The Prisoner

 “Is this what happens to the youth of women? We meet them, and then, if suddenly we want to see them again, will they always have grown old? Is the young, desirable woman like one of those stage roles which are created by particular actresses and then, as they decay, inevitably passed on to other stars? But then it is no longer the same role.” Then I was overcome by sadness. We experience in our sleep many instances of Pity, like the different pietas of the Renaissance, but unlike them ours are not carved in marble but evanescent. They have their value, however, which is to keep us in touch with a certain kinder, more humane view of things that is only too easily submerged in the chilly, even hostile good sense of the waking state. Thus I was reminded of the promise I had made to myself at Balbec, always to feel pity for Francoise. And for the rest of that morning at least I would manage not to be irritated by Francoise’s quarrels with the butler, and to be gentle with her, in whom others saw so little good. For that morning only, however; and I should have tried to provide myself with a somewhat more stable code of conduct, for, just as a people cannot long be governed by policies based on pure sentiment, men cannot be in thrall to the memory of their dreams. Already this dream was beginning to fade. By trying to hold on to it in order to describe it, I sent it fleeing all the faster. My eyelids were no longer so firmly sealed over my eyes. If I tried to reconstruct my dream, they would open altogether. We constantly have to choose between health and wisdom on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been too much of a coward to choose the second. What is more, the dangerous power I was renouncing was even more dangerous than we realize. By deliberately varying the conditions in which we fall asleep, we can forfeit the power, not only of dreaming but of falling asleep: it is not only our dreams that vanish but, sometimes for days or years together, sleep itself, which is divine but unstable: the smallest shock can render it volatile. It is to be found in the company of habit, which anchors it every evening to its accustomed place, preserving it from any disturbance. But if habits are altered, if it is no longer tied to them, it dissolves like a vapor. Like youth and love, once lost it cannot be found again. 

&

I was ready. Francoise had not telephoned yet: should I leave without waiting? But how did I know if she would find Albertine? If she were ng already backstage? And even if Francoise found her, would she let herself, taken home? Half an hour later, the telephone rang and hope and feat bey wildly in my heart. A flying column of sounds, commanded by an employee, of the telephone company, brought to me with instant speed the words of the operator, not of Francoise, whose ancestral shyness and melancholy, applied to an object unknown to her forefathers, forbade her to approach telephone receiver, even if the alternative were to visit a contagious invalid in person. She had found Albertine alone in the promenade gallery and she taking only a moment to tell Andrée that she was going, had promptly left with Francoise. “She wasn’t angry? Oh, sorry! Would you please ask the lady if the young lady wasn’t angry?—The lady asked me to tell you that she wasn’t angry at all, quite the opposite; anyway, if she wasn’t pleased, you couldn’ tell. They're going to the Trois Quartiers now and they'll be back at two oclock.” I knew that two oclock must mean three o'clock, since it was after two already. But it was one of Francoise’s particular weaknesses, a per manent, incurable weakness of the kind we call congenital, never to be able to tell the time correctly. I have never been able to understand what went on in her head when she looked at her watch and, if it were two o'clock, said that it was one o'clock, or three; I have never been able to tell whether the phenomenon which occurred then had as its locus Francoise’s  eyesight her thought, or her language; what is certain is that it always occurred. Humanity is very old. Heredity and breeding have given an irresistible scrength to bad habits and vicious reflexes. One person sneezes and his chest rattles when he passes a rose-bush, another comes out in a rash at the smell of fresh paint; many people have stomach-aches when they have to travel, and grandsons of thieves who are millionaires and generous cannot resise robbing of fifty francs, As far as explaining Francoise’s inability to tell the time is concerned, she herself certainly never gave me any clues. For in spree of che anger usually produced in me by her wrong answers, Francoise would neither apologize for her mistake nor try to explain it. She stayed mute, looking as if she could not hear me, which completed my exasperation. I would have liked to hear one word of excuse, if only to throw it back at her, but there was nothing.  Only indifferent silence.

&

240 THE CAPTIVE 

 I have said that Bergotte never went out of doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room, he would be smothered in shawls, rugs, all the things with which a person covers himself before exposing himself to intense cold or going on a railway journey. He would apologise for them to the few friends whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary; pointing to his tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, he would say merrily: “After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey.” Thus he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an end, for, however far forward into future generations the works of men may shine, there must none the less be men. If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it. 

In the months that preceded his death, Bergotte suffered from insomnia, and what was worse, whenever he did fall asleep, from nightmares which, if he awoke, made him reluctant to go to sleep again. He had long been a lover of dreams, even bad dreams, because thanks to them, thanks to the contradiction they present to the reality which we have before us in our waking state, they give us, at the moment of waking if not before, the profound sensation of having slept. But Bergotte’s nightmares were not like that. When he spoke of nightmares, he used in the past to mean unpleasant things that happened in his brain. Latterly, it was as though from somewhere outside himself that he would see a hand armed with a damp cloth which, rubbed over his face by an evil woman, kept trying to wake him; or an intolerable itching in his thighs; or the rage—because Bergotte had murmured in his sleep that he was driving badly—of a raving lunatic of a cabman who flung himself upon the writer, biting and gnawing his fingers. Finally, as soon as it had grown sufficiently dark in his sleep, nature would arrange a sort of undress rehearsal of the apoplectic stroke that was to carry him off. Bergotte would arrive in a carriage beneath the porch of Swann’s new house, and would try to get out. A shattering attack of dizziness would pin him to his seat; the concierge would try to help him out; he would remain seated, unable to lift himself up or straighten his legs. He would cling to the stone pillar in front of him, but could not find sufficient support to enable him to stand. 

He consulted doctors who, flattered to be summoned by him, saw in his virtues as an incessant worker (he had done nothing for twenty years), in overwork, the cause of his ailments. They advised him not to read frightening stories (he never read anything), to take more advantage of the sunshine, which was “indispensable to life” (he had owed a few years of comparative health only to his rigorous confinement at home), to take more nourishment (which made him thinner, and nourished nothing but his nightmares). One of his doctors was blessed with an argumentative and contrary spirit, and whenever Bergotte saw him in the absence of the others and, in order not to offend him, suggested to him as his own ideas what the others had advised, this doctor, thinking that Bergotte was trying to get him to prescribe something that he liked, would at once forbid it, often for reasons invented so hurriedly to meet the case that, in face of the material objections which Bergotte raised, the doctor, contradicting him, was obliged in the same sentence to contradict himself, but, for fresh reasons, repeated the original prohibition. Bergotte would return to one of the previous doctors, a man who prided himself on his wit, especially in the presence of one of the masters of the pen, and who, if Bergotte insinuated: “I seem to remember, though, that Dr X-———told me—long ago, of course—that that might affect my kidneys and my brain . , . ," would smile mischievously, raise his finger and announce: “I said use, } did not say abuse. Naturally every drug, if one takes it in excess, becomes a double-edged weapon.” There is in the human body a certain instinct for what is beneficial to us, as there is in the heart for what is our moral duty, an instinct which no authorisation by a doctor of medicine or divinity can replace. We know that cold baths are bad for us, but we like them: we can always find a doctor to recommend them, not to prevent them from doing us harm. From each of these doctors Bergotte took something which, in his own wisdom, he had forbidden himself for years past. After a few weeks, his old troubles had reappeared and the new ones had become worse. Maddened by uninterrupted pain, to which was added insomnia broken only by brief spells of nightmare, Bergotte called in no more doctors and tried with success, but to excess, different narcotics, trustingly reading the prospectus that accompanied each of them, a prospectus which proclaimed the necessity of sleep but hinted that all the preparations which induce it (except the one contained in the bottle round which the prospectus was wrapped, which never produced any toxic effect) were toxic, and therefore made the remedy worse than the disease. Bergotte tried them all. Some of these drugs may be of a different family from those to which one is accustomed, by-products, for instance, of amyl and ethyl. When one absorbs a new drug, entirely different in composition, it is always with a delicious expectancy of the unknown. One’s heart beats as at a first assignation. To what unknown forms of sleep, of dreams, is the newcomer going to lead one? It is inside one now, it is in control of one’s thoughts. In what way is one going to fall asleep? And, once asleep, by what strange paths, up to what peaks, into what unfathomed gulfs will this all-powerful master lead one? What new group of sensations will one meet with on this journey? Will it lead to illness? To blissful happiness? To death? 

Bergotte’s death came to him the day after he had thus entrusted himself to one of these friends (a friend? an enemy?) who proved too strong. 

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. ‘All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.” 

He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were under-cooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible onlyif then!—to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable. 

They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection. 

&

I guessed long afterward that I had been wrong in accusing the newspapers of inaccuracy, for Albertine had not met Bergotte on that day at all. But I had not suspected it for a moment, she had told me the story so naturally, and it was only much later that I recognized her charming gift for lying with simplicity. What she said, what she confessed had so much the same character as the forms of the obviously true—those things we see or learn quite undeniably—that she scattered into the empty spaces of life (4 episodes of another life whose falsehood I did not then suspect. This w falsehood would repay further examination. The universe is true for all of us and different for each one. 

&

But could I have been sure even then? The evidence of the senses is itself a mental event in which conviction creates belief. We have often seen the sense of hearing bring to Francoise not the word actually spoken, but the one she believed to be right, and that this was sufficient for her to ignore the correc. tion implicit in a better pronunciation. Our butler was no different. M. de Charlus was at that time in the habit of wearing very light-colored trousers which would have been recognizable anywhere. Now the butler, who thought that the word pissotiére (meaning what M. de Rambuteau had been so dis tressed to hear the Duc de Guermantes call a “Rambuteau shelter”) was pistiere, never in his whole life actually heard anyone say pissotiére, even though the word was often pronounced that way in his hearing. But erroris more stubborn than faith and does not examine its beliefs. I constantly heard the butler say, “M. le Baron de Charlus must have caught a disease, he spends so much time in the same pistiére. That’s what he gets for all those years running after women. You can tell from those trousers he wears. This morning, Madam sent me on an errand to Neuilly. As I went past the pi tiére in the rue de Bourgogne I saw M. le Baron de Charlus going in. On the way back from Neuilly, a good hour later, I saw his cream-colored trousers in the same pistiére, in the same place, in the middle, where he always stands so that nobody can see him.” 

&

 Had M. de Charlus, during his over-heated journeys from Donciéres to Douville, acquired the habit of relaxation, and just as he pushed his straw hat back on his head to let his enormous forehead breathe, had he begun to loosen, at first just for a few moments, the mask too tightly covering his real face? His matrimonial manners with Morel would have rightly astonished anyone who knew that he no longer loved him. But in M. de Charlus’s case, the narrow range of pleasures offered by his vice had come to bore him. He had instinctively sought to break new physical limits and then, tiring of the strangers he met, had gone to the opposite extreme and chosen what he had thought he would always loathe, the simulacrum of a “marriage” or of “fatherhood.” Sometimes even that did not satisfy him, he had to do something new, and he would go and spend the night with a woman, in the way a normal man might, once in his life, want to sleep with a boy, out of the same kind of curiosity, each the mirror-image of the other, and each equally unhealthy. The Baron’s life as “one of the crowd,” living as he did, because of Charlie, entirely within the Verdurin clan, had had the same effect, in undoing the efforts he had made for so long to keep up a false appearance, as a voyage of exploration or a stay in the colonies can have on certain Europeans, who lose while abroad the guiding principles that ruled their lives in France. And yet the inward revolution of a mind, unconscious at first of the abnormality within itself, then frightened by it when it had recognized it, and finally becoming so familiar with it that it no longer recognized the danger of admitting it to other people, having learned to admit it without shame to itself, had been even more effective in freeing M. de Charlus from the last ties of social constraint than the time spent at the Verdurins’. For no exile at the South Pole or at the top of Mont Blanc can detach us more from other people than a lengthy stay inside an inner vice, that is to say, a way of thinking different from theirs. A vice (for such the Baron used to call it), to which he now gave the amiable character of a mere fault, very common, quite likable and almost amusing, like laziness, forgetfulness or too great a liking for food. Recognizing the curiosity that his odd personality aroused, M. de Charlus took a certain pleasure in satisfying it, stimulating and encouraging it. Just as a certain Jewish journalist daily defends Catholicism, probably not expecting to be taken seriously, but in order not to disappoint the readers who appreciate his humor, M. de Charlus jokingly attacked immorality, in the little set, as he might have affected an English accent or imitated Mounet-Sully,* without waiting to be asked, a talented amateur singing for his supper with a good grace; so that M. de Charlus now threatened to report Brichot to the Sorbonne for walking out with young men, as the circumcised columnist punctuates his prose with “France, the eldest daughter of the Church” and the “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” without the least hypocrisy, but with a certain theatrical affectation. And it is not only his new vocabulary, so different from the words he formerly allowed himself to use, that would be a rewarding study, but also the change in his intonations and gestures, which both now bore a Surprising resemblance to everything he had once most scathingly condemned; he now emitted, quite without thinking, something like the little ‘queals—involuntary in his case, and therefore all the more revealing—that homosexuals produce—in their case deliberately—when they call out to tach other—“darling!”; as if this purposely “camp” manner, which M. de Charlus had so long avoided like the plague, were nothing but a brilliant, faithful imitation of the intonations that the Charluses of this world inevitably develop when they reach a certain phase of their disease, just as a tertiary syphilitic or a sufferer from ataxia cannot fail in the end to present certain symptoms. In reality—as this deep-rooted affectation revealed the only difference between the stern Charlus I had once known, dressed a| in black, with his hair cut short, and made-up young men dripping with jewels, was the purely superficial one that we see between an agitated per. son, talking all the time and constantly fidgeting, and a mental sufferer who speaks slowly, is impossible to rouse, but in the eyes of a clinician is plainly affected by the same neurasthenia, eaten up by the same anxieties and sutfering from the same physical defects.

&

M. de Charlus was handing over his overcoat with the familiarity of, frequent guest. But the footman to whom he was offering it was a new one just a boy. Now M. de Charlus often lost the place, as they say, nowadays ang no longer had a sense of what was and was not done. He had had a praise. worthy desire, at Balbec, to show that he was not alarmed by certain sub. jects, not afraid to declare of someone, “He’s good-looking,” to say, ina word, the same things as anyone might have said who was not like him; now he sometimes gave expression to this desire by saying things that no one who was not like him would ever have dreamed of saying, things on which his mind was so constantly fixed that he forgot they were not part of everyone’s daily preoccupations. In this way, looking at the new footman, the Baron raised his index finger in the air in a threatening fashion, and, think ing he was making an excellent joke, said, “You! How dare you make eyes at me like that!” and turning to Brichot, “He has a funny little face, hasn’t he? Cute little nose”; then, to complete his teasing, or giving way to an urge, he lowered his finger to the horizontal, pointed it straight at the boy, hesitated a moment, then, unable to contain himself any longer, poked the end of his Nose saying “Beep, beep!” and, followed by Brichot, myself and Saniette who told us that Princess Sherbatoff had died at six o'clock, walked into the drawing-room. “What sort of a house is this?” the foorman thought to himself, and asked his friends if the Baron was a wise guy or a nut. That's just the way he is, replied the butler (who thought he was a bit ‘touched,’ a bit ‘crackers’), but he’s one of Madame'’s friends I've always had the most time for, his heart's in the right place.” 

&

...and ill-at-ease whenever I went into society to be able to fix my attention on vaguely pretty objects. It could have been arrested only by the appeal of something which addressed my imagination, as, that evening, a view of Ven. ice might have done, that city on which my thoughts had dwelled for so long in the afternoon, or some general element common to several appearances and more real than any of them, something which always spontaneously aroused in me an inner spirit, normally slumbering, but whose rise to the surface of my consciousness caused me the greatest joy. Now, as I came out of the room they called the theater, and walked with Brichot and M. de Char. lus through the other reception rooms, noticing, placed here and there among other furniture, certain pieces I had seen at La Raspeliére withour paying any attention to them, I grasped a certain family resemblance be. tween the layout of the town house and the chateau, an underlying identity, and I understood Brichot when he said with a smile, “Look, do you see the far end of this room, that might just give you an idea of what the rue Montalivet house was like twenty-five years ago, grande mortalis aevi spatium.” His smile, at the thought of the departed salon which he could see once more, let me understand what it was that Brichot, perhaps unconsciously, preferred about the old room: not its big windows, not the youthful gaiety of the Patrons and their friends, but that unreal part (which I had reconstructed myself from a few similarities between La Raspeliére and the Quai Conti) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything, the outer part, present and observable by everyone, is simply an extension: that part which had become purely spiritual, whose color existed only in the mind of my old companion, who could not show it to me, that pare which detaches itself from the outer world to find refuge in our souls, which it enhances, and with whose normal substance it merges, transforming itself there—vanished houses, people of former days, dishes of fruit from remembered suppersinto the translucent alabaster of our memories, whose color we cannot show to others as only we can see it (so that we can truthfully say to them that they cannot imagine the past, that it was nothing like anything they have seen), and which we cannot contemplate inwardly without being moved, when we think that the existence of our thought is the condition of these things’ continued survival, for a little while, the light of lamps that have gone out and the scent of arbors that will flower no more. And it was no doubt for this reason that the rue Montalivet drawing-room outshone, in Brichot’s eyes, the Verdurins’ present house. But, on the other hand, it added to the new house, for the professor, a beauty which it could never have for a newcomer. Those pieces of the old furniture which had been relocated here, the same groupings sometimes retained, and which I myself recognized from La Raspeliére, integrated into the present salon parts of the old one which somecimes recalled it to the point of hallucination and then seemed almost unreal in the way they evoked, in the midst of ambient reality, fragments of a destroyed world which seemed to be existing elsewhere. A dream sofa rising up among new, all-too-real armchairs, the brocade cover of a gaming-table raised to the dignity of a person since, like a person, it had a past, a memory, still scorched by the sun shining through the windows of the rue Montalivet (the hour of whose arrival it knew as well as Mme Verdurin herself) and through the french windows at Douville, where it had been taken and from where it looked out all day over the carefully planted flower garden and across the deep valley waiting for the time when Cottard and the violinist would have their game of cards, a bunch of violets and pansies drawn in pastel, the gift of a friend, a great artist now dead, sole surviving fragment of a life vanished without trace, the summing-up of a talent and a long friendship, recalling his gentle, intent gaze, his fine, plump hand with its sad look while he was painting; this charming clutter, this disorderly display of the gifts of the faithful which followed the mistress of the house everywhere she went and finally took on the structure, the fixity of a character trait; a profusion of bouquets, of chocolate boxes which developed systematically, here as there, according to an identical pattern of flowering; a sprinkling of those strange, superfluous objects chat look as if they had just emerged from their gift-wrappings and remain throughout their lives what they were to begin with, New Year's presents; all those objects that one could not consider in isolarion, but which for Brichot, an old habicué of the Verdurins’ parties, had the patina, the velvety touch of those things which acquire 2 kind of depth from being inhabited by their spiritual doubles; these things, strewa about, all set singing before his eyes as many musical notes which awakened beloved resemblances in his heart, confused reminiscences which marked off and cut out of the present-day salon, which they patterned here and there, as a frame of sunlight does on a fine day, pieces of furniture and car pets, pursuing from a cushion to a flower-stand, from a stool to a waft of perfume, from a lighting effect to a predominance of colors, molding, call ing up, making spiritual, bringing to life a form which, as it were, was the ideal figure, immanent in all their successive dwellings, of the Verdurins drawing-room.