Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

But in the end the Guermantes, and Gilberte, too, differed from the other people in society in that they thrust their roots further down into a past time of my life in which I dreamed more and believed more strongly in individuals. What at least I had before me, bored as I was chatting away first with one then with the other Guermantes, were those of my childhood imaginings whom I had found the most beautiful and believed the most inaccessible, and I consoled myself, like a shopkeeper whose bookkeeping has become muddled, by confusing the value of having them there with the price my desire had once put on them.

Certainly I intended to resume living in solitude from the next day onward, but this time with a specific purpose. Even at home I would not let people come to see me during my working moments, for the duty to write my book took precedence over that of being polite or even good-natured. They would probably insist, those who had not seen me for such a long time, coming to see me in the belief that I was cured, coming when the labor of their day or of their life was finished or interrupted, and having then the same need of me as I had once had of Saint-Loup; and because, as I had already noticed at Combray when my parents reprimanded me at the moment when, unknown to them, I had made the most praiseworthy resolutions, the internal clocks which are allocated to human beings are not all set to the same time. One strikes the hour of repose at the same time as another is striking that of work, one that of punishment by the judge when within the culprit the hour of repentance and self-improvement has long since struck. But I would have the courage to reply to those who came to see me, or who sent for me, that, because of essential matters which I needed to get abreast of immediately, I had an urgent, a crucially important meeting with myself.

And anyway was it not so that I could be occupied by them that I was living apart from those people who would complain about not seeing me, so that I could be more deeply occupied by them than I could ever have been with them, in order to try to reveal them to themselves, to make them real? What use would it have been if I had continued for yet more years to waste whole evenings bouncing my equally vain remarks off the hardly defunct echo of theirs, all for the sterile pleasure of a social contact which excludes everything that is not superficial? Was it not better that I should take these gestures they made, these things they said, their lives, their natures, and attempt to describe the curve they made and to isolate and define their laws?

But in the end, when intervals of rest and society became necessary, I felt that, rather than the intellectual conversations which society people thought useful for writers, a few light love affairs with young girls in flower would be a select nutrient which, if I had to, I might allow my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses.

What suddenly I hoped for again was what I had dreamed of at Balbec when, before I had yet met them, I had seen Albertine, Andrée and their friends walking beside the sea. But alas! I could no longer hope to rediscover those girls whom at that moment I desired so strongly. The action of the years which had transformed all the individuals I had seen today, including Gilberte herself, had certainly turned all those who still survived, as they would have done Albertine if she had not been killed, into women very different from my recollections of them. It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder than this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to that which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being. It is simply, as I had often had reason to suspect, that what seems unique in a person whom one desires does not in fact belong to her. But the passage of time was giving me a more complete proof of this since, after twenty years, spontaneously, I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now posses...

In the same way that Elstir liked to see incarnate before him, in his wife, the Venetian beauty he had often painted in his works, I gave myself the excuse that there was a degree of aesthetic selfishness in my attraction toward beautiful women who could cause me pain, and I felt something close to idolatry for the future Gilbertes, the future Duchesses de Guermantes, the future Albertines whom I might meet and who, it seemed to me, might inspire me, as if I were a sculptor walking among fine classical marbles. I ought, though, to have realized that even earlier than this attraction to each of them was my sense of the mystery surrounding them and that therefore, rather than asking Gilberte to introduce me to young girls, I would do better to go out to places where we have no connection with them, where between them and oneself one feels something unbridgeable, where two steps away, on the beach, going for a bathe, one feels separated from them by impossibility. That is how my sense of mystery had been able to attach itself in turn to Gilberte, to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to Albertine and to so many others. No doubt in due course the unknown, and almost the unknowable, had become the known, familiar, indifferent or painful, yet it always retained something of the charm it had once possessed.

And to tell the truth, like those calendars the postman brings to get his Christmas box, there was not one of my years which might not have had as its frontispiece, or intercalated between its days, the image of a woman I had desired; an image made even more arbitrary by the fact that sometimes I had never seen the woman, as for example when it was Mme Putbus’s maid, or Mlle d’Orgeville, or some girl whose name I had glimpsed in the society page of a newspaper, among “the bevy of charming waltzers.” I would imagine her as beautiful, fall in love with her, and create for her an ideal body, its height dominating a landscape in the part of the country where, as I had read in the Annuaire des châteaux, her family estates were to be found. For the women whom I had known, this landscape was at least twofold. Each woman arose, at a different point in my life, towering up like a local tutelary deity, first in the middle of one of these dream landscapes the juxtapositions of which checkered my life, the landscape in which I had first wanted to imagine her, then seen from the viewpoint of memory, surrounded by the places where I had known her and of which she reminded me, remaining attached to them, for although our lives are vagabond, our memories are sedentary and although we may move endlessly on, our memories, fastened to the places from which we free ourselves, continue to lead their unadventurous lives there, like the friends which a traveler makes briefly in a town and whom h...

In the same way Gilberte, whom nonetheless I was asking, without quite realizing that this was what I was doing, to enable me to have friends who would be like she had once been, was no longer anything to me but Mme de Saint-Loup. I no longer thought, when I saw her, of the part played in my love for her, which she had also forgotten about, by my admiration for Bergotte, for Bergotte once again simply the author of his books, without my remembering (save in rare and entirely distinct moments of recollection) the emotion of having been presented to the man, the disappointment, the astonishment at the conversation, in the drawing-room with the white fur rugs, filled with violets, where so many lamps were brought in so early, and set on so many consoles. All the memories which composed the original Mlle Swann had in effect been subtracted from the Gilberte of today, kept at a distance by the powers of attraction of another universe, grouped around a phrase of Bergotte’s with which they fused into a unity, and steeped in the scent of hawthorn.

Everybody looked at one another, not quite knowing what expression to assume, a few ill-mannered young people stifled giggles, each person cast furtive glances at his neighbor, the sort that at smart dinner-parties, when there is a new implement in front of you, a lobster fork, a sugar grater, etc., whose purpose and use you do not know, you cast at some more authoritative guest who, you hope, will be served before you are and thus give you the opportunity to copy what they do. You do the same, too, when somebody quotes a line of poetry you do not know, but which you want to look as if you do know, when, as if pausing to permit somebody to enter a door first, you allow another, better-informed person, as if it were a favor, to have the pleasure of saying where it comes from. In this way, while they listened to the actress, everyone waited, heads lowered and eyes inquiring, for other people to take the initiative by laughing, or criticizing, or weeping, or applauding.

“She was a good lady who said things of unbelievable silliness,”

The old Duc de Guermantes no longer went out, for he spent all his days and his evenings with her. But today he did come for a moment to see her, despite the irritation of meeting his wife. I had not noticed him, and probably would not have recognized him if he had not been clearly pointed out to me. He was little more than a ruin, but a superb one, or perhaps not even a ruin so much as that most romantic of beautiful objects, a rock in a storm. Lashed on all sides by the waves of suffering, of anger at suffering, and of the rising tide of death, by which he was surrounded, his face, crumbling like a block of stone, still kept the style, the hauteur I had always admired; it was worn away like one of those beautiful but half-obliterated classical heads with which we are still always glad to ornament a study. Only it seemed to belong to a period more ancient than before, not only because of the way in which its once more lustrous material had become rough and broken, but because an expression of subtlety and playfulness had been succeeded by an involuntary, an unconscious expression, constructed out of illness, the struggle against death, mere resistance and the difficulty of living. The arteries, all their suppleness gone, had given his once beaming face a sculptural rigidity. And although the Duc had no inkling of this, his neck, his cheeks, his forehead all displayed indications that the human being within, as if obliged to cling tenaciously to each minute, seemed to be b...

Mlle de Saint-Loup. Was she not, as indeed most human beings are, like one of those “stars” in forests, crossroads where roads converge which have come, as they do in our lives, from the most diverse starting-points? They were numerous enough, in my case, the roads leading to Mlle de Saint-Loup and radiating out again from her. Above all it was the two great “ways” which had led to her, along which I had had so many walks and so many dreams—through her father, Robert de Saint-Loup, the Guermantes way, through her mother, Gilberte, the Méséglise way which was the “way by Swann’s.” One, through the little girl’s mother and the Champs-Élysées, led me to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to the Méséglise way; the other, through her father, to my afternoons at Balbec, where I could visualize him close to the sunlit sea. Already some connecting roads were establishing themselves between these two main routes. For the actual Balbec, where I had met Saint-Loup, was a place that I had so much wanted to go to very largely because of what Swann had told me about the churches there, especially about the Persian church, and then again, through Robert de Saint-Loup, the nephew of the Duchesse de Guermantes, I came back, in Combray once more, to the Guermantes way. But there were still many other points in my life to which Mlle de Saint-Loup led, to the lady in pink, who was her grandmother and whom I had met at my great-uncle’s house. A new connecting road here, because this great-uncle...

Finally, this idea of Time was valuable to me for one other reason, it was a spur, it told me that it was time to start, if I wanted to achieve what I had sometimes sensed during the course of my life, in brief flashes, on the Guermantes way, in my carriage-rides with Mme de Villeparisis, which had made me feel that life was worth living. How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labor awaited him! To give some idea of it, one would have to go to the most elevated and divergent arts for comparisons; for this writer, who would also need to show the contrasting aspects of each character to create depth, would have to prepare his book scrupulously, perpetually regrouping his forces as in an offensive, and putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries, the explanations for which are probably to be found only in other worlds, while our occasional inklings of them are what, in life and in art, move us most deeply. In books of this scope, there are parts which have never had time to be more than sketched in ...

But to return to myself, I was thinking about my book in more modest terms, and it would even be a mistake to say that I was thinking of those who would read it as my readers. For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses of the sort the optician at Combray used to offer his customers; my book, but a books thanks to which I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves. With the result that I would not ask them to praise me or to denigrate me, only to tell me if it was right, if the words they were reading in themselves were really the ones I had written (possible divergences in this regard not necessarily always originating, it should be said, in my having been wrong, but sometimes in the fact that the reader’s eyes might not be of a type for which my book was suitable as an aid for self-reading).

I thought that at my big light-wood table, watched by Françoise, who, in the way that all unpretentious people who live alongside us do, had an intuitive understanding of my task (and I had sufficiently forgotten Albertine to have forgiven Françoise for any harm she had done her), I would work next to her, and work almost in the same way as her (at least in the way she used to in the past: she was now so old she could hardly see at all); for, pinning a supplementary page in place here and there, I should construct my book, I don’t dare say, ambitiously, as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making. When I did not have all of what Françoise called my manuscribbles within reach, and could not find just the one that I wanted, Françoise would sympathize with my annoyance, as she always used to be saying how she could not sew if she did not have the right number thread and the proper buttons. And then through being so close to my life, she had developed a kind of instinctive understanding of literary work, more accurate than that of many intelligent people, let alone fools. Once, for example, when I had done my article for the Figaro, when the old butler, with the kind of commiseration which always slightly exaggerates the laborious nature of any alien task, like people who say: “How it must tire you to sneeze like that,” expressed his pity for writers by saying: “What a headache that must be,” Françoise, by contrast, sensed my happiness and respecte...

Because I often had to glue one piece onto another, the papers that Françoise called my manuscribbles kept getting torn. But Françoise would always be able to help me mend them, just as she put patches on the worn-out parts of her dresses or, while she was waiting for the glazier, as I was for the printer, she would stick a piece of newspaper over a broken pane in the kitchen window. Françoise would say to me, pointing to my note-books, eaten away like wood that insects have got into: “It’s all moth-eaten, look, that’s a pity, there’s a page here that looks like lace,” and examining it closely like a tailor: “I don’t think I can mend this, it’s too far gone. It’s a shame, those might have been your best ideas. You know what they used to say in Combray, even the best furriers don’t know as much as the moths. They always get into the best material.” But given that individual entities (whether human or not) in a book are made up of a large number of impressions which, taken from many girls, many churches, many sonatas, are then used to form a single sonata, a single church, a single girl, should I not make my book in the same way as Françoise made her braised beef in aspic, which M. de Norpois had so much liked, in which the jelly was enriched by so many carefully selected extra pieces of meat? And I was finally on the point of achieving what I had so longed for on my walks on the Guermantes way and believed impossible, as I had believed it to be impossible, when I got back h...

Yes, the idea of Time that I had just formed was telling me that it was time to apply myself to the work. It was high time; but, and this was the explanation for the anxiety which had beset me as soon as I entered the drawing-room, when the made-up faces had given me the idea of lost time, was there still time, and was I even still in a sufficiently fit condition? The mind has its landscapes and only a short time is allowed for their contemplation. My life had been like a painter who climbs up a road overhanging a lake that is hidden from view by a screen of rocks and trees. Through a gap he glimpses it, he has it all there in front of him, he takes up his brushes. But the night is already falling when there is no more painting, and after which no day will break. Only, one prerequisite of my work as I had just recently conceived it in the library was the thorough investigation of impressions which needed first to be re-created through memory. But that was threadbare. First of all, nothing having yet been started, I might well feel anxious, even though I might think, on account of my age, that I still had a few years ahead of me, for my hour might strike at any moment. For I real...

An accident affecting the brain was not even necessary. Its symptoms, which I perceived as a feeling of emptiness in my head and a tendency to forget everything so that things only ever recurred by chance, as when in sorting out one’s possessions one finds something one had forgotten or even had been searching for, were making me like a hoarder whose strongbox had a hole in it through which the wealth was progressively disappearing. For a while there existed a self which deplored the loss of thes...

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times. To take the most recent period, had I not been more attached to Albertine than to my life? Could I conceive of my personality, then, without my love for her continuing? Now that I no longer loved her, I was no longer the being who loved her, but a different being who did not love her, I had stopped loving her when I became somebody else. But there was no suffering involved in becoming this other person, in not loving Albertine any longer; and certainly some day not having my body any longer could not possibly seem as sad, from any point of view, as not loving Albertine one day had once seemed to be. And yet, how little I cared now about not loving her! These successive deaths, so feared by the self they were doomed to annihilate, so meaningless, so gentle after they had happened and when the person who was afraid of them was no longer there to feel them, had enabled me for some time ...

When in a few minutes I made my way home through the Champs-Élysées, who was to say that I would not be struck down by the same illness as my grandmother, one afternoon when she had gone there with me for a walk which was to be her last, although she had no suspicion, such is the ignorance in which we live, that the hand of the clock had, unawares, arrived at the point when the clenched spring of the clockwork was to strike the hour? Perhaps the fear of having already lived through almost the whole of the minute which precedes the first stroke of that hour, when it is already being prepared, perhaps this fear of the stroke that was about to toll in my brain, was like a shadowy recognition of what was about to occur, like a reflection in consciousness of the precarious state of the brain when its arteries are about to give up, something which is no more impossible than the sudden acceptance of death by men who have been wounded and who, although still lucid, when both the doctor and their desire to live attempt to mislead them, say, as they see what is about to happen: “I’m going to die, I’m ready,” and write their farewells to their wife.

I had received an invitation from Mme Molé, and learned that Mme Sazerat’s son was dead. I had decided to use one of the hours after which I could no longer utter a word, my tongue being as tied as my grandmother’s had been when she was dying, nor even swallow milk, to send my excuses to Mme Molé and my condolences to Mme Sazerat. But after a few moments I forgot what I was meant to be doing. A fortunate forgetfulness, for the memory of my work was alert and ready to use the unexpected gift of the extra hour to lay the first foundations. Unfortunately, as I took hold of my note-book to start writing, Mme Molé’s card slid out and caught my attention. Immediately the forgetful self, which was able to dominate the other one, as is always the case with scrupulous barbarians who have been out to dinner, pushed away the note-book and wrote to Mme Molé (who would no doubt have been very impressed, had she known it, at my putting my reply to her invitation ahead of my architectural labors). Then a word in my reply suddenly reminded me that Mme Sazerat had lost her son, and I wrote to her, too, then, having sacrificed a genuine duty to the factitious obligation to show that I was sensitive and polite, I fell back exhausted, closed my eyes and could do nothing but vegetate for a week.

Yet while all these pointless duties, to which I was always ready to sacrifice the real one, had left my head after a few minutes, the idea of my construction never left me for an instant. I did not know if it would be a church in which the faithful would gradually be able to learn truths and discover harmonies, the great general plan, or if it would remain—like a druidic monument on the high point of an island—something forever unvisited. But I had decided to devote all my powers to it, which seemed to be failing regretfully and so as to leave me time, once the walls were up, to close “the funerary gate.”

Soon I was able to show people a few sketches. Nobody understood anything. Even those who were well disposed toward my perception of the truths which I intended subsequently to engrave within the temple congratulated me on having discovered them with a “microscope,” when on the contrary I had used a telescope to make out things which were indeed very small, but only because they were situated a long way away, each of them a world in itself. In the places where I was trying to find general laws, I was accused of sifting through endless detail. So what was the point of all of it? I had had a certain facility when I was young, and Bergotte had thought the pages I had written as a student “splendid.” But instead of working, I had lived a life of idleness, of dissipation and pleasure, of illness, anxieties and obsessions, and was undertaking my work on the eve of my death, without knowing anything about my craft. I no longer felt strong enough to face up to my obligations to other people, nor to my duties toward my thought and my work, still less to both of them.

The organization of my memory, of my preoccupations, was bound up with my work, perhaps because, whereas the letters were forgotten the moment after, the idea of my book was in my head, always the same, in a perpetual process of becoming.

For myself, what I had to write was something different from a dying man’s farewell, longer, and for more than one person. Longer to write. In the daytime, at best, I could try to sleep. If I worked, it would be only at night. But I would need a good number of nights, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand. And I would be living with the anxiety of not knowing whether the Master of my destiny, less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, when I broke off my story each morning, would stay my death sentence, and permit me to take up the continuation again the following evening.

One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one’s books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.

It would be a book as long as the Arabian Nights perhaps, but quite different. It is probably true that when one is in love with a work of literature one wants to make something as like it as possible, but one needs to sacrifice one’s love of the moment, think not of one’s own taste, but of a truth which does not ask for your preferences and forbids you to think about them. And only if one follows it will one sometimes find that one has come upon what one abandoned, that, by forgetting them, one has written the Arabian Nights or the Mémoires of Saint-Simon for a new age. But was there still enough time for me? Was it not too late?

But was not the re-creation through memory of impressions, which then needed to be investigated, illuminated and transformed into intellectual equivalents, one of the preconditions, almost the very essence, of the work of art as I had conceived it just now in the library?

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother’s face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again . . . Then I suddenly thought that, if I did still have the strength to complete my work, this afternoon party—like certain days long ago at Combray which had influenced me—which had, just today, given me both the idea of my work and the fear of not being able to accomplish it, would be bound to mark it more than anything else with the form that I had sensed long ago in the church at Combray, and which normally remains invisible to us, the form of Time.

There are, of course, many other errors of the senses, and we have seen how various episodes of this narrative had proved this to me, which falsify our perception of the real appearance of the world. But where necessary, by doing everything I could to give the most exact transcription, I would be able to keep the location of sounds unchanged, to abstain from detaching them from their cause, besides which the intellect situates them only after the event, even though to make the rain sing gently in the middle of the room and to make the bubbling of our tisane fall torrentially in the courtyard ought, after all, to be no more disconcerting than what painters have done so often when they have depicted, very close or very far away, depending on how the laws of perspective, the intensity of color and our first illusory glance make them appear to us, a sail or a peak, which the rational mind will then relocate, sometimes across enormous distances. I might, even though the error would be more serious, continue the general practice of adding features to the face of a passerby, although instead of a nose, cheeks and a chin, there should not really be anything except an empty space over which would flicker, at most, the reflection of our desires. And even if I did not have the leisure to prepare, and this was a much more important matter, the hundred masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face, if only because of all the eyes that see it and the different meanings they...

It was this notion of embodied time, of past years not being separated from us, that it was now my intention to make such a prominent feature in my work, and it was at that very moment of decision, in the hôtel of the Princesse de Guermantes, that I heard that sound of my parents’ footsteps as they led M. Swann to the gate, heard the tinkling of the bell, resilient, ferruginous, inexhaustible, shrill and fresh, which told me that M. Swann had gone and that Mama was on her way upstairs, heard the very sounds themselves, heard them even though they were situated so far away in the past. Then, as I thought of all the events which had to be set in place between the moment when I heard those sounds and this party at the Guermantes’, I was frightened to think that the bell could still be ringing in me without my being able to do anything to alter the shrillness of its tinkling, since, no longer remembering very clearly how it faded away, and wanting to rediscover this, and to listen to it properly, I had to try to block out the sound of the conversations which the masks were holding all around me. In order to try to hear it at closer quarters, I was forced to go back down into myself. It must therefore be that this tinkling was always there, and also, between it and the present moment, the whole of this past, unrolled indefinitely, which I did not know that I was carrying. When it tinkled, I already existed, and for me still to be able to hear the tinkling there must have been n...

Therefore, if enough time was left to me to complete my work, my first concern would be to describe the people in it, even at the risk of making them seem colossal and unnatural creatures, as occupying a place far larger than the very limited one reserved for them in space, a place in fact almost infinitely extended, since they are in simultaneous contact, like giants immersed in the years, with such distant periods of their lives, between which so many days have taken up their place—in Time.