhaps see him but not know it, who will perhaps live with him but not enjoy
it. She feels no resentment for the latter, and without daring to give them messages,
she keeps endlessly interrogating them, astonished at times that people hear her talking
so much around her secret yet never surmise it. A large photograph of Biarritz is
one of the few decorations in her bedroom. She lends Monsieur de Laléande’s features
to one of the strollers whom one sees in that picture, albeit hazily. If she knew
the bad music he likes and plays, those scorned ballads would probably replace Beethoven’s
symphonies and Wagner’s operas on her piano and soon thereafter in her heart, both
because of the sentimental cheapening of her taste and because of the spell cast on
them by the man from whom all spells and sorrows come to her.

Now and then the image of the man she has seen only two or three times, and for moments
at that, the man who has such a tiny space in the exterior events of her life and
such an absorbing space in her mind and her heart, virtually monopolizing them altogether—his
image blurs before the weary eyes of her memory. She no longer sees him, no longer
recalls his features, his silhouette, barely remembers his eyes. Still, that image
is all she has of him. She goes mad at the thought that she might lose that image,
that her desire (which, granted, tortures her, but which is entirely herself now,
in
which she has taken refuge, fleeing everything she values, the way you value your
own preservation, your life, good or bad)—that her desire could vanish, leaving nothing
but a feeling of malaise, a suffering in dreams, of which she would no longer know
the cause, would no longer see it even in her mind or cherish it there. But then Monsieur
de Laléande’s image reappears after that momentary blurring of inner vision. Her grief
can resume and it is almost a joy.

How will Madame de Breyves endure going back to Paris, to which he will not return
before January? What will she do until then? What will she do, what will he do after
that?

I wanted to leave for Biarritz twenty times over and bring back Monsieur de Laléande.
The consequences might be terrible, but I do not have to examine them; she will not
stand for it. Nonetheless I am devastated to see those small temples throbbing from
within, beating strongly enough to be shattered by the interminable blows of this
inexplicable love. This love gives her life the rhythm of anxiety. Often she imagines
him coming to Trouville, approaching her, telling her he loves her. She sees him,
her eyes glow. He speaks to her in that toneless voice of dreams, a voice that prohibits
us from believing yet forces us to listen. It is he. He speaks to her in those words
that make us delirious even though we never hear them except in dreams when we see
the very shiny and poignant, the divine and trusting smile of two destinies uniting.

Thus she is awakened by the feeling that the two worlds of reality and her desire
are parallel, that it is as impossible for them to join together as it is for a body
and the shadow it casts. Then, remembering that minute in the cloakroom when his elbow
grazed her elbow, when he offered her his body, which she could now press against
her own if she had wished, if she had known, and which may remain forever remote from
her, she is skewered by cries of despair and revolt like those heard on sinking ships.
If, while strolling on the beach or in the woods, she allows a pleasure of contemplation
or reverie, or at least a fragrance, a singing wafted and muffled by the wind—if she
allows those things to take hold of her gently and
let her forget her sorrow for an instant, then she suddenly feels a great blow to
her heart, a painful wound; and, above the waves or the leaves, in the hazy skyline
of woods or sea, she perceives the nebulous face of her invisible and ever-present
conqueror, who, his eyes shining through the clouds as on the day when he offered
himself to her, flees with his quiver after shooting one more arrow at her.