In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (12 page)

As my chokings had persisted long after any congestion remained that
could account for them, my parents asked for a consultation with
Professor Cottard. It is not enough that a physician who is called in
to treat cases of this sort should be learned. Brought face to face
with symptoms which may or may not be those of three or four different
complaints, it is in the long run his instinct, his eye that must
decide with which, despite the more or less similar appearance of them
all, he has to deal. This mysterious gift does not imply any
superiority in the other departments of the intellect, and a creature
of the utmost vulgarity, who admires the worst pictures, the worst
music, in whose mind there is nothing out of the common, may perfectly
well possess it. In my case, what was physically evident might equally
well have been due to nervous spasms, to the first stages of
tuberculosis, to asthma, to a toxi–alimentary dyspnoea with renal
insufficiency, to chronic bronchitis, or to a complex state into which
more than one of these factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required
to be treated firmly, and discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care
and with a 'feeding–up' process which would have been bad for an
arthritic condition such as asthma, and might indeed have been
dangerous in a case of toxi–alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for
a strict diet which, in return, would be fatal to a tuberculous
patient. But Cottard's hesitations were brief and his prescriptions
imperious. "Purges; violent and drastic purges; milk for some days,
nothing but milk. No meat. No alcohol." My mother murmured that I
needed, all the same, to be 'built up,' that my nerves were already
weak, that drenching me like a horse and restricting my diet would
make me worse. I could see in Cottard's eyes, as uneasy as though he
were afraid of missing a train, that he was asking himself whether he
had not allowed his natural good–humour to appear. He was trying to
think whether he had remembered to put on his mask of coldness, as one
looks for a mirror to see whether one has not forgotten to tie one's
tie. In his uncertainty, and, so as, whatever he had done, to put
things right, he replied brutally: "I am not in the habit of repeating
my instructions. Give me a pen. Now remember, milk! Later on, when we
have got the crises and the agrypnia by the throat, I should like you
to take a little clear soup, and then a little broth, but always with
milk;
au lait
! You'll enjoy that, since Spain is all the rage just
now;
ollé, ollé
!" His pupils knew this joke well, for he made it at
the hospital whenever he had to put a heart or liver case on a milk
diet. "After that, you will gradually return to your normal life. But
whenever there is any coughing or choking—purges, injections, bed,
milk!" He listened with icy calm, and without uttering a word, to my
mother's final objections, and as he left us without having
condescended to explain the reasons for this course of treatment, my
parents concluded that it had no bearing on my case, and would weaken
me to no purpose, and so they did not make me try it. Naturally they
sought to conceal their disobedience from the Professor, and to
succeed in this avoided all the houses in which he was likely to be
found. Then, as my health became worse, they decided to make me follow
out Cottard's prescriptions to the letter; in three days my 'rattle'
and cough had ceased, I could breathe freely. Whereupon we realised
that Cottard, while finding, as he told us later on, that I was
distinctly asthmatic, and still more inclined to 'imagine things,' had
seen that what was really the matter with me at the moment was
intoxication, and that by loosening my liver and washing out my
kidneys he would get rid of the congestion of my bronchial tubes and
thus give me back my breath, my sleep and my strength. And we realised
that this imbecile was a clinical genius. At last I was able to get
up. But they spoke of not letting me go any more to the
Champs–Elysées. They said that it was because the air there was bad;
but I felt sure that this was only a pretext so that I should not see
Mlle. Swann, and I forced myself to repeat the name of Gilberte all
the time, like the native tongue which peoples in captivity endeavour
to preserve among themselves so as not to forget the land that they
will never see again. Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead
with her hand, saying: "So little boys don't tell Mamma their troubles
any more?" And Françoise used to come up to me every day with: "What a
face, to be sure! If you could just see yourself I Anyone would think
there was a corpse in the house." It is true that, if I had simply had
a cold in the head, Françoise would have assumed the same funereal
air. These lamentations pertained rather to her 'class' than to the
state of my health. I could not at the time discover whether this
pessimism was due to sorrow or to satisfaction. I decided
provisionally that it was social and professional.

One day, after the postman had called, my mother laid a letter upon my
bed. I opened it carelessly, since it could not bear the one signature
that would have made me happy, the name of Gilberte, with whom I had
no relations outside the Champs–Elysées. And lo, at the foot of the
page, embossed with a silver seal representing a man's head in a
helmet, and under him a scroll with the device
Per viam rectam
,
beneath a letter written in a large and flowing hand, in which almost
every word appeared to be underlined, simply because the crosses of
the 't's ran not across but over them, and so drew a line beneath the
corresponding letters of the word above, it was indeed Gilberte's
signature and nothing else that I saw. But because I knew that to be
impossible upon a letter addressed to myself, the sight of it,
unaccompanied by any belief in it, gave me no pleasure. For a moment
it merely struck an impression of unreality on everything round about
me. With lightning rapidity the impossible signature danced about my
bed, the fireplace, the four walls. I saw everything sway, as one does
when one falls from a horse, and I asked myself whether there was not
an existence altogether different from the one I knew, in direct
contradiction of it, but itself the true existence, which, being
suddenly revealed to me, filled me with that hesitation which
sculptors, in representing the Last Judgment, have given to the
awakening dead who find themselves at the gates of the next world. "My
dear Friend," said the letter, "I hear that you have been very ill and
have given up going to the Champs–Elysées. I hardly ever go there
either because there has been such an enormous lot of illness. But I'm
having my friends to tea here every Monday and Friday. Mamma asks me
to tell you that it will be a great pleasure to us all if you will
come too, as soon as you are well again, and we can have some more
nice talks here, just like the Champs–Elysées. Good–bye, dear friend;
I hope that your parents will allow you to come to tea very often.
With all my kindest regards. GILBERTE."

While I was reading these words, my nervous system was receiving, with
admirable promptitude, the news that a piece of great good fortune had
befallen me. But my mind, that is to say myself, and in fact the party
principally concerned, was still in ignorance. Such good fortune,
coming from Gilberte, was a thing of which I had never ceased to
dream; a thing wholly in my mind, it was, as Leonardo says of
painting,
cosa mentale
. Now, a sheet of paper covered with writing
is not a thing that the mind assimilates at once. But as soon as I had
finished reading the letter, I thought of it, it became an object of
my dreams, became, it also,
cosa mentale
, and I loved it so much
already that every few minutes I must read it, kiss it again. Then at
last I was conscious of my happiness.

Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love
can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially
brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had
lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to
me, just as, when I was little and went first to the sea–side, so as
to give me some pleasure in bathing, which I detested because it took
away my breath, she used secretly to hand to the man who was to 'dip'
me marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I
believed that I myself had discovered lying at the bottom of the sea.
However, with every occurrence which, in our life and among its
contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make
no attempt to understand it, since in so far as these are inexorable,
as they are unlooked–for, they appear to be governed by magic rather
than by rational laws. When a multi–millionaire—who for all his
millions is quite a charming person—sent packing by a poor and
unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in
his desperation, all the resources of wealth, and brings every worldly
influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it
is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his
mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him, and to make him
die of an affection of the heart, than to seek any logical
explanation. These obstacles, against which lovers have to contend,
and which their imagination, over–excited by suffering, seeks in vain
to analyse, are contained, as often as not, in some peculiar
characteristic of the woman whom they cannot bring back to themselves,
in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her, the fears
suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind
of pleasures which, at the moment, she is demanding of life, pleasures
which neither her lover nor her lover's wealth can procure for her. In
any event, the lover is scarcely in a position to discover the nature
of these obstacles, which her womanly cunning hides from him and his
own judgment, falsified by love, prevents him from estimating exactly.
They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in
reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them
these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last,
as a rule, longer than love itself. And as that is not a disinterested
passion, the lover who is no longer in love does not seek to know why
the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused
obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her.

Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a
catastrophe, when love is in question, envelops just as frequently the
suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had come to me with
Gilberte's letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are
few solutions that can really be happy when we are dealing with a
sentiment of such a kind that every satisfaction which we can bring to
it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes
a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion
that we are healed.

So far as concerns this letter, at the foot of which Françoise
declined to recognise Gilberte's name, because the elaborate capital
'G' leaning against the undotted 'i' looked more like an 'A', while
the final syllable was indefinitely prolonged by a waving flourish, if
we persist in looking for a rational explanation of the sudden
reversal of her attitude towards me which it indicated, and which made
me so radiantly happy, we may perhaps find that I was to some extent
indebted for it to an incident which I should have supposed, on the
contrary, to be calculated to ruin me for ever in the sight of the
Swann family. A short while back, Bloch had come to see me at a time
when Professor Cottard, whom, now that I was following his
instructions, we were again calling in, happened to be in my room. As
his examination of me was over, and he was sitting with me simply as a
visitor because my parents had invited him to stay to dinner, Bloch
was allowed to come in. While we were all talking, Bloch having
mentioned that he had heard it said that Mme. Swann was very fond of
me, by a lady with whom he had been dining the day before, who was
herself very intimate with Mme. Swann, I should have liked to reply
that he was most certainly mistaken, and to establish the fact (from
the same scruple of conscience that had made me proclaim it to M. de
Norpois, and for fear of Mme. Swann's taking me for a liar) that I
did not know her and had never spoken to her. But I had not the
courage to correct Bloch's mistake, because I could see quite well
that it was deliberate, and that, if he invented something that Mme.
Swann could not possibly have said, it was simply to let us know (what
he considered flattering to himself, and was not true either) that he
had been dining with one of that lady's friends. And so it fell out
that, whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know but would
very much like to know Mme. Swann, had taken great care to avoid
speaking to her about me, Cottard, who was her doctor also, having
gathered from what he had heard Bloch say that she knew me quite well
and thought highly of me, concluded that to remark, when next he saw
her, that I was a charming young fellow and a great friend of his
could not be of the smallest use to me and would be of advantage to
himself, two reasons which made him decide to speak of me to Odette
whenever an opportunity arose.

Thus at length I found my way into that abode from which was wafted
even on to the staircase the scent that Mme. Swann used, though it was
embalmed far more sweetly still by the peculiar, disturbing charm that
emanated from the life of Gilberte. The implacable porter, transformed
into a benevolent Eumenid, adopted the custom, when I asked him if I
might go upstairs, of indicating to me, by raising his cap with a
propitious hand, that he gave ear to my prayer. Those windows which,
seen from outside, used to interpose between me and the treasures
within, which were not intended for me, a polished, distant and
superficial stare, which seemed to me the very stare of the Swanns
themselves, it fell to my lot, when in the warm weather I had spent a
whole afternoon with Gilberte in her room, to open them myself, so as
to let in a little air, and even to lean over the sill of one of them
by her side, if it was her mother's 'at home' day, to watch the
visitors arrive who would often, raising their heads as they stepped
out of their carriages, greet me with a wave of the hand, taking me
for some nephew of their hostess. At such moments Gilberte's plaits
used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their
grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their
constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of
which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them,
even infinitely minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given
as a reliquary. But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment
of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have their photograph,
how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci's
pencil! To acquire one of these, I stooped—with friends of the
Swanns, and even with photographers—to servilities which did not
procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of
extremely tiresome people.