In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (23 page)

"You can't think how delighted I am, because you have made a conquest
of my great friend Bergotte. He's been telling Mamma that he found you
extremely intelligent."

"Where are we going?" I asked her. "Oh, wherever you like; you know,
it's all the same to me." But since the incident that had occurred on
the anniversary of her grandfather's death I had begun to ask myself
whether Gilberte's character was not other than I had supposed,
whether that indifference to what was to be done, that wisdom, that
calm, that gentle and constant submission did not indeed conceal
passionate longings which her self–esteem would not allow to be
visible and which she disclosed only by her sudden resistance whenever
by any chance they were frustrated. As Bergotte lived in the same
neighbourhood as my parents, we left the house together; in the
carriage he spoke to me of my health. "Our friends were telling me
that you had been ill. I am very sorry. And yet, after all, I am not
too sorry, because I can see quite well that you are able to enjoy the
pleasures of the mind, and they are probably what mean most to you, as
to everyone who has known them."

Alas, what he was saying, how little, I felt, did it apply to myself,
whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was
happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and
well; I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in
life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect. As I made no
distinction among my pleasures between those that came to me from
different sources, of varying depth and permanence, I was thinking,
when the moment came to answer him, that I should have liked an
existence in which I was on intimate terms with the Duchesse de
Guermantes, and often came across, as in the old toll–house in the
Champs–Elysées, a chilly smell that would remind me of Combray. But in
this ideal existence which I dared not confide to him the pleasures of
the mind found no place.

"No, sir, the pleasures of the mind count for very little with me; it
is not them that I seek after; indeed I don't even know that I have
ever tasted them."

"You really think not?" he replied. "Well, it may be, no, wait a
minute now, yes, after all that must be what you like best, I can see
it now clearly, I am certain of it."

As certainly, he did not succeed in convincing me; and yet I was
already feeling happier, less restricted. After what M. de Norpois had
said to me, I had regarded my moments of dreaming, of enthusiasm, of
self–confidence as purely subjective and barren of truth. But
according to Bergotte, who appeared to understand my case, it seemed
that it was quite the contrary, that the symptom I ought to disregard
was, in fact, my doubts, my disgust with myself. Moreover, what he had
said about M. de Norpois took most of the sting out of a sentence from
which I had supposed that no appeal was possible.

"Are you being properly looked after?" Bergotte asked me. "Who is
treating you?" I told him that I had seen, and should probably go on
seeing, Cottard. "But that's not at all the sort of man you want!" he
told me. "I know nothing about him as a doctor. But I've met him at
Mme. Swann's. The man's an imbecile. Even supposing that that doesn't
prevent his being a good doctor, which I hesitate to believe, it does
prevent his being a good doctor for artists, for men of intelligence.
People like you must have suitable doctors, I would almost go so far
as to say treatment and medicines specially adapted to themselves.
Cottard will bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from
having any effect. Besides, the proper course of treatment cannot
possibly be the same for you as for any Tom, Dick or Harry. Nine
tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from
their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands their
disease. How do you expect that Cottard should be able to treat you,
he has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for
gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of
reading Shakespeare. So that his calculations are inaccurate in your
case, the balance is upset; you see, always the little bottle–imp
bobbing up again. He will find that you have a dilated stomach; he
has no need to examine you for it, since he has it already in his eye.
You can see it there, reflected in his glasses." This manner of
speaking tired me greatly; I said to myself, with the stupidity of
common sense: "There is no more any dilated stomach reflected in
Professor Cottard's glasses than there are inanities stored behind the
white waistcoat of M. de Norpois." "I should recommend you, instead,"
went on Bergotte, "to consult Dr. du Boulbon, who is quite an
intelligent man." "He is a great admirer of your books," I replied. I
saw that Bergotte knew this, and I decided that kindred spirits soon
come together, that one has few really 'unknown friends.' What
Bergotte had said to me with respect to Cottard impressed me, while
running contrary to everything that I myself believed. I was in no way
disturbed by finding my doctor a bore; I expected of him that, thanks
to an art the laws of which were beyond me, he should pronounce on the
subject of my health an infallible oracle, after consultation of my
entrails. And I did not at all require that, with the aid of an
intellect, in which I easily outstripped him, he should seek to
understand my intellect, which I pictured to myself merely as a means,
of no importance in itself, of trying to attain to certain external
verities. I doubted greatly whether intellectual people required a
different form of hygiene from imbeciles, and I was quite prepared to
submit myself to the latter kind. "I'll tell you who does need a good
doctor, and that is our friend Swann," said Bergotte. And on my
asking whether he was ill, "Well, don't you see, he's typical of the
man who has married a whore, and has to swallow a hundred serpents
every day, from women who refuse to meet his wife, or men who were
there before him. You can see them in his mouth, writhing. Just look,
any day you're there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes
in, to see who's in the room." The malice with which Bergotte spoke
thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had so long been
received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost amorous
tone which, in that house, he had constantly been adopting to speak to
them. Certainly a person like my great–aunt, for instance, would have
been incapable of treating any of us with that politeness which I had
heard Bergotte lavishing upon Swann. Even to the people whom she
liked, she enjoyed saying disagreeable things. But behind their backs
she would never have uttered a word to which they might not have
listened. There was nothing less like the social 'world' than our
society at Combray. The Swanns' house marked a stage on the way
towards it, towards its inconstant tide. If they had not yet reached
the open sea, they were certainly in the lagoon. "This is all between
ourselves," said Bergotte as he left me outside my own door. A few
years later I should have answered: "I never repeat things." That is
the ritual phrase of society, from which the slanderer always derives
a false reassurance. It is what I should have said then and there to
Bergotte, for one does not invent all one's speeches, especially when
one is acting merely as a card in the social pack. But I did not yet
know the formula. What my great–aunt, on the other hand, would have
said on a similar occasion was: "If you don't wish it to be repeated,
why do you say it?" That is the answer of the unsociable, of the
quarrelsome. I was nothing of that sort: I bowed my head in silence.

Men of letters who were in my eyes persons of considerable importance
had had to plot for years before they succeeded in forming with
Bergotte relations which continued to the end to be but dimly
literary, and never emerged beyond the four walls of his study,
whereas I, I had now been installed among the friends of the great
writer, at the first attempt and without any effort, like a man who,
instead of standing outside in a crowd for hours in order to secure a
bad seat in a theatre, is shewn in at once to the best, having entered
by a door that is closed to the public. If Swann had thus opened such
a door to me, it was doubtless because, just as a king finds himself
naturally inviting his children's friends into the royal box, or on
board the royal yacht, so Gilberte's parents received their daughter's
friends among all the precious things that they had in their house,
and the even more precious intimacies that were enshrined there. But
at that time I thought, and perhaps was right in thinking, that this
friendliness on Swann's part was aimed indirectly at my parents. I
seemed to remember having heard once at Combray that he had suggested
to them that, in view of my admiration for Bergotte, he should take me
to dine with him, and that my parents had declined, saying that I was
too young, and too easily excited to 'go out' yet. My parents, no
doubt, represented to certain other people (precisely those who seemed
to me the most marvellous) something quite different from what they
were to me, so that, just as when the lady in pink had paid my father
a tribute of which he had shewn himself so unworthy, I should have
wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just
received, and to testify their gratitude to that generous and
courteous Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without
seeming any more to be conscious of its value than is, in Luini's
fresco, the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair, to whom,
it appeared, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking
resemblance.

Unfortunately, this favour that Swann had done me, which, as I entered
the house, before I had even taken off my greatcoat, I reported to my
parents, in the hope that it would awaken in their hearts an emotion
equal to my own, and would determine them upon some immense and
decisive act of politeness towards the Swanns, did not appear to be
greatly appreciated by them. "Swann introduced you to Bergotte? An
excellent friend for you, charming society!" cried my father,
ironically. "It only wanted that!" Alas, when I had gone on to say
that Bergotte was by no means inclined to admire M. de Norpois:

"I dare say!" retorted my father. "That simply proves that he's a
foolish and evil–minded fellow. My poor boy, you never had much common
sense, still, I'm sorry to see you fall among a set that will finish
you off altogether."

Already the mere fact of my frequenting the Swanns had been far from
delighting my parents. This introduction to Bergotte seemed to them a
fatal but natural consequence of an original mistake, namely their own
weakness in controlling me, which my grandfather would have called a
'want of circumspection.' I felt that I had only, in order to complete
their ill humour, to tell them that this perverse fellow who did not
appreciate M. de Norpois had found me extremely intelligent. For I had
observed that whenever my father decided that anyone, one of my school
friends for instance, was going astray—as I was at that moment—if
that person had the approval of somebody whom my father did not rate
high, he would see in this testimony the confirmation of his own stern
judgment. The evil merely seemed to him more pronounced. I could hear
him already exclaiming, "Of course, it all hangs together," an
expression that terrified me by the vagueness and vastness of the
reforms the introduction of which into my quiet life it seemed to
threaten. But since, were I not to tell them what Bergotte had said of
me, even then nothing could efface the impression my parents had
formed, that this should be made slightly worse mattered little.
Besides, they seemed to me so unfair, so completely mistaken, that not
only had I not any hope, I had scarcely any desire to bring them to a
more equitable point of view. At the same time, feeling, as the words
came from my lips, how alarmed they would be by the thought that I had
found favour in the sight of a person who dismissed clever men as
fools and had earned the contempt of all decent people, praise from
whom, since it seemed to me a thing to be desired, would only
encourage me in wrongdoing, it was in faltering tones and with a
slightly shamefaced air that, coming to the end of my story, I flung
them the bouquet of: "He told the Swanns that he had found me
extremely intelligent." Just as a poisoned dog, in a field, rushes,
without knowing why, straight to the grass which is the precise
antidote to the toxin that he has swallowed, so I, without in the
least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was
capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to
Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best reasons that I could have
urged, all the tributes that I could have paid him, must have proved
powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed.

"Oh! He said that he found you intelligent," repeated my mother. "I am
glad to hear that, because he is a man of talent."

"What! He said that, did he?" my father joined in. "I don't for a
moment deny his literary distinction, before which the whole world
bows; only it is a pity that he should lead that scarcely reputable
existence to which old Norpois made a guarded allusion, when he was
here," he went on, not seeing that against the sovran virtue of the
magic words which I had just repeated the depravity of Bergotte's
morals was little more able to contend than the falsity of his
judgment.

"But, my dear," Mamma interrupted, "we've no proof that it's true.
People say all sorts of things. Besides M. de Norpois may have the
most perfect manners in the world, but he's not always very
good–natured, especially about people who are not exactly his sort."

"That's quite true; I've noticed it myself," my father admitted.

"And then, too, a great deal ought to be forgiven Bergotte, since he
thinks well of my little son," Mamma went on, stroking my hair with
her fingers and fastening upon me a long and pensive gaze.