In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (22 page)

But as a theory requires to be stated as a whole, Swann, after this
momentary irritation, and after wiping his eyeglass, finished saying
what was in his mind in these words, words which were to assume later
on in my memory the importance of a prophetic warning, which I had not
had the sense to take: "The danger of that kind of love, however, is
that the woman's subjection calms the man's jealousy for a time but
also makes it more exacting. After a little he will force his mistress
to live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day
and night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in
trouble."

I reverted to M. de Norpois. "You must never trust him; he has the
most wicked tongue!" said Mme. Swann in an accent which seemed to me
to indicate that M. de Norpois had been 'saying things' about her,
especially as Swann looked across at his wife with an air of rebuke,
as though to stop her before she went too far.

Meanwhile Gilberte, who had been told to go and get ready for our
drive, stayed to listen to the conversation, and hovered between her
mother and her father, leaning affectionately against his shoulder.
Nothing, at first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme. Swann,
who was dark, than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But
after looking at them both for a moment one saw in Gilberte many of
the features—for instance, the nose cut short with a sharp,
unfaltering decision by the unseen sculptor whose chisel repeats its
work upon successive generations—the expression, the movements of her
mother; to take an illustration from another form of art, she made one
think of a portrait that was not a good likeness of Mme. Swann, whom
the painter, to carry out some whim of colouring, had posed in a
partial disguise, dressed to go out to a party in Venetian
'character.' And as not merely was she wearing a fair wig, but every
atom of a swarthier complexion had been discharged from her flesh
which, stripped of its veil of brownness, seemed more naked, covered
simply in rays of light shed by an internal sun, this 'make–up' was not
just superficial but was incarnate in her; Gilberte had the appearance
of embodying some fabulous animal or of having assumed a mythological
disguise. This reddish skin was so exactly that of her father that
nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was being created, to solve
the problem of how to reconstruct Mme. Swann piecemeal, without any
material at her disposal save the skin of M. Swann. And nature had
utilised this to perfection, like a master carver who makes a point of
leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in evidence. On Gilberte's
face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette's nose, the
skin was raised so as to preserve intact the two beauty spots of M.
Swann. It was a new variety of Mme. Swann that was thus obtained,
growing there by her side like a white lilac–tree beside a purple. At
the same time it did not do to imagine the boundary line between these
two likenesses as definitely fixed. Now and then, when Gilberte
smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father's cheek upon her
mother's face, as though some one had mixed them together to see what
would result from the blend; this oval grew distinct, as an embryo
grows into a living shape, it lengthened obliquely, expanded, and a
moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte's eyes there was the frank
and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when
she gave me the agate marble and said, "Keep it, to remind yourself of
our friendship." But were one to put a question to Gilberte, to ask
her what she had been doing, then one saw in those same eyes the
embarrassment, the uncertainty, the prevarication, the misery that
Odette used in the old days to shew, when Swann asked her where she
had been and she gave him one of those lying answers which, in those
days, drove the lover to despair and now made him abruptly change the
conversation, as an incurious and prudent husband. Often in the
Champs–Elysées I was disturbed by seeing this look on Gilberte's face.
But as a rule my fears were unfounded. For in her, a purely physical
survival of her mother, this look (if nothing else) had ceased to have
any meaning. It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go
home for some lesson, that Gilberte's pupils executed that movement
which, in time past, in the eyes of Odette, had been caused by the
fear of disclosing that she had, during the day, opened the door to
one of her lovers, or was—at that moment in a hurry to be at some
trysting–place. So one could see the two natures of M. and Mme. Swann
ebb and flow, encroaching alternately one upon the other in the body
of this Melusine.

It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both
its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the merits and
defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good
qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents you will find
but one in the child, and allied to that very fault in the other
parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it. Indeed, the
incarnation of a good moral quality in an incompatible physical
blemish is often one of the laws of filial resemblance. Of two
sisters, one will combine with the proud bearing of her father the
mean little soul of her mother; the other, abundantly endowed with the
paternal intelligence, will present it to the world in the aspect
which her mother has made familiar; her mother's shapeless nose and
scraggy bosom are become the bodily covering of talents which you had
learned to distinguish beneath a superb presence. With the result that
of each of the sisters one can say with equal justification that it is
she who takes more after one or other of her parents. It is true that
Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two
Gilbertes. The two natures, her father's and her mother's, did more
than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of
her—and yet one cannot exactly say that, which would let it be
thought that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering by being
the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one and
the other, and at any given moment no more than one of the two, that
is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering
accordingly, the better Gilberte not being able at the time, on
account of her momentary absence, to detect the other's lapse from
virtue. And so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of
an ignoble kind. When the other spoke to you from the heart of her
father, she held broad views, you would have liked to engage with her
upon a fine and beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as
your arrangements were being completed, her mother's heart would
already have resumed its control; hers was the voice that answered;
and you were disappointed and vexed—almost baffled, as in the face of
a substitution of one person for another—by an unworthy thought, an
insincere laugh, in which Gilberte saw no harm, for they sprang from
what she herself at that moment was. Indeed, the disparity was at
times so great between these two Gilbertes that you asked yourself,
though without finding an answer, what on earth you could have said or
done to her, last time, to find her now so different. When she
herself had arranged to meet you somewhere, not only did she fail to
appear, and offer no excuse afterwards, but, whatever the influence
might have been that had made her change her mind, she shewed herself
in so different a character when you did meet her that you might well
have supposed that, taken in by a likeness such as forms the plot of
the
Menaechmi
, you were now talking to some one not the person who
had so politely expressed her desire to see you, had she not shewn
signs of an ill–humour which revealed that she felt herself to be in
the wrong, and wished to avoid the necessity of an explanation.

"Now then, run along and get ready; you're keeping us waiting," her
mother reminded her.

"I'm so happy here with my little Papa; I want to stay just for a
minute," replied Gilberte, burying her head beneath the arm of her
father, who passed his fingers lovingly through her bright hair.

Swann was one of those men who, having lived for a long time amid
the illusions of love, have seen the prosperity that they themselves
brought to numberless women increase the happiness of those women
without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their
benefactors; but in their child they believe that they can feel an
affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them
to remain in the world after their death. When there should no longer
be any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle. Swann, or a Mme.
something–else,
née
Swann, who would continue to love the vanished
father. Indeed, to love him too well, perhaps, Swann may have been
thinking, for he acknowledged Gilberte's caress with a "Good girl!" in
that tone, made tender by our apprehension, to which, when we think of
the future, we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a
creature who is destined to survive us. To conceal his emotion, he
joined in our talk about Berma. He pointed out to me, but in a
detached, a listless tone, as though he wished to remain to some
extent unconcerned in what he was saying, with what intelligence, with
what an astonishing fitness the actress said to Œnone, "You knew it!"
He was right. That intonation at least had a value that was really
intelligible, and might therefore have satisfied my desire to find
incontestable reasons for admiring Berma. But it was by the very fact
of its clarity that it did not at all content me. Her intonation was
so ingenious, so definite in intention and in its meaning, that it
seemed to exist by itself, so that any intelligent actress might have
learned to use it. It was a fine idea; but whoever else should
conceive it as fully must possess it equally. It remained to Berma's
credit that she had discovered it, but is one entitled to use the
word 'discover' when the object in question is something that would not
be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong
essentially to one's own nature seeing that some one else may
afterwards reproduce it?

"Upon my soul, your presence among us does raise the tone of the
conversation!" Swann observed to me, as though to excuse himself to
Bergotte; for he had formed the habit, in the Guermantes set, of
entertaining great artists as if they were just ordinary friends whom
one seeks only to make eat the dishes that they like, play the games,
or, in the country, indulge in whatever form of sport they please. "It
seems to me that we're talking a great deal of art," he went on. "But
it's so nice, I do love it!" said Mme. Swann, throwing me a look of
gratitude, as well from good nature as because she had not abandoned
her old aspirations towards a more intellectual form of conversation.
After this it was to others of the party, and principally to Gilberte,
that Bergotte addressed himself. I had told him everything that I felt
with a freedom which had astonished me, and was due to the fact that,
having acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those
hours of solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better
part of myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence,
I was less frightened by him than by a person with whom I should have
been talking for the first time. And yet, for the same reason, I was
greatly disturbed by the thought of the impression that I must have
been making on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for
my ideas dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant
time in which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray.
And yet I ought perhaps to have reminded myself that, since it was in
all sincerity, abandoning myself to the train of my thoughts, that I
had felt, on the one hand, so intensely in sympathy with the work of
Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theatre, a disappointment the
reason of which I did not know, those two instinctive movements which
had both carried me away could not be so very different from one
another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of
Bergotte which I had loved in his books could not be anything entirely
foreign and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to
express it. For my intelligence must be a uniform thing, perhaps
indeed there exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in
the world participates, towards which each of us from the position of
his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if
everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a
single stage. Of course, the ideas which I was tempted to seek to
disentangle were probably not those whose depths Bergotte usually
sounded in his books. But if it were one and the same intelligence
which we had, he and I, at our disposal, he must, when he heard me
express those ideas, be reminded of them, cherish them, smile upon
them, keeping probably, in spite of what I supposed, before his mind's
eye a whole world of intelligence other than that an excerpt of which
had passed into his books, an excerpt upon which I had based my
imagination of his whole mental universe. Just as priests, having the
widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins
which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest
experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas
most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its
own writings. I ought to have told myself all this (though, for that
matter, it was none too consoling a thought, for the benevolent
condescension of great minds has as a corollary the incomprehension
and hostility of small; and one derives far less happiness from the
friendliness of a great writer, which one finds expressed, failing a
more intimate association, in his books, than suffering from the
hostility of a woman whom one did not choose for her intelligence but
cannot help loving). I ought to have told myself all this, but I did
not; I was convinced that I had appeared a fool to Bergotte, when
Gilberte whispered in my ear: