Part 4

Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4
by Marcel Proust, John Sturrock (Translator)

(Page 4 of 5)

I had to come to a decision, however. I was well able to recognize under the trees women with whom I was more or less friendly, but they seemed transformed because they were at the Princesse's and not at her cousin's, and because I saw them sitting not in front of a Saxe plate but beneath the branches of a chestnut tree. The elegance of the setting played no part in it. Had it been infinitely less than at "Oriane's," the same unease would still have existed inside me. Should the electricity happen to go off in our drawing room and have to be replaced by oil lamps, everything seems altered. I was rescued from my uncertainty by Mme de Souvré. "Good evening," she said as she came up to me. "Is it long since you saw the Duchesse de Guermantes?" She excelled at lending words of this kind an intonation that proved she was not uttering them out of pure stupidity, like those people who, not knowing what to talk about, are forever accosting you and naming some common acquaintance, often very vague. She, on the contrary, had a fine conductor wire in her eyes, which signified: "Don't think I didn't recognize you. You're the young man I've seen at the Duchesse de Guermantes's. I remember very well." Unfortunately, the protection extended over me by these seemingly stupid yet delicately intentioned words was extremely fragile and vanished the moment I sought to make use of it. Mme de Souvré had the art, if it was a matter of backing up a request to someone of influence, of appearing both to be recommending it in the eyes of the petitioner, and not to be recommending this petitioner in the eyes of the exalted personage, in such a way that this double-edged gesture opened a credit balance of gratitude from the former without incurring any debt vis-à-vis the other. Encouraged by this lady's good grace to ask her to present me to M. de Guermantes, she seized on a moment when our host's eyes were not turned in our direction, took me maternally by the shoulders, and, smiling at the Prince's face, which was turned away so that he could not see her, she thrust me toward him with a movement purportedly protective yet deliberately ineffective, which left me stranded almost at my point of departure. Such is the cowardliness of society people.

That of a lady who came up to greet me by calling me by my name was greater still. I tried to recover her name even as I was speaking to her; I remembered very well having dined with her, I remembered things she had said to me. But my attention, straining toward that inner region where these memories of her were, was unable to discover the name. Yet it was there. My mind was engaged on a sort of game with it, in order to grasp its contours and the letter it began with, and finally to illuminate it in its entirety. It was so much wasted effort; I could more or less sense its mass, its weight, but as for its forms, comparing these with the mysterious captive huddled in the darkness within, I said to myself, "That's not it." My mind might certainly have been able to create the most difficult names. But, alas, it had not to create but to reproduce. Any action of the mind is easy when it is not subject to reality. Here I was forced to submit. At last, suddenly, the name came in its entirety: "Mme d'Arpajon." I am wrong to say that it came, for I do not believe it appeared to me under its own propulsion. Nor do I think that my numerous faint memories relating to this lady, whose help I did not cease to solicit (by exhortations such as, "Come on, this is the woman who's a friend of Mme de Souvré, who has so simple-minded an admiration for Victor Hugo, along with so much terror and repugnance") - I do not believe that all these memories, fluttering about between me and her name, served in the very least to refloat it. In the great game of "hide-and-seek" played out in the memory when we are trying to recover a name, there is not a series of graduated approximations. We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semidarkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, those transitions are unconscious. For the intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the right name, are themselves false, and bring us no closer to it. They are not even names, properly speaking, but often mere consonants not to be found in the rediscovered name. The work of the mind as it passes from nothingness to reality is so mysterious, on the other hand, that it is possible after all that these false consonants are a pole held clumsily out to us in advance, to help us grapple the right name. "All of which," the reader will say, "teaches us nothing about this lady's disobligingness; but since you've been at a standstill for this long, let me, M. l'Auteur, make you waste one minute more to tell you how regrettable it is that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he is not yourself), you should already have had so little memory as to be unable to recall the name of a lady whom you knew very well." It is very regrettable, you are right, M. le Lecteur. And sadder than you think, once it is sensed as heralding the day when names and words will vanish from the illuminated zone of the mind and we shall have to give up forever naming to ourselves those whom we have known best. It is regrettable, indeed, that, from our youth on, it should require such labor to recover names we know well. But were this infirmity to occur only with names barely known and quite naturally forgotten, and which we do not want to weary ourselves by recalling, then this infirmity would not be without its advantages. "And what are they, pray?" Well, monsieur, the fact is that this malady alone causes us to take notice of and to learn, and enables us to analyze, the mechanisms of which we would otherwise be ignorant. A man who drops into his bed each evening like a dead weight and lives again only at the moment of coming awake and getting up, will that man ever dream of making, if not great discoveries, then at least some minor observations, concerning sleep? He hardly knows whether he sleeps. A spot of insomnia is not without its uses for appreciating sleep, for projecting a certain light into that darkness. An unfailing memory is no very powerful stimulus for studying the phenomena of memory. "So Mme d'Arpajon finally introduced you to the Prince?" No, but be quiet and let me take up my story again.

Mme d'Arpajon was even more cowardly than Mme de Souvré, but her cowardice had greater excuse. She knew she had always had little influence in society. This influence had been further weakened by the liaison she had had with the Duc de Guermantes; the latter's rejection of her was the final straw. The ill- humor produced in her by my request to be introduced to the Prince resulted in a silence, which she was naïve enough to think was an appearance of not having heard what I said. She did not even realize that anger had caused her to frown. Or perhaps she did realize but was not troubled by the contradiction, using it for the lesson in tact she could give me without being too impolite - I mean, a lesson that was wordless but no less eloquent on that account.

Mme d'Arpajon was in any case much annoyed, the gaze of many having been raised toward a Renaissance balcony at the corner of which, in place of the monumental statues that were so often placed there in those days, there leaned, no less sculptural than they, the magnificent Duchesse de Surgis-le-Duc, she who had just succeeded Mme d'Arpajon in the affections of Basin de Guermantes. Beneath the flimsy white tulle that protected her against the cool night air could be seen the supple body of a Winged Victory. My one remaining recourse was to M. de Charlus, who had gone back into a room below, which gave access to the garden. I had ample leisure (since he was pretending to be absorbed in a simulated game of whist, which enabled him not to appear to see people) in which to admire the willful and artistic simplicity of his dress coat, which, thanks to tiny details that a couturier alone might have discerned, looked like a Harmony in Black and White by Whistler; or, rather, black, white, and red, for M. de Charlus wore, suspended by a broad ribbon against the jabot of his evening attire, the white, black, and red enamel cross of a knight of the religious Order of Malta. At that moment, the Baron's game was interrupted by Mme de Gallardon, who had her nephew in tow, the Vicomte de Courvoisier, a young man with a pretty face and an impertinent air: "Cousin," said Mme de Gallardon, "allow me to introduce to you my nephew Adalbert. Adalbert, you know, the famous Uncle Palamède you're always hearing about." "Good evening, Mme de Gallardon," replied M. de Charlus. And he added, without even looking at the young man, "Good evening, monsieur," with a surly look, and in so violently discourteous a tone that everyone was astounded. Perhaps, knowing that Mme de Gallardon had her suspicions as to his habits and had been unable to resist for once the pleasure of alluding to them, M. de Charlus was anxious to forestall whatever embroidery she might add to a friendly reception of her nephew, at the same time making a resounding profession of his indifference with respect to young men; or perhaps he considered that the aforesaid Adalbert had not replied to his aunt's words with a sufficiently respectful air; or perhaps, eager to press home his attack later on so attractive a cousin, he wanted to give himself the advantages of a previous act of aggression, like those sovereigns who, before engaging in a diplomatic démarche, support it with a military action.

It was not as difficult as I had thought for M. de Charlus to accede to my request for an introduction. For one thing, in the course of the last twenty years, this Don Quixote had tilted against so many windmills (frequently relatives who he claimed had behaved badly toward him), and had forbidden people to be invited with such regularity "as someone unfit to be received," by either male or female Guermantes, that the latter were beginning to be afraid of quarreling with all the people whom they liked, and of being deprived until the day they died of the company of certain newcomers about whom they were curious, in order to espouse the thunderous yet unexplained grudges of a brother-in-law or cousin who would have wanted them to abandon wife, brother, and children for his sake. Being more intelligent than the other Guermantes, M. de Charlus had noticed that only one in two of his vetoes was effective, and, looking ahead to the future and fearing that one day it might be him of whom they would deprive themselves, he had begun to cut his losses, to lower, as they say, his prices. Moreover, if he was capable of giving an identical life to some hated individual for months, or for years, on end - to whom he would not have tolerated extending an invitation, but would rather have fought, like a street porter, with a queen, the rank of whatever stood in his way no longer counting for him - his explosions of anger, on the other hand, were too frequent for them not to be somewhat fragmentary. "The imbecile, the miserable devil! We're going to return him to where he belongs, sweep him into the gutter, where, alas, he won't do much for the salubriousness of the town," he would shout, even when alone at home, on reading a letter he considered irreverent, or on recalling a remark that had been repeated to him. But a fresh outburst against a second imbecile would dispel the earlier one, and, provided the first imbecile proved deferential, the attack he had occasioned was forgotten, not having lasted long enough to create a foundation of hatred on which to build. So perhaps - in spite of his ill-humor against me - I would have succeeded with him when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not had the unhappy idea of adding, out of scrupulousness, and so that he should not suppose me tactless enough to have entered on the off chance, relying on him to enable me to stay, "You know that I know them very well, the Princesse has been very kind to me." "Well, if you know them, what need have you of me to introduce you?" he snapped at me and, turning his back, resumed his make-believe game of cards with the nuncio, the German ambassador, and a personage whom I did not know.

Then, from the depths of those gardens where once the Duc d'Aiguillon had bred rare animals, there reached me, through the wide-open doors, a sniffing sound, of someone breathing in all this elegance and wanting none of it to go to waste. The sound drew closer; I made in its direction on the off chance, with the result that the words "good evening" were murmured into my ear by M. de Bréauté, not like the jagged, metallic sound of a knife being ground on the wheel, let alone the cry of the young wild boar that lays waste the crops, but like the voice of a potential savior. Less influential than Mme de Souvré, but less fundamentally afflicted than her by disobligingness, far more at ease with the Prince than was Mme d'Arpajon, under an illusion perhaps concerning my own place in the Guermantes circle, or perhaps knowing it better than I did, I yet had, in those first seconds, some difficulty in securing his attention, for, with nostrils dilated and the papillae of his nose quivering, he was facing in all directions, his monocle eye wide with curiosity, as though he had found himself faced by five hundred masterpieces. But, having heard my request, he welcomed it with satisfaction, led me toward the Prince, and presented me to him wearing a hungry, ceremonious, and vulgar expression, as though he were passing him, along with a recommendation, a plate of petits fours. Just as the Duc de Guermantes's greeting was, when he wanted, friendly, imbued with camaraderie, cordial, and familiar, so I found that of the Prince stiff, solemn, and haughty. He barely smiled at me, and addressed me gravely as "monsieur." I had often heard the Duc make fun of his cousin's aloofness. But from the first words he spoke to me, which, in their coldness and seriousness, formed the most complete contrast with Basin's way of speaking, I realized at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duc, who spoke to you from your first visit "as an equal," and that, of the two cousins, the truly simple one was the Prince. In his reserve I found a greater sense, I will not say of equality, for that would have been inconceivable for him, but at least of the consideration one may accord an inferior, as occurs in any strongly hierarchical setting, at the Palais de Justice, for example, or in a university faculty, where a public prosecutor or a "dean," conscious of his high office, perhaps hides more actual simplicity and, once you get to know him better, more kindness, true simplicity, and cordiality beneath a traditional hauteur than someone more up-to-date in his affectation of a bantering camaraderie. "Are you expecting to follow Monsieur your father's career?" he said to me with a distant yet interested expression. I replied summarily to his question, realizing he had only asked it in order to be gracious, and moved away to let him welcome the new arrivals.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. His father, an eminent Professor of Medicine, was Roman Catholic and his mother was Jewish, factors that were to play an important role in his life and work. He was a brilliant, very literary schoolboy, and later a half-hearted student of law and political science. In his twenties he became an assiduous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. During this period he published a volume of sketches and stories, Les Plaisirs et le jours, and between 1895 and 1900 wrote a novel, Jean Santeuil, which was in many ways a first draft for his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu.

John Sturrock is a writer and critic who has previously translated Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and Rimbaud. A consulting editor at the London Review of Books, he lives in West Sussex, England.