Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

she had become incapable of concealing beneath a mask of impassivity what she was thinking, or rather – thinking puts it too high – what was going through her mind, nodding her head, pursing her lips, shrugging her shoulders at every impression she was feeling like a drunk does, or a small child, or poets who, sensing inspiration and oblivious to their surroundings, start composing a poem at a social gathering, furrowing their eyebrows and distorting their features, to the astonishment of the woman on their arm whom they are taking in to dinner.

Although still beautiful, she had become – something she had never been before – an object of infinite sympathy; because she who had betrayed Swann and everybody else was now being betrayed by the entire universe; and she had become so weak that she no longer even dared, now the roles were reversed, to defend herself against men. And soon she would not defend herself against death.

Even with the Duchesse de Guermantes, as with certain pages of Bergotte, her charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished when I was close to her, for it all lay in my memory and my imagination.

I consoled myself, like a shop-keeper whose book-keeping has become muddled, by confusing the value of having them there with the price my desire had once put on them.

‘It is very kind of you to remember that,’ she said to me fondly, for women refer to any recollection of their beauty as kindness, as artists do when you admire their work.

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 buffeted by a tragic gale, while the white strands of his thinner but still magnificent hair lashed with their spume the flooded promontory of his face. And I realized that, like the strange, unique glints which only the approach of an all-engulfing storm gives to rocks normally a different colour, the leaden grey of the stiff, worn cheeks, the almost white, foam-flecked grey of the swelling locks, the weak light still emanating from the scarcely seeing eyes, were not unreal colours, far from it, all too real, but uncanny, and borrowed from the palette and the lighting, inimitable in its terrifying and prophetic shades of darkness, of old age, and of the proximity of death.

This is how the pattern of things changes in this world; how the focus of empires, registers of wealth, and titles to social positions, everything that seemed permanent is perpetually recast, and the eyes of a man may over the course of a lifetime contemplate the most complete change precisely in those places where it had appeared most impossible.

From time to time, under the gaze of the old paintings assembled by Swann in a ‘collector’s’ arrangement which added a finishing touch to the antiquated, old-fashioned nature of this scene, with this very ‘Restoration’ Duc and this perfectly ‘Second Empire’ courtesan in one of the wraps he liked so much, the lady in pink would interrupt him with her bright chatter; he would stop dead and glare at her, fiercely. Perhaps he had come to realize that she too, like the Duchesse, sometimes said silly things; perhaps, in an old man’s hallucination, he thought that it was a badly timed witticism from Mme de Guermantes that had interrupted him, believing himself to be in the Guermantes hôtel, as chained animals might imagine for a moment that they are free in the deserts of Africa again. And brusquely lifting his head, with his little round yellow eyes, which had a wild animal gleam to them, he would fix her with one of the looks which had sometimes, when I was visiting Mme de Guermantes, and he thought she was talking too much, made me tremble. Thus the Duc stared for moment at the audacious lady in pink. But she stared back, her gaze not leaving his eyes, and at the end of a few moments which seemed very long to those watching, the vanquished old beast, remembering that he was not free at home with the Duchesse, in that Sahara whose entrance is marked by the door-mat at the top of the stairs, but in his cage in the Zoological Gardens at Mme de Forcheville’s, sank his head, from w...

Odette deceived M. de Guermantes, as she looked after him, without charm and without nobility. She was indifferent in this role as in all her others. Not because life had not frequently given her leading roles, but because she did not know how to play them.

So each individual – and I was one of these individuals myself – became a measure of duration for me each time he completed a revolution not just around himself, but around other people, and in particular by the successive positions he occupied in relation to me. And no doubt all these different planes, in relation to which Time, as I had just grasped in the course of this party, arranged my life, by giving me the idea that in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the flat psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space, added a new beauty to the resurrections that had taken place in my memory while I was lost in my thoughts alone in the library, since memory, by bringing the past into the present without making any changes to it, just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time through which a life is given reality.

Time, colourless and intangible, had been materialized in her so that I could, so to speak, see it and touch it, it had shaped her into a master-work, while at the same time on me, alas, it had merely done its work.

Such an individual feature, even if it was the only one visible, would have made one statue recognizable among thousands of others, and I marvelled that nature should have returned at the appointed time to the granddaughter, as to the mother and to the grandmother, like a great and original sculptor, to perform this powerful and decisive stroke of the chisel. I thought she was very beautiful: still full of hopes, laughing, formed out of the very years that I had lost, she looked like my youth.

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 labour awaited him!

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.

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.

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 for ever 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’.

I finally understood why the Duc de Guermantes, who had caused me to wonder, seeing him sitting on a chair, how he could have aged so little when he had so many more years than I had below him, had, the moment he rose and tried to stand upright, wavered on trembling legs, like those of some ancient archbishop whose metal crucifix is the only solid thing about him, and towards whom hasten a few strapping young seminarists, and could not move forward without shaking like a leaf, on the scarcely manageable summit of his eighty-three years, as if all men are perched on top of living stilts which never stop growing, sometimes becoming taller than church steeples, until eventually they make walking difficult and dangerous, and down from which, all of a sudden, they fall. (Was this the reason why the faces of men over a certain age were, even to the least aware eyes, so impossible to confuse with those of young men, and were visible only through a sort of cloudy aura of seriousness?) I began to be afraid that the stilts on which I myself was standing had already reached that height, and it did not seem to me that I would for very long have the strength to keep this past attached to me which already stretched so far down. 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 the...