The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (23 page)

Alas! What sentiment has brought it removes capriciously, and sadness, more sublime
than gaiety, is not as enduring as virtue. By this morning we have forgotten last
night’s tragedy, which elevated us so high that we could view our lives in their entirety
and their reality with sincere and clear-sighted compassion. Within a year perhaps
we will get over a woman’s betrayal, a friend’s death. Amid this wreckage of dreams,
this scattering of withered happiness, the wind has sown the good seed under a deluge
of tears, but they will dry too soon for the seed to germinate.

In Praise of Bad Music

Detest bad music but do not make light of it. Since it is played, or rather sung,
far more frequently, far more passionately than good music, it has gradually and far
more thoroughly absorbed human dreams and tears. That should make it venerable for
you. Its place, nonexistent in the history of art, is immense in the history of the
emotions of societies. Not only is the respect—I am not saying love—for bad music
a form of what might be called the charity of good taste, or its skepticism, it is
also the awareness of the important social role played by music. How many ditties,
though worthless in an artist’s eyes, are among the confidants chosen by the throng
of romantic and amorous adolescents. How many songs like “Gold Ring” or “Ah, slumber,
slumber long and deep,” whose pages are turned every evening by trembling and justly
famous hands, are soaked with tears from the most beautiful eyes in the world: and
the purest maestro would envy this melancholy and voluptuous homage of tears, the
ingenious and inspired confidants that ennoble sorrow, exalt dreams, and, in exchange
for the ardent secret that is confided in them, supply the intoxicating illusion of
beauty.

Since the common folk, the middle class, the army, the aristocracy have the same mailmen—bearers
of grief that strikes them or happiness that overwhelms them—they have the same invisible
messengers of love, the same beloved confessors. These are the bad composers. The
same annoying jingle, to which every well-born, well-bred ear instantly refuses to
listen, has received the treasure of thousands of souls and guards the secret of thousands
of lives: it has been their living inspiration, their consolation, which is always
ready, always half-open on the music stand of the piano—and it has been their dreamy
grace and their ideal. Certain arpeggios, certain reentries of motifs have made the
souls of more than one lover or dreamer
vibrate with the harmonies of paradise or the very voice of the beloved herself. A
collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery
or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under
tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful
enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock
of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dream that gave them an inkling of
the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

Lakeside Encounter

Yesterday, before going to dine in the Bois de Boulogne, I received a letter from
Her: after a week she was responding rather coldly to my desperate letter, notifying
me that she feared she could not say goodbye to me before leaving. And I, yes, rather
coldly replied that it was better this way, and I wished her a pleasant summer. Then
I dressed and I rode across the Bois in an open carriage. I felt extremely sad, but
calm. I was determined to forget, I had made up my mind: it was a matter of time.

As my carriage turned into the lakeside drive, I spotted a lone woman slowly walking
at the far end of the small path that circles the lake fifty meters from the drive.
At first I could barely make her out. She waved casually at me, and then I recognized
her despite the distance between us. It was she! I waved back for a long time. And
she continued to gaze at me as if wanting me to halt and take her along. I did nothing
of the kind, but I soon felt an almost exterior agitation pounce upon me and grip
me firmly. “I guessed right!” I exclaimed. “For some unknown reason she’s always feigned
indifference toward me. She loves me, the dear thing.”

An infinite happiness, an invincible certainty came over me; I felt dizzy and I burst
into sobs. The carriage was approaching Armenonville; I dried my eyes, and the gentle
greeting of her hand passed over them as if also to dry their tears, and her softly
questioning eyes fixed on mine, asking if I could take her along.

When I arrived at the dinner, I was radiant. My happiness spread to each person in
hearty, blissful, thankful amiability: nobody had the slightest inkling what hand
unknown to them—the little hand that had waved to me—had kindled this great fire of
my joy, its radiance visible to everyone; and my sense of their unawareness of that
hand added the charm of secret sensual delights to my happiness. We were waiting only
for Madame de T., and she soon arrived. She is the most insignificant person I know
and, though somewhat attractive, the most unpleasant. But I was too happy not to forgive
each individual for his faults, his ugliness, and I went over to her with an affectionate
smile.

“You were less friendly just now,” she said.

“Just now?” I said, astonished. “Just now? But I haven’t seen you.”

“What do you mean? You didn’t recognize me? It’s true you were far away. I was strolling
along the lake, you drove by proudly in your carriage, I waved at you and I wanted
to ride with you so as not to be late.”

“You mean that was you?” I exclaimed and in my despair I repeated several times: “Oh,
do please forgive me, please forgive me!”

“How unhappy he looks! My compliments, Charlotte,” said the mistress of the house.
“But you can cheer up, she’s with you now.”

I was crushed; my entire happiness was destroyed.

All well and good! But the most horrible part of it was that it was not as if it had
not been. Even after I realized my mistake, that loving image of the woman who did
not love me altered my conception of her for a long time. I attempted a reconciliation,
I forgot about her less quickly, and, struggling to find solace for my distress by
imagining that those were her hands as I had originally
felt
, I often closed my eyes to evoke those little hands, which had waved to me, which
would have so nicely dried my eyes, so nicely cooled my brow—those little gloved hands,
which she gently held out by the lake, as frail symbols of peace, love, and reconciliation,
while her sad and questioning eyes seemed to ask me to take her along.

Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, “There is a fire over there,” certain
blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames
in the mirror. But sometimes even carefree and cheerful people have eyes that are
vast and somber like grief, as if a filter had been stretched between the soul and
the eyes so that all the live content of the soul had virtually seeped into the eyes.
Warmed solely by the fervor of their egoism (that attractive fervor of egoism, to
which people are drawn as strongly as they are alienated by inflammatory passion),
the parched soul is henceforth nothing but an artificial palace of intrigues. However,
their eyes, which endlessly burn with love, and which a dew of languor will water,
set aglow, cause to float, and drown without extinguishing them—those eyes will astonish
the universe with their tragic blaze. Twin spheres that are now independent of the
soul, spheres of love, ardent satellites of an eternally frozen world, those spheres
will continue to cast an unwonted and deceptive shimmer until the death of these false
prophets, these perjurers, whose promise of love the heart will not keep.

The Stranger

Dominique had settled next to the extinguished fire, waiting for his guests. Every
evening he would invite some aristocrat to come for supper together with men of wit;
and since he was rich, well-born, and charming, he was never alone. The candles had
not yet been lit, and the daylight was dying sadly in the room. All at once he heard
a voice, a distant and intimate voice, saying to him: “Dominique”; and at the mere
sound of it, so far and so near, “Dominique,” he froze with fear. He had never heard
that voice before, and yet he recognized it so clearly, his remorse recognized so
clearly the voice of a victim, a noble victim that he had immolated. He tried to
remember some ancient crime he had committed, but none came to mind. Yet the tone
of that voice reproached him for a crime, a crime he had probably committed without
realizing it, but for which he was responsible—as attested by his fear and sadness.
Upon raising his eyes he saw, standing before him, grave and familiar, a stranger
with a vague and gripping demeanor. Uttering a few respectful words, Dominique bowed
to the stranger’s obvious and melancholy authority.

“Dominique, am I the only person you won’t invite to supper? You have some wrongs
to right with me, ancient wrongs. Then I will teach you how to get along without other
people, who will no longer come when you’re old.”

“I invite you to supper,” Dominique replied with a warm gravity that surprised him.

“Thank you,” said the stranger.

No crest was inscribed in the stone on his ring, nor had wit frosted his words with
its glittering needles. However, the gratitude in his firm, brotherly gaze intoxicated
Dominique with unknown happiness.

“But if you wish to keep me here, you have to dismiss your other guests.”

Dominique heard them knocking at the door. The candles were unlit; the room was pitch-black.

“I can’t dismiss them,” Dominique replied, “
I can’t be alone
.”

“With me you’ll be alone, that’s true,” said the stranger sadly. “But you have to
keep me here. You have to right ancient wrongs that you did me. I love you more than
all of them do and I’ll teach you how to get along without those others, who will
no longer come when you’re old.”

“I can’t,” said Dominique.

And he sensed he had just sacrificed a noble happiness at the command of an imperious
and vulgar habit, that no longer had even pleasures to dispense as prizes for obedience.