The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3)

by Marcel Proust

And if it was so important to her that other people should know we ‘had money’ (for she knew nothing about the use of what Saint-Loup called partitive articles and would say ‘have money’, ‘fetch water’),6 that we were rich, it was not because wealth alone, wealth without virtue, was the supreme good for Françoise, but virtue without wealth was not her ideal either. For her, wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between the two that she came to see their qualities as interchangeable, expecting material comfort from virtue and moral edification from wealth.

Our feelings belong to one world, our ability to name things and our thoughts to another; we can establish a concordance between the two, but not bridge the gap.

But I’ve strayed off the subject again.

What a surprise!

For this miracle to happen, all we need do is to approach our lips to the magic panel and address our call – often with too much delay, I agree – to the Vigilant Virgins whose voices we hear every day but whose faces we never get to know, and who are the guardian angels of the dizzy darkness whose portals they jealously guard; the All-Powerful Ones who conjure absent beings to our presence without our being permitted to see them; the Danaids20 of the unseen who constantly empty and refill and transmit to one another the urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we are murmuring private words to a loved one in the hope we are not overheard, call out with brutal invasiveness: ‘This is the operator speaking’; the forever fractious servants of the Mysteries, the shadowy priestesses of the Invisible, so quick to take offence, the Young Ladies of the Telephone!

We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.

But only individuals get punishment. Sometimes not even them.

We constantly strive to give our life its form, but by copying, in spite ourselves, like a drawing, the features of the person we are and not the person we should like to be.

It is true that, since we are always concerned to hide our feelings, we never think about the manner in which we express them. Then suddenly there is this obscene and unfamiliar animal inside us making itself heard, in a voice that can sometimes even manage to frighten the recipient of the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible disclosure of our defect or vice, as much as the sudden avowal indirectly and weirdly blurted by a criminal, who cannot refrain from confessing to a murder of which no one had ever thought him guilty.

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world’, from the people who have not directly perceived them, by an ambience whose permeability is infinitely variable and unknown to us;

What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbour; the things we had forgotten we had said, or even those we never did say, travel far off to provoke hilarity on another planet, and the image other people form of our actions and exploits no more corresponds to our own than an inaccurate tracing does to the original drawing, with empty spaces where there were black lines and inexplicable shapes where there were blank spaces.

egoists always have the last word; starting from the premise that their resolution is unshakeable, the more susceptible the feeling to which one appeals in them to make them abandon their resolve, the more objectionable they find, not themselves and their resistance to that appeal, but those who put them under pressure to resist, so that their own unbending behaviour may be carried to extremes of cruelty without them seeing the matter as anything more than the aggravated culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to feel hurt, to be in the right, and who thus lets them down by making them feel the pain of acting against their natural sense of compassion.

At that moment I would have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as readily as I had been to make him go and live with her permanently a few hours earlier. In the one case Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend, in the other his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet in that interval of a few hours I was the same man.

Such is society, where every being is double, and where the most transparent person, the most notorious, will be known to others only from within a protective shell, a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity.

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

For every one disorder that doctors cure with medication (it does happen occasionally, I’m told) there are ten others they provoke in healthy patients by inoculating them with that pathogenic agent a thousand times more virulent than all the germs you can name, the idea that one is ill.

We make a point of telling ourselves that death can come at any moment, but when we do so we think of that moment as something vague and distant, not as something that can have anything to do with the day that has already begun or might mean that death – or the first signs of its partial possession of us, after which it will never loosen its hold again – will occur this very afternoon, the almost inevitable afternoon with its hourly activities prescribed in advance. We look forward to our daily outing as a means of getting our month’s supply of fresh air; we have hesitated over which coat to wear, which cabman to hail; we are in the cab, the whole day is spread before us, a short one because we need to get back home early enough for the visit of a friend; we hope that it will be as fine again tomorrow; and we have no suspicion that death, accompanying us in some obscure way, has chosen this very day to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time, roughly at the moment when the carriage reaches the Champs-Élysées.

In a war, a man who does not love his country says nothing against it, but regards it as doomed, pities it, sees everything in the blackest terms.

That morning the newly installed heating boiler had been lit. The disagreeable noise it made – a sort of spasmodic hiccup – was in no way connected to my memories of Doncières, but its prolonged encounter with them inside me that afternoon was to force it into such an affinity with them that, after I thought I had more or less forgotten it, whenever I heard the central heating, it would bring them back to me.

So it isz not just the cupcakes which trigger the memory outbursts.

For, as a general rule, the shorter the time that separates us from the project we have in mind the longer it seems, because we measure it on a more reduced scale or simply because of the fact that we even bother to measure it. The papacy, we are told, measures time by the century and may in fact not think to measure it at all, since its goal is eternity.

Is it because we relive past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but by fixing our memory on the coolness or sunshine of one particular morning or evening spent in the shade of some isolated setting, enclosed, static, arrested, lost, remote from everything else, and because the changes gradually effected not only in the world outside but in our dreams and in our developing personality, changes which have carried us along through life from one phase to a wholly different one without our noticing, are therefore nullified, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, the gaps, the immense stretches of oblivion between the two, make us feel something like a huge gulf of difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two utterly dissimilar qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration?

Nothing stops us continuing to light candles in church or to consult doctors.

In the time that followed I was continually to be invited, however small the party, to the dinners and luncheons whose guests I had at one time imagined to resemble the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. And in fact they did assemble there like the early Christians, not to partake of merely material nourishment, which was in fact exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist;

People are never completely alike, their way of behaving towards us, even, one might say, at the same level of friendship, reveals differences which offset one another in the end. When I knew Mme de Montmorency, she took pleasure in saying disagreeable things to me, but if I asked her a favour, she would oblige me in the most generous way by effectively using all the influence she had to obtain it. Whereas another woman, Mme de Guermantes for instance, would never have wished to hurt my feelings, never said anything about me except what might give me pleasure, lavished upon me all those gestures of friendliness which for the Guermantes constituted the richness of moral life, but, had I asked her for the least thing beyond that, would not have budged an inch to procure it for me, as in those country houses where the guest is provided with a chauffeur and a valet but where it is impossible to obtain a glass of cider for which no provision has been made in the entertainment arrangements.

Poised for the first time in her life between two duties as far removed from each other as getting into her carriage to go to a dinner-party and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find no appropriate precedent to follow in the code of conventions and, not knowing which duty to honour, she felt she had no choice but to pretend to believe that the second alternative did not need to be raised, thus enabling her to comply with the first, which at that moment required less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that there was one. ‘You must be joking,’ she said to Swann.