In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (2 page)

As for my mother, perhaps the Ambassador had not the type of mind
towards which she felt herself most attracted. I should add that his
conversation furnished so exhaustive a glossary of the superannuated
forms of speech peculiar to a certain profession, class and period—a
period which, for that profession and that class, might be said not to
have altogether passed away—that I sometimes regret that I have not
kept any literal record simply of the things that I have heard him
say. I should thus have obtained an effect of old–fashioned courtesy
by the same process and at as little expense as that actor at the
Palais–Royal who, when asked where on earth he managed to find his
astounding hats, answered, "I do not find my hats. I keep them." In a
word, I suppose that my mother considered M. de Norpois a trifle
'out–of–date,' which was by no means a fault in her eyes, so far as
manners were concerned, but attracted her less in the region—not, in
this instance, of ideas, for those of M. de Norpois were extremely
modern—but of idiom. She felt, however, that she was paying a
delicate compliment to her husband when she spoke admiringly of the
diplomat who had shewn so remarkable a predilection for him. By
confirming in my father's mind the good opinion that he already had of
M. de Norpois, and so inducing him to form a good opinion of himself
also, she knew that she was carrying out that one of her wifely duties
which consisted in making life pleasant and comfortable for her
husband, just as when she saw to it that his dinner was perfectly
cooked and served in silence. And as she was incapable of deceiving my
father, she compelled herself to admire the old Ambassador, so as to
be able to praise him with sincerity. Incidentally she could
naturally, and did, appreciate his kindness, his somewhat antiquated
courtesy (so ceremonious that when, as he was walking along the
street, his tall figure rigidly erect, he caught sight of my mother
driving past, before raising his hat to her he would fling away the
cigar that he had just lighted); his conversation, so elaborately
circumspect, in which he referred as seldom as possible to himself and
always considered what might interest the person to whom he was
speaking; his promptness in answering a letter, which was so
astonishing that whenever my father, just after posting one himself to
M. de Norpois, saw his handwriting upon an envelope, his first thought
was always one of annoyance that their letters must, unfortunately,
have crossed in the post; which, one was led to suppose, bestowed upon
him the special and luxurious privilege of extraordinary deliveries
and collections at all hours of the day and night. My mother marvelled
at his being so punctilious although so busy, so friendly although so
much in demand, never realising that 'although,' with such people, is
invariably an unrecognised 'because,' and that (just as old men are
always wonderful for their age, and kings extraordinarily simple, and
country cousins astonishingly well–informed) it was the same system of
habits that enabled M. de Norpois to undertake so many duties and to
be so methodical in answering letters, to go everywhere and to be so
friendly when he came to us. Moreover she made the mistake which
everyone makes who is unduly modest; she rated everything that
concerned herself below, and consequently outside the range of, other
people's duties and engagements. The letter which it seemed to her so
meritorious in my father's friend to have written us promptly, since
in the course of the day he must have had ever so many letters to
write, she excepted from that great number of letters, of which
actually it was a unit; in the same way she did not consider that
dining with us was, for M. de Norpois, merely one of the innumerable
activities of his social life; she never guessed that the Ambassador
had trained himself, long ago, to look upon dining–out as one of his
diplomatic functions, and to display, at table, an inveterate charm
which it would have been too much to have expected him specially to
discard when he came to dine with us.

The evening on which M. de Norpois first appeared at our table, in a
year when I still went to play in the Champs–Elysées, has remained
fixed in my memory because the afternoon of the same day was that upon
which I at last went to hear Berma, at a
matinée
, in
Phèdre
, and
also because in talking to M. de Norpois I realised suddenly, and
in a new and different way, how completely the feelings aroused in me
by all that concerned Gilberte Swann and her parents differed from any
that the same family could inspire in anyone else.

It was no doubt the sight of the depression in which I was plunged by
the approach of the New Year holidays, in which, as she herself had
informed me, I was to see nothing of Gilberte, that prompted my mother
one day, in the hope of distracting my mind, to suggest, "If you are
still so anxious to hear Berma, I think that your father would allow
you perhaps to go; your grandmother can take you."

But it was because M. de Norpois had told him that he ought to let me
hear Berma, that it was an experience for a young man to remember in
later life, that my father, who had hitherto been so resolutely
opposed to my going and wasting my time, with the added risk of my
falling ill again, on what he used to shock my grandmother by calling
'futilities,' was now not far from regarding this manner of spending
an afternoon as included, in some vague way, in the list of precious
formulae for success in a brilliant career. My grandmother, who, in
renouncing on my behalf the profit which, according to her, I should
have derived from hearing Berma, had made a considerable sacrifice in
the interests of my health, was surprised to find that this last had
become of no account at a mere word from M. de Norpois. Reposing the
unconquerable hopes of her rationalist spirit in the strict course of
fresh air and early hours which had been prescribed for me, she now
deplored, as something disastrous, this infringement that I was to
make of my rules, and in a tone of despair protested, "How easily led
you are!" to my father, who replied angrily "What! So it's you that
are not for letting him go, now. That is really too much, after your
telling us all day and every day that it would be so good for him."

M. de Norpois had also brought about a change in my father's plans in
a matter of far greater importance to myself. My father had always
meant me to become a diplomat, and I could not endure the thought
that, even if I did have to stay for some years, first, at the
Ministry, I should run the risk of being sent, later on, as
Ambassador, to capitals in which no Gilberte dwelt. I should have
preferred to return to the literary career that I had planned for
myself, and had been abandoned, years before, in my wanderings along
the Guermantes way. But my father had steadily opposed my devoting
myself to literature, which he regarded as vastly inferior to
diplomacy, refusing even to dignify it with the title of career, until
the day when M. de Norpois, who had little love for the more recent
generations of diplomatic agents, assured him that it was quite
possible, by writing, to attract as much attention, to receive as much
consideration, to exercise as much influence, and at the same time to
preserve more independence than in the Embassies.

"Well, well, I should never have believed it. Old Norpois doesn't at
all disapprove of your idea of taking up writing," my father had
reported. And as he had a certain amount of influence himself, he
imagined that there was nothing that could not be 'arranged,' no
problem for which a happy solution might not be found in the
conversation of people who 'counted.' "I shall bring him back to
dinner, one of these days, from the Commission. You must talk to him a
little, and let him see what he thinks of you. Write something good
that you can shew him; he is an intimate friend of the editor of the
Deux–Mondes
; he will get you in there; he will arrange it all, the
cunning old fox; and, upon my soul, he seems to think that diplomacy,
nowadays——!"

My happiness in the prospect of not being separated from Gilberte made
me desirous, but not capable, of writing something good which could be
shewn to M. de Norpois. After a few laboured pages, weariness made the
pen drop from my fingers; I cried with anger at the thought that I
should never have any talent, that I was not 'gifted,' that I could
not even take advantage of the chance that M. de Norpois's coming
visit was to offer me of spending the rest of my life in Paris. The
recollection that I was to be taken to hear Berma alone distracted me
from my grief. But just as I did not wish to see any storms except on
those coasts where they raged with most violence, so I should not have
cared to hear the great actress except in one of those classic parts
in which Swann had told me that she touched the sublime. For when it
is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to
receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have
certain scruples about allowing our soul to gather, instead of these,
other, inferior, impressions, which are liable to make us form a false
estimate of the value of Beauty. Berma in
Andromaque
, in
Les
Caprices de Marianne
, in
Phèdre
, was one of those famous spectacles
which my imagination had so long desired. I should enjoy the same
rapture as on the day when in a gondola I glided to the foot of the
Titian of the Frari or the Carpaccios of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni,
were I ever to hear Berma repeat the lines beginning,

I was familiar with them from the simple reproduction in black and
white which was given of them upon the printed page; but my heart beat
furiously at the thought—as of the realisation of a long–planned
voyage—that I should at length behold them, bathed and brought to
life in the atmosphere and sunshine of the voice of gold. A Carpaccio
in Venice, Berma in
Phèdre
, masterpieces of pictorial or dramatic art
which the glamour, the dignity attaching to them made so living to me,
that is to say so indivisible, that if I had been taken to see
Carpaccios in one of the galleries of the Louvre, or Berma in some
piece of which I had never heard, I should not have experienced the
same delicious amazement at finding myself at length, with wide–open
eyes, before the unique and inconceivable object of so many thousand
dreams. Then, while I waited, expecting to derive from Berma's playing
the revelation of certain aspects of nobility and tragic grief, it
would seem to me that whatever greatness, whatever truth there might
be in her playing must be enhanced if the actress imposed it upon a
work of real value, instead of what would, after all, be but
embroidering a pattern of truth and beauty upon a commonplace and
vulgar web.

Finally, if I went to hear Berma in a new piece, it would not be easy
for me to judge of her art, of her diction, since I should not be able
to differentiate between a text which was not already familiar and
what she added to it by her intonations and gestures, an addition
which would seem to me to be embodied in the play itself; whereas the
old plays, the classics which I knew by heart, presented themselves to
me as vast and empty walls, reserved and made ready for my inspection,
on which I should be able to appreciate without restriction the
devices by which Berma would cover them, as with frescoes, with the
perpetually fresh treasures of her inspiration. Unfortunately, for
some years now, since she had retired from the great theatres, to make
the fortune of one on the boulevards where she was the 'star,' she had
ceased to appear in classic parts; and in vain did I scan the
hoardings; they never advertised any but the newest pieces, written
specially for her by authors in fashion at the moment. When, one
morning, as I stood searching the column of announcements to find the
afternoon performances for the week of the New Year holidays, I saw
there for the first time—at the foot of the bill, after some probably
insignificant curtain–raiser, whose title was opaque to me because it
had latent in it all the details of an action of which I was
ignorant—two acts of
Phèdre
with Mme. Berma, and, on the following
afternoons,
Le Demi–Monde
,
Les Caprices de Marianne
, names which,
like that of
Phèdre
, were for me transparent, filled with light
only, so familiar were those works to me, illuminated to their very
depths by the revealing smile of art. They seemed to me to invest with
a fresh nobility Mme. Berma herself when I read in the newspapers,
after the programme of these performances, that it was she who had
decided to shew herself once more to the public in some of her early
creations. She was conscious, then, that certain stage–parts have an
interest which survives the novelty of their first production or the
success of a revival; she regarded them, when interpreted by herself,
as museum pieces which it might be instructive to set before the eyes
of the generation which had admired her in them long ago, or of that
which had never yet seen her in them. In thus advertising, in the
middle of a column of plays intended only to while away an evening,
this
Phèdre
, a title no longer than any of the rest, nor set in
different type, she added something indescribable, as though a
hostess, introducing you, before you all go in to dinner, to her other
guests, were to mention, casually, amid the string of names which are
the names of guests and nothing more, and without any change of
tone:—"M. Anatole France."

The doctor who was attending me—the same who had forbidden me to
travel—advised my parents not to let me go to the theatre; I should
only be ill again afterwards, perhaps for weeks, and should in the
long run derive more pain than pleasure from the experience. The fear
of this might have availed to stop me, if what I had anticipated from
such a spectacle had been only a pleasure for which a subsequent pain
could so compensate as to cancel it. But what I demanded from this
performance—just as from the visit to Balbec, the visit to Venice for
which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from
pleasure; a series of verities pertaining to a world more real than
that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from
me again by any of the trivial incidents—even though it were the
cause of bodily suffering—of my otiose existence. At best, the
pleasure which I was to feel during the performance appeared to me as
the perhaps inevitable form of the perception of these truths; and I
hoped only that the illness which had been forecast for me would not
begin until the play was finished, so that my pleasure should not be
in any way compromised or spoiled. I implored my parents, who, after
the doctor's visit, were no longer inclined to let me go to
Phèdre
. I
repeated, all day long, to myself, the speech beginning,