The furthest he went was to say that since 1914 there had in reality been a succession of wars, the lessons of each influencing the conduct of the next. So that, for example, the theory of the ‘breakthrough’ had been supplemented by the proposition that, before breaking through, it was necessary for the artillery completely to disrupt the ground occupied by the enemy. But then the opposite had been argued, that sach disruption made it impossible for the infantry and artillery to advance across ground where thousands of shell-holes created as many obstacles. “War, he said, is no exception to good old Hegel’s laws. It is in a state of perpetual becoming.’
This was scant answer to all the things I would have liked to know. But what annoyed me even more was that he was no longer allowed to mention the names of the generals. All the more so as, from the little I was able to glean from the newspapers, it was not those whose likely valour in the event of a war I had been so preoccupied with discovering at Donciéres who were now in command of this one. Geshe de Bourgogne, Gallifet, Négrier, were dead. Pau had retired from active service shortly after the outbreak of war. Of Joffre, of F of Camelnau and Pétain we had never spoken.
My dear boy,
I do realize thas phrases such as ‘shall not pass’ or ‘we'll get them’ are not very pleasant; they have stuck in my throat as much as poilu and the rest, and of course it is tedious to be making an epic out af terms that are worse tham faults of grammar or failures of taste, that are in fact that dreadful, contradictory thing, vernacular affectation orpretentiousness of the sort we desess so much, like for example the people who think it is clever to say Coke instead of cocaine. But if you saw everyone, especially the ordinary people, the workers, the small shopkeepers, who never dreamed of possessing the kind of heroism they have been displaying and would have died peacefully in their beds without ever having imagined it running through the bullets to rescue a comrade or to fetch a wounded officer and when they are hit themselves smiling just before they die because the medical officer has told them that the trench has been recaptured from the Germans then I assure you my dear boy that it gives you a marvelous idea of the French and Makes you begin to understand those periods of history which used to seem a bit implausible when we studied them at school.
&
And now, returning to Paris for the second time, I had received, the day after my arrival, another letter from Gilberte, who must have forgotten the one, or at least the gist of the one I cited, because her departure from Paris at the end of 1914 is described retrospectively in it in a rather different manner. You may not know perhaps, my dear friend, she told me, that I have been at Tansonville for two years now. I arrived at the same time as the Germans; everyone had tried to stop me leaving. They thought I was mad. ‘Why on earth, they would say, are you leaving the safety of Paris for the occupied regions, at the very moment when everyone else is trying to escape from there?’ I did recognize how much good sense there was in all this. But what could I do, I only possess one good quality, I’m not a coward, or if you prefer I’m loyal, and when I learned that my beloved Tansonville was under threat, I couldn’t leave our old steward to defend it by himself. It seemed to me that my place was by his side. And it was because of that decision that I was able to do something at least to save the house, when all the other chateaux in the neighbourhood, abandoned by their panic-stricken owners, have almost all been destroyed from top to bottom, and not only to save the house but to save those precious collections my dear father set so much store by. In short, Gilberte was now persuaded that she had not gone to Tansonville, as she had told me in her letter in 1914, to escape from the Germans to a place of safety, but on the contrary to find them and defend her house against them. They had not, in fact, stayed at Tansonville, but from then on her house had seen a constant coming and going of soldiers which exceeded by far that which drew tears from Francoise in the street at Combray, and she had not ceased, as she put it quite truthfully this time, to live life on the front line. So the newspapers spoke in the most laudatory terms of her admirable conduct, and there was talk of giving her a decoration. The conclusion of the letter was entirely accurate. You have no idea what this war is like, my dear friend, and the importance that a road, a bridge or a hill can assume. How often I have thought of you and the walks, which you made so delightful, that we took together in this now devastated countryside, where vast battles were fought just to Win possession of one of the paths or slopes you used to love, where we so often walked together! You probably did not imagine, any more than I did, that humble Roussainville and boring Méséglise, where they used to bring our letters from, and where they went to find the doctor when you were ill, would ever be amous places. Well, my dear friend, they now share the same immortal ame as Austerlitz or Valmy. The battle of Méséglise lasted or more than eight months, in the course of which the Germans lost over six hundred thousand men and destroyed Méséglise, but they did not take it. The little path you used to like so much, the one we called the hawthorn climb, where you claimed you , ell in love with me when you were a child, though I can assure you quite truth ully that it was I who was in love with you, I can't tell you how important tt has become, The huge cornfield it led into is the famous Hill 307, whose name you must have seen crop up time and again in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which you told me did not remind you of your childhood as much as you would have wished, the Germans put up some new ones, and for the last year and a half they have held one half of Combray and the French have held the other.
&
The day after I received this letter, that is two days before that evening when I was walking along in the darkness, listening to the echoing sound of my footsteps, chewing over all these memories, Saint-Loup, back from the front and about to return there, had paid me just a few moments’ visit, the mere announcement of which had powerfully affected me. Frangoise had wanted to pounce on him at once, in the hope that he might be able to get an exemption for the timid butcher’s boy, whose class was to be called up in a year’s time. But she was stopped by her own realization that there was no point in such a step, as the timid animal slaughterer had long since moved to another butcher’s shop. And whether our butcher’s wife was atraid of losing our custom, or whether she was telling the truth, she told Francoise that she did not know where the boy, who anyway would never make a good butcher, was now employed. Francoise had searched high and low for him. But Paris is large, butchers’ shops are numerous, and despite visiting a great number of them, she had never been able to find the timid, blood-stained young man again. When Saint Loup entered my room, I had gone up to him with a feeling of shyness, that sense of eeriness which in fact all soldiers on leave made one feel, and which one experiences when one comes into the presence of someone suffering from a fatal illness, who none the less still gets up, gets dressed and goes for walks. It seemed (it had seemed most strongly to begin with, because for anyone who had not, as I had, lived away from Paris, habit had taken hold, which takes away from things we have seen a number of times the radically profound impression and thought which gives them their real meaning), it seemed almost as if there was something cruel in the leave granted to combatants. When the first of them came, people said to themselves: “They won’t want to go back, they'll desert.” And indeed it was not that they came simply from places that seemed unreal to us because we had only heard of them through the newspapers, and therefore could not imagine how these men could have taken part in those titanic battles and retumed with nothing more than a bruised shoulder; it was from the shores of death, whither they were about to return, that they came to spend a moment among us, incomprehensible to us, filling us with tenderness, dread and a sense of mystery, like the dead whom we evoke, and who appear to us for a second, whom we dare not question and who could anyway only reply: ‘You could not even imagine.” For it is extraordinary how, both in those who have survived combat, which is what soldiers on leave are, and in the living or the dead hypnotized or invoked by a medium, the sole effect of contact with mystery is to increase, if that be possible, our sense of the insignificance of what is said. It was with this in mind that I approached Robert, who still had a scar on his forehead, more noble and more mysterious to me than the imprint left in earth by the foot of a giant. And I had not dared ask him a single question and he had addressed only a few simple words to me. Even these differed hardly at all from those he might have spoken before the war, as if people, in spite of it, continued to be what they were; the tone of the discussion was the same, only the subject matter was different, if that!
&
As he spoke then, M. de Charlus, with the noble guise of a Saint-Vallier or a Saint-Megrin, was upright, stiff and solemn, his voice was serious, and for a brief moment he displayed none of the mannerisms by which men of his sort reveal themselves. And yet, why is it that none of them can ever have a voice that sounds absolutely right? Even at this moment, when it was approaching its most serious, his still sounded slightly wrong, as if it needed tuning. M. de Charlus literally did not know which way to look, and often he glanced upward, regretting that he did not have a pair of binoculars, although they would not have been a great deal of use, since, because of the Zeppelin raid of two days earlier which had made the authorities extend their vigilance, there were soldiers in larger numbers than usual, even in the sky. The aeroplanes which I had seen some hours earlier looking like insects, brown spots against the blue sky, now passed through the night, the darkness of which was further intensified by the partial extinction of the street-lights, like gleaming fire-ships. The greatest impression of beauty that these human shooting stars made us experience was perhaps to make us look at the sky, towards which normally we hardly ever raise our eyes. In this Paris, whose almost defenceless beauty, in 1914, I had seen awaiting the threat of the approaching enemy, there was, certainly, now as then, the ancient, unchanged splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene....
&
The piece that was being played was about to end at any moment, at which point I would be obliged to enter the drawing-room. I therefore forced myself to try to see as clearly and quickly as possible into the nature of the identical pleasures I had just experienced three times in a few minutes, and then to isolate the lesson I was to draw from it. On the enormous difference between the true impression we have had of a thing and the artificial impression we give ourselves of it when we try by an act of will to represent it to ourselves, I did not pause; remembering too clearly with what relative indifference Swann had once been able to speak of the days when he had been loved, because beneath his words he saw something different, and the sudden pain that the little phrase of Vinteuil had caused him by bringing back those very days, just as he had felt them at the time, I understood only too well that what the sensation of the uneven flagstones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine, had awoken within me bore no relation to what I was trying to remember about Venice, about Balbec and about Combray, with the help of a uniform memory; and I understood that life might be deemed dreary, even though at certain moments it may seem so beautiful, because for the most part it is on the basis of something quite different from it, on the basis of images which retain nothing of life itself, that we judge it and that we disparage it. At most I noted incidentally that the differences which there are between each of the real impressions — differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot be a good likeness — was probably because the slightest word we have spoken at any point in our lives, the most insignificant action, was surrounded by, and was a reflection of, things which logically were not connected to it, were separated from it by the intelligence which had no need of them for its rational purposes, but in the middle of which — here, the pink reflection of the evening on the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury — there, the blue scrolls of the morning sea enveloping the musical phrases which partially emerge from them like the shoulders of mermaids — the gesture, the simplest action remains enclosed as if within a thousand sealed vessels each one of which would be filled with things of a completely different colour, odour and temperature; quite apart from the fact that these vessels, arranged across the full length of our years, during which we have never ceased to change, even if only our thoughts or our dreams, are placed at quite different heights and give us the sensation of extraordinarily varied atmospheres. Admittedly, these are changes that we have accomplished imperceptibly; but between the memory which suddenly comes back to us and our current state, even between two memories of different years or places or times, the distance is such that it is enough, apart even from any specific originality, to render them incomprehensible to each other. Yes, if the memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has not been able to make a single connection, to throw up a single link between it and the present moment, if it has stayed in its place, at its date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or at the very peak of a summit, it suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.
And I noticed in passing that, in the work of art that I now, without having made any conscious resolution, felt close to undertaking, this would pose great difficulties. For I would have to execute its successive parts in slightly different materials, and would need to find one very different from that suited to memories of mornings beside the sea, or afternoons in Venice, if I wanted to depict the evenings at Rivebelle at the moment when, in the dining-room that opened on to the garden, the heat was beginning to break up, to subside and settle, when a last glimmer was still illuminating the roses on the walls of the restaurant, while the last water-colours of the day were still visible in the sky — in a different way, new, with a particular transparency and sonority, compact, cooling and pink.
I slid rapidly over all that, being more imperiously required to seek out the cause of this happiness and the nature of the certainty with which it imposed itself, an enquiry I had hitherto postponed. And I began to divine this cause as I compared these varied impressions of well-being with each other, all of which, the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven flagstones, the taste of the madeleine, had something in common, which I was experiencing in the present moment and at the same time in a moment far away, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extratemporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. This explained why my anxieties on the subject of my death had ceased the moment when I unconsciously recognized the taste of the little madeleine, since at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being, and consequently unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the future. It lived only through the essence of things, and was unable to grasp this in the present, where, as the imagination does not come into play, the senses were incapable of providing it; even the future towards which action tends surrenders it to us. This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.
And perhaps, if just now I thought that Bergotte was wrong when he talked about the joys of the life of the mind, it was because at that moment what I meant by ‘life of the mind’ was the sort of logical reasoning which had no connection with it, or with what existed in me at that moment — exactly as I had been able to find life and society boring because I was judging them according to untruthful memories, whereas I had a considerable appetite for living now that a real moment of the past had just, on three separate occasions, been recreated within me.
Was it no more than a moment of the past? Perhaps it was a great deal more; something which, common both to the past and the present, is much more essential than either of them. So many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent. But now all the consequences of that iron law had suddenly been neutralized, suspended, by a wonderful natural expedient, which had held out the prospect of a sensation — sound of a fork and a hammer, same book title, etc. — both in the past, which enabled my imagination to enjoy it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of experiencing the sound, the touch of linen, etc., had added to the dreams of the imagination the thing which they were habitually deprived of, the idea of existence — and, thanks to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilize — for the duration of a flash of lightning — the one thing it never apprehends: a little bit of time in its pure state. The being which had been reborn in me when, with such a tremor of happiness, I had heard the sound common once both to the spoon touching the plate and the hammer hitting the wheel, or felt the unevenness beneath my feet common to the stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard and St Mark’s baptistery, etc., this spirit draws its nourishment only from the essence of things, and only in them does it find its sustenance and its delight. It languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it. One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And because of that we can understand why he trusts his joy, and even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain reasons for this joy, we can understand how the word ‘death’ has no meaning for him; situated outside time, what should he fear from the future?
But this optical illusion which brought back to me a moment of the past incompatible with the present could not last. The scenes played out by our voluntary memory, of course, can be prolonged, as they require no more effort on our part than leafing through a picture-book. Long ago, for example, on the day when I had to go to the house of the Princesse de Guermantes for the first time, from the sun-filled courtyard of our house in Paris, I had idly gazed on images of my choice, of the place de l’Eglise in Combray, or the beach at Balbec, as if 1 had been leafing through an album of water-colours painted in the different places I had been to choose illustrations of each of these days, enabling me to say, with the selfish pleasure of a collector, as I catalogued the illustrations of my memory: ‘I’ve certainly seen some beautiful things in my life.” My memory probably then affirmed the difference between these sensations; but all it could do was to rearrange homogeneous elements in different ways. The same was not true of the three recollections I had just had and in which, instead of giving me a more flattering idea of my self, I had on the contrary almost doubted that self’s current reality. Just as on the day when I had dipped the madeleine in the warm herb tea, in the place where I happened to be, wherever that were, then in my bedroom in Paris, or today, at this moment, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes, or a little earlier in the courtyard of his Aéte, there had been within me, irradiating a small area around me, a sensation (taste of the soaked madeleine, the sound of metal, a feeling underfoot) which was common to the place where I was and also to another place (my aunt Octave’s bedroom, the railway carriage, St Mark’s baptistery). And at the moment I was working this out, the piercing noise of a water-pipe, just like those long cries that in summer the pleasure boats sometimes made in the evening off the coast at Balbec, made me feel (as I had already once at Paris, in a grand restaurant, at the sight of a luxurious dining-room half empty, summery and hot) much more than a sensation simply analogous to the one I had had at the end of the afternoon at Balbec when all the tables were covered with their cloths and their silverware, the vast bay-windows wide open to the beach, in one long space, a single wall of glass or stone, while the sun slowly descended over the sea where the ships were starting their cries, and all I had to do, to join Albertine and her friends who were walking on the sea-front, was to step over the wooden frame, scarcely higher than my ankle, into a groove in which, to let the air into the hotel, all the continuous panes of glass had been slid. But the painful memory of having loved Albertine was not a part of this sensation. The only painful memory is of the dead. And they rapidly decay and nothing remains, even around their tombs, save the beauty of nature, silence and pure air. Yet it was not just an echo, the duplicate of a past sensation, that the sound of the water-pipe had just made me experience, it was that sensation itself. In this instance, as in all the preceding ones, the shared sensation had sought to recreate the old location around it, while the actual location which now occupied the place used all the resistance of its substantiality to oppose this intrusion into an Adze in Paris of a Normandy beach, or a railway embankment. The seaside dining-room at Balbec, with its damask linen laid out like altar cloths to receive the setting sun, had tried to undermine the solidity of the Guermantes’ hdtel, to force open its doors, and for a moment had made the sofas around me flicker, as on another occasion it had done to the tables in the Paris restaurant. Always, in resurrections of this sort, the distant location engendered around the common sensation would be meshed for a moment, like a wrestler, with the actual location. The actual location had always been the winner; and the loser had always seemed to me to be the more beautiful; so beautiful that I remained in ecstasy on the uneven paving-stones, as before the cup of tea, attempting to retain, when it appeared, and bring back, the moment it escaped me, this influx and rejection of Combray, or Venice, or Balbec, which surged up only to abandon me a few moments later in the midst of these new surroundings, permeated though they now were by the past. And if the current location had not immediately been victorious, I believe I would have lost consciousness; because these resurrections of the past, for the second they last, are so complete that they do more than simply force our eyes to stop seeing the room around them in order to look at the railway line bordered with trees or the incoming tide. They force our nostrils to breathe the air of places that are actually far away, our will to choose between the different plans they suggest to us, our whole person to believe itself surrounded by them, or at least to stumble between them and the present locations, in a dizzying uncertainty akin to that which one sometimes experiences through some ineffable vision at the moment of falling asleep.
So it began to seem that what the being which had now been resuscitated in me three or four times had just enjoyed might well have been fragments of existence which had escaped from time, but that the contemplation of them, while a contemplation of eternity, was itself fugitive. And yet I felt that the pleasure it had brought to my life, albeit at rare intervals, was the only one that was both real and fertile. The sign of the unreality of the others is surely shown clearly enough, either by the impossibility of their satisfying us, as for instance in the case of social pleasures, which at best result in discomfort caused by the ingestion of awful food, or friendship, which is a fiction because the artist who, for whatever reason, gives up an hour of work to spend an hour chatting with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (friends being friends only within the ambit of that mild eccentricity which accompanies our lives, and which we acquiesce in, but which in our heart of hearts we know is like the wanderings of a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it), or else by the sadness which follows their satisfaction, as with the sadness I felt on the day when I had been introduced to Albertine, for the trouble I had gone to, slight though it was, in order to obtain something — the acquaintance of a young girl — which seemed a slight thing only because I had obtained it. Even a more profound pleasure, like the one I should have been able to experience when I loved Albertine, was in fact perceived only inversely, through the anxiety | felt when she was not there, because when I was sure that she would soon be with me again, as on the day when she came back from the Trocadéro, I had seemed to experience no more than a vague sense of worry, whereas I became more and more excited the more deeply I penetrated, with an increasing sense of personal joy, into the sound of the knife or the taste of the tea which had brought into my bedroom my aunt Léonie’s bedroom, and with it all of Combray, and its two ways. I had therefore decided to cling on to this contemplation of the essence of things, to stabilize it, but how, by what means? Of course at the moment when the stiffness of the napkin had brought back Balbec, and for an instant had caressed my imagination, not only with the view of the sea as it had been on that day, but with the smell of the room, the strength of the wind, the desire for lunch, the uncertainty which walk to take, all of it tied to the feeling of the linen like the thousand wings of angels which revolve a thousand times a minute; and of course, at the moment when the unevenness of the two pavingstones had extended the thin, desiccated images I had of Venice and St Mark’s, and all the sensations I had felt there, into every sense and each dimension, linking the square to the church, the canal to the landing-stage and, to everything the eye can see, the world of desires seen only by the mind, I had been tempted, if not, because of the time of year, to go back and float along the canals of Venice, for me associated principally with the spring, then at least to return to Balbec.
But I did not linger for an instant over this thought. In the first place, 1 knew that places were not the same as the pictures conjured up by their names, and that it was almost only in my dreams, in my sleep, that a place stretched out before my eyes in that pure materiality that is completely distinct from the ordinary things that we can see and touch, and which I always used to imagine them as possessing. But even when it came down to images of an altogether different kind, those of memory, I knew that the beauty of Balbec was something I had never experienced when I was there, and that the beauty it left me with, the beauty of memory, was something I was unable to discover when I went back there to stay for a second time. I had too much experience of the impossibility of making contact in reality with what lay deep within myself; it was not in St Mark’s Square, any more than it had been in my second visit to Balbec or in my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, that I would find Lost Time, and travel, which did nothing but offer me once again the illusion that these bygone impressions had an existence outside of me, in some corner of a particular place, could not be the means which I was looking for. And I did not want to let myself be taken in yet again, for what 1 wanted to do was to find out once and for all whether it was truly possible to reach that which, always disappointed as I had been in the presence of places and human beings, I had (even though that piece of chamber music by Vinteuil seemed to tell me the opposite) believed to be unreachable. I was therefore not going to attempt another experiment on a path that I had long known led nowhere. Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came into contact with a direct pleasure which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths. I had been unable to know pleasure at Balbec, any more than the pleasure of living with Albertine, which had become perceptible to me only after the event. And the recapitulation I was making of all the disappointments of my life, as I had lived it, and which made me believe that its reality must reside somewhere else than in action, was not bringing the different disappointments together in a purely fortuitous manner in accordance with the circumstances of my existence. I felt very strongly that the disappointments of travel and the disappointments of love were not different disappointments, but the varied aspect taken on, according to the circumstances which bring it into play, by our powerlessness to realize ourselves in material pleasure or real action. And, thinking once again about the extratemporal joy caused by the sound of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, I said to myself: “Was this the happiness which the sonata’s little phrase offered to Swann, which he was unable to find in artistic creation and therefore mistook by assimilating it to the pleasure of love; was this the happiness I had felt as a presentiment, even more supra-terrestrial than the little phrase of the sonata, of the mysterious, glowing appeal of the septet which Swann had not been able to recognize, being dead like so many others before the truth made for them can be revealed to them? And anyway, it would not have been any use to him, for the phrase could easily symbolize an appeal, but not create the powers to make Swann the writer that he was not.’ Yet after a moment I realized, having given some thought to these resurrections of memory, that in another way, obscure impressions had sometimes, even already at Combray on the Guermantes way, attracted the attention of my thoughts, in the way these reminiscences did, but not then hiding a past impression but a new truth, a precious image that I sought to discover by efforts of the same kind as those which one makes to remember something, as if our most beautiful ideas were like tunes in music which come back, so to speak, to us without our ever having heard them, and which we do our best to listen to and to transcribe. I remembered with pleasure, because it showed me that I was already the same then and gave me back something that was fundamental to my nature, but also with sadness when I thought that I had not progressed since then, that in Combray already 1 used attentively to fix before my mind’s eye some image which had impelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a pebble, feeling that there might be something quite different beneath the signs which I had to try to uncover, some form of thought they translated like those hieroglyphics that people used to believe represented only material objects. Doubtless the effort of deciphering was difficult but it alone gave reading a degree of truth. For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters us through our senses, but one from which it is also possible to extract something spiritual. So in each case, whether we are dealing with impressions such as that made on me by the sight of the steeples of Martinville, or recollections like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art? The consequences of this were already thronging into my mind; for whether it was a matter of recollections of the sort characterized by the sound of the fork or the taste of the madeleine, or of those truths written with the aid of figures, the meaning of which I was trying to find in my head where, church steeples or wild grasses, they composed a complicated and elaborate book of spells, their primary character was that I was not free to choose them, that they were given to me just as they were. And I sensed that this was the mark of their authenticity. I had not been looking for the two uneven paving-stones in the courtyard where I stumbled. But the very fortuity, the inevitability of the manner in which the sensation was encountered, controlled the authenticity of the past that it resuscitated, the images it let loose, since we feel it striving towards the light, we feel the joy of the real, found again. It is also the control of the truth of the whole picture made out of contemporary impressions that it brings in its train, with this infallible proportion of light and shade, intensity and omission, memory and forgetfulness, of which conscious memory or observation will always be incapable.
As for the inner book of unknown signs (signs which seemed to stand out, as it were, in relief, and which my attention, exploring my unconscious, cast around for, stumbled over, and traced the shapes of, like a diver feeling his way underwater), for the reading of which nobody else could provide me with any rules, reading them becoming one of those acts of creation in which nobody can take our place or even collaborate with us. So many people are discouraged from writing because of this! There are almost no tasks they will not take on in order to avoid it. Every major event, from the Dreyfus Affair to the war, provided further excuses for writers not to decipher that book - they wanted to ensure the triumph of justice, to rebuild the moral unity of the nation, they were much too busy to think about literature, But these were simply excuses because they did not have, or no longer had, genius, or to put it another way, instinct. For instinct shows us the work we have to do and intelligence provides the pretexts for evading it. Excuses have absolutely no place in art, mere intentions do not count for anything, the artist has to listen to his instinct all the time, with the result that art is the most real thing there is, the most austere school of life, and the true Last Judgment. That book, the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose ‘impression’ has been made in us by reality itself. Whatever the ideas that may have been left in us by our life, their material outline, the trace of the impression they originally made on us, is always the indispensable warrant of their truth. The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary. The book whose characters are forged within us, rather than sketched by us, is the only book we have. Not that the ideas which we form ourselves may not be logically right, but that we do not know whether they are true. Only the impression, however slight its material may seem, however elusive its trace, can be a criterion of truth, and on that account is the only thing worthy of being apprehended by the mind; it alone, if the mind can elucidate its truth, can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards. Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own. The only things that come from ourselves are those we draw out of the obscurity within us, which can never be known by other people.
....
But anyway, quite apart from their intellectual content, these theories seemed to me to indicate the inferiority of their supporters, in the same way that a really well brought-up child who hears the people with whom he has been taken to lunch saying: “We don’t hide anything here, we say whatever we think,’ senses that this indicates a moral quality inferior to that inherent in good deeds, pure and simple, which do not need words. Real art has nothing to do with proclamations of this sort, and carries out its work in silence. Also, the people who indulged in this kind of theorizing used ready-made expressions which had a curious similarity to those of the idiots they were attacking. Indeed it may well be that quality of language is a better gauge of the level of moral or intellectual endeavour than aesthetic approach. Conversely, though, this quality of language (and the laws of character can be equally well studied in a frivolous subject and in a serious one, just as an anatomist can as easily study the laws of anatomy on the body of an imbecile as on that of a man of talent, the great moral laws, as much as those of the circulation of the blood or renal filtration, differing very little with the intellectual level of the individual), which the theoreticians think they can do without, those who admire the theoreticians believe simplistically that it shows no great intellectual worth, worth which they need, if they are to discern it, to see expressed directly and which they cannot infer from the beauty of an image. Whence the vulgar temptation for the writer to write intellectual works. Gross unscrupulousness. A work in which there are theories is like an object with its price-tag still attached. Even this latter only gives something a value, which, on the contrary, logical reasoning in literature diminishes. One reasons, that is one wanders off the track, each time that one does not have the strength of mind to force oneself to make an impression pass through all the successive states which will lead to its stabilization and its expression. The reality to be expressed resided, I now realized, not in the subject’s appearance but at a depth where appearance hardly matters, as in the case of its symbolization by the sound of the spoon on a plate, or the starched stiffness of the napkin, which had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations. ‘No more style, was what I had heard people say in those days, no more literature, what we want is life.’ It is easy to see how even M. de Norpois’s simple theories in opposition to ‘flute-players’ had taken on a new lease of life since the war. For all those who do not have an artistic sense, by which I mean the submission to an interior reality, may still be endowed with the capacity to argue about art till the cows come home. And to the extent that they are also diplomats or financiers, deeply involved in the ‘realities’ of the present time, they are all the more willing to believe that literature is just a form of intellectual amusement destined to be gradually eliminated. Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.
.....
Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them, that we can see monuments and pictures only through an almost tangible veil woven over them through the centuries by the love and contemplation of so many admirers. This fantasy would become truth if they transposed it into the realm of the only reality each person knows, into the domain of their own sensitivity. Yes, in that sense and that sense only (but it is much the more important one), a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained. This is because things — a book in its red binding, like the rest — at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them. Some name, read long ago in a book, contains among its syllables the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. Thus the sort of literature which is content to ‘describe things’, to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it unceremoniously cuts all communication between our present self and the past, the essence of which is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh. It is this that any art worthy of the name must express, and, if it fails in this, we can still draw a lesson from its incapacity (whereas there is none to be drawn even from the successes of realism), namely that this essence is, in part, subjective and impossible to communicate.
More than that, a thing which we saw at a certain time in our lives, a book which we read, does not remain for ever a part solely of what there was around us; it remains just as faithfully part of what we then were, and can be re-experienced, rethought, only by the sensibility, the thought processes, the person that we then were; if in the library I take down Francois le Champi, a child immediately rises up within me and takes my place, the only one who has the right to read the title Francois le Champi and who reads it as he read it then, with the same impression of the weather outside in the garden, the same dreams as he formed then about other countries and about life, the same anxiety about the future. Or again, if I see a thing from another time, it will be a young man who rises up. So that my character today is nothing but an abandoned quarry, thinking everything it contains to be monotonous and identical, but out of which each memory, like a sculptor of genius, makes countless statues. I say each thing that we see again, because books in this respect behave as things; the way a book opened along the spine, the texture of the paper, may have retained within it as vivid a memory of the way I imagined Venice then, and of my wish to go there, as the book’s actual sentences. More vivid even, for words sometimes get in the way, like those photographs of a person, looking at which one remembers him less well than if one had been content just to think about him. Certainly with many of the books of my childhood, even, sadly, some by Bergotte himself, if I happen to pick them up some evening when I am feeling tired, I do so only as I might take a train, in the hope of finding some repose by looking at different things and breathing the atmosphere of times past. But it sometimes happens that this sought-for evocation is hindered by prolonged reading of the book. There is, for instance, one of Bergotte’s books (the copy of which in the Prince’s library bore a dedication that was fawning and platitudinous in the extreme), which I read one winter day when I was unable to see Gilberte, in which I can never manage to find the phrases I used to love so much. Certain words almost make me believe that I’ve found them again, but it’s impossible. Where could the beauty be that I used to find in them? Yet from the volume itself, the snow that covered the Champs-Elysées on the day I read it has not been removed: I can see it still. And that is why, if I had ever been tempted to be a bibliophile, like the Prince de Guermantes, I should only have been a rather odd one, except that the beauty which accrues to a book for collectors, independently of its inherent value, when they know the libraries through which it has passed, or know that it was given by a particular sovereign on the occasion of some significant event to some famous man, when they have been able to trace its movements, from sale to sale, throughout its life, all the, so to speak, historic beauty of a book, would not be lost on me. But I would prefer to derive its value from my own life, rather than mere curiosity; and it would often not be the physical copy itself that I would associate with it, but the work itself, as in the case of Francois le Champi, revealed to me for the first time in my little room at Combray, during perhaps the loveliest and saddest night of my life, when I had, alas! (at a time when the mysterious Guermantes appeared completely inaccessible to me) obtained from my parents their first surrendering of authority, from which I would later come to date the decline of my health and my will, and my withdrawal, each day more complete, from a difficult task — and rediscovered today, appropriately, in the Guermantes’ library, on this most glorious day, by which were illuminated suddenly not only the old fumblings of my thought, but even the purpose of my life and perhaps of art. As for individual copies of books, I could have been interested in them too, in a living sense. The first edition of a work would have been more precious to me than the others, but by that I would have meant the edition in which I had read it for the first time. I would look for the original editions, by which I mean those from which I had received an original impression of the book. Because subsequent impressions are not original. In the case of novels, I would collect old-fashioned bindings, the ones from the period when I read my first novels and which so often would have heard Papa telling me to ‘Sit up straight!’ Like the dress a woman was wearing when we saw her for the first time, they would help me to rediscover the love I had then, the beauty over which I have superimposed too many decreasingly loved images in my attempt to rediscover the first one, I who am not the I who saw it and who must give way to the I that I was then, if it calls up the thing it knew and that my I of today does not recognize at all. But even in this sense, which is the only one I could in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it — a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence. One can list indefinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style. Indeed, just as in life, it begins at the moment when, by bringing together a quality shared by two sensations, he draws out their common essence by uniting them with each other, in order to protect them from the contingencies of time, in a metaphor. Had not nature herself, from this point of view, set me on the way to art, wasn’t she herself the beginning of art, she who made it possible for me, often after a long interval, to recognize the beauty of one thing only in another, noon at Combray only in the sound of its bells, mornings at Donciéres only in the hiccuping of our water-heater? The relationship may not be very interesting, the objects ordinary, the style bad, but if no relationship has been established, there is nothing.
But that was not all. If reality were a kind of residue of experience, more or less identical for everybody, because when we talk about bad weather, a war, a cab-stand, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden in flower, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were just that, then no doubt some sort of cinematographic film of things would be enough and ‘style’ and ‘literature’ which departed from their simple data would be an artificial irrelevance. But was this really what reality was? When I tried to ascertain what actually happens at the moment when something makes a particular impression on us, whether as on the day when, crossing the bridge over the Vivonne, the shadow of a cloud on the water had made me exclaim ‘Damn!’ and jump for joy, or when, listening to a sentence of Bergotte’s, the only part of my impression that I had been conscious of was the not particularly characteristic phrase ‘That’s marvellous’, or when, annoyed by some piece of bad behaviour, Bloch uttered these words, which were completely unsuited to such a commonplace event: ‘I can only say that such conduct b-b-beggars belief,’ or when, flattered at having been made welcome at the Guermantes’, and also a little drunk on their wines, I could not help saying, half out loud to myself as I was leaving: “They really are terribly nice people, it would be lovely to spend all one’s time with them,’ I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator.
But while, in cases where the imprecise language of, say, vanity is involved, realigning interior indirect speech (which as it goes on moves further and further away from the original, central impression) until it coincides with the straight line which ought to have run directly from the impression, while this realignment is a difficult matter and something which our idle nature is reluctant to take on, there are other instances, where love is involved for example, where the same realignment becomes painful. All our pretence of indifference, all our indignation against those lies which are so natural, so like the ones we tell ourselves, in a word all those things we have not only, whenever we felt wretched or betrayed, said endlessly to our loved one, but even said over and over again to ourselves while we were waiting to see her, sometimes speaking aloud, breaking the silence of our bedroom with comments such as: ‘No, really, that sort of behaviour is intolerable,’ and: ‘I consented to see you one last time, but I won’t pretend it isn’t painful,” to bring all that back to the truth of experience when it has moved so far away from it means putting an end to all that we value most, to everything that, when we have been alone with our over-excited plans for letters and approaches, has constituted our passionate dialogue with ourselves.
Even where the pleasures of art are concerned, although we seek them because of the impression they make on us, we contrive as quickly as possible to dismiss the specificity of this impression as being inexpressible, and to concentrate on whatever allows us to experience the pleasure of it without properly analysing it, and to think that we are communicating it to other art-lovers, with whom conversation will be possible because we will be speaking to them about something we have in common, the personal root of our own impression having been suppressed. Even at the moments when we are the most disinterested onlookers of nature, or society, or love, or art itself, since every impression comes in two parts, half of it contained within the object, and the other half, which we alone will understand, extending into us, we are quick to disregard this latter half, which ought to be the sole object of our attention, and to take notice only of the first, which, being external and therefore impossible to study in any depth, will not impose any strain on us: we find it too demanding a task to try to perceive the little furrow that the sight of a hawthorn or of a church has made in us. But we play a symphony again and again, we go back to look at the church until — in this flight from our own lives, which we don’t have the courage to look at, which people call erudition — we know them as well, and in the same manner, as the most knowledgeable student of music or of archaeology.
Very many people, therefore, leave it at that, extracting nothing from their impressions, growing old useless and unsatisfied, like celibates at the shrine of art! They have the bitterness that goes with virginity and indolence, but which in those instances can be cured by pregnancy or work. They get more excited by works of art than real artists do, because their excitement, not being for them the result of hard introspective investigation, bursts outward, overheats their conversation and makes them go red in the face. They think they are accomplishing something by shouting “Bravo, bravo’ at the tops of their voices after the performance of a work they enjoy. But these demonstrations do not force them to clarify the nature of their enjoyment, and they remain unaware of it. Yet, untapped, it overflows even into their calmest conversations, makes them make grand gestures, and grimace and toss their heads whenever they talk about art. ‘I went to this concert. I must say it didn’t do anything for me. Then they started playing the quartet. Lord, what a difference!’ (at this point, the music~lover’s face expresses anxious concern, as if he was thinking: ‘I can see sparks, there’s a smell of burning, something must be on fire’). ‘Damn it all, what I heard was exasperating, it’s badly written, but it’s astounding, though, mind you, it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of te The look is also accompanied by a worried tone of voice, head on side, more gesticulation, the whole absurd pantomime of with half-grown winglets which has not solved the problem of wings but is none the less tormented with a desire to soar into the air. And so this barren music-lover spends his life going from one concert to the next, embittered and unsatisfied as his hair turns grey and he enters an unfruitful old age, the celibate bachelor of art, as it were. Yet there is something almost touching about this most unlikeable breed, though they reek of worthiness and though they have not received anything like their due share of contentment, because they are the first halfformed products of the need to pass from the shifting objects of intellectual pleasure to its permanent organ.
So, ludicrous they may be, but they are not totally to be despised. They are the first experimental efforts of nature’s attempt to create artists, as ill-formed and unviable as the original creatures which preceded the animal species we now have, and which were not made to last. These weak-willed, sterile art-lovers are surely as touching as those early machines which could not get off the ground but which embodied, not the secret of flight, which was yet to be discovered, but the desire to fly. ‘Also, old chap, adds the music-lover, gripping you by the arm, this is the eighth time I've heard it, and I can promise you it won't be the last.’ And indeed, since they cannot take in the truly nourishing elements in art, they are permanently in need of artistic pleasures, victims of a bulimia which never lets them feel satisfied. So they go to concert after concert to applaud the same work, believing that by being there they are fulfilling a duty, an obligation, in the way that other people feel a duty to attend board meetings or funerals. Then, whether it be in literature, in painting or in music, new, even diametrically opposed, works start to appear. For the ability to launch new ideas and new systems, and more importantly the capacity to assimilate and reproduce them, has always been much commoner, even among those who produce art, than genuine taste, but it has become much more widespread now with the multiplication of reviews and literary journals (and concomitantly of factitious careers as writers and artists). Thus the best part of the younger generation, the most intelligent and disinterested of them, used to like nothing in literature so much as works that had an elevated moral and sociological, even religious, significance. They imagined this to be the criterion of a work’s value, thereby repeating the error of artists such as David Chenavard, Brunetiere, etc. Instead of Bergotte, whose finest sentence, did in fact require a much more profound consideration by the reader, they preferred writers who seemed more profound simply because they wrote less well. The complexity of his artistry was aimed at fashionable society, said the democrats, thus paying the people in society an unmerited tribute. Whenever the rational intelligence decides to start passing judgment on works of art, nothing continues to be fixed or certain, you can prove anything you like. While the reality of talent is a universal possession or acquisition, our primary responsibility being to establish its presence or absence beneath the surface fashions of thought and style, criticism in its classification of authors never goes beyond that surface. It hails a writer as a prophet, on account of his peremptory tone and his very public scorn for the school that preceded him, when in fact he has absolutely nothing new to say. These aberrations on the part of criticism are so constant that a writer might almost prefer to be judged by the general public (if they were not incapable even of recognizing what an artist has tried to achieve in an area of research which they know nothing about). For there is a closer analogy between the instinctive life of the public and the talent of a great writer, which is no more than an instinct religiously listened to while imposing silence on everything else, an instinct perfected and understood, than between it and the superficial verbiage and shifting criteria of the recognized arbiters of judgment. New battles of words take place in every decade (for the kaleidoscope is not only made up of fashionable groupings, but also of social, political and religious ideas which become widespread for a short while thanks to their refraction among ordinary people, but which are none the less still subject to the brief lifespan of ideas whose novelty has been able to seduce only those minds which do not require strict standards of proof). So one school or party had followed another, always winning adherents among the same minds, men with a limited amount of intelligence, always liable to become caught up with things which other minds, more scrupulous and more difficult to convince away from. Unfortunately, precisely because the former are only half-minds, they need to supplement themselves by doing things, so they are more active than the better minds, and attract crowds of followers, and create around them not only exaggerated reputations and unjustified contempt, but civil and foreign wars, which a little Port-Royalist self-criticism might have prevented.
As for the enjoyment the beautifully expressed thought of a master gives to a truly discerning mind or a spirit that is genuinely alive, it is probably entirely healthy but, however prized the men may be who can really appreciate it (and how many of them are there in twenty years?), it does reduce them to being no more than the complete consciousness of another. When a man has done everything he can to be loved by a woman who could only have made him miserable, but despite his best efforts over the years has not succeeded even in arranging a meeting with her, then instead of trying to give expression to his sufferings and the danger he has escaped, he reads and rereads this comment of La Bruyére’s, adding to it his own ‘million words’ and some intensely moving recollections of his life: ‘Men often want to love where they cannot succeed, they seek their defeat without being able to bring it about and so, if I may put it like this, they are compelled to remain free.’** Whether or not this is the meaning the comment had for its writer (for it to have done so, it would have had to read ‘be loved’ instead of ‘love’, which would have been better), there can be no doubt that, taking it this way, this sensitive and well-read man gives it new life, inflates it with meaning until it is ready to burst and cannot repeat it without brimming over with joy, so true and fine does he think it to be; yet despite all that he has added nothing to it, and it remains the thought of La Bruyére alone.
How could a purely descriptive literature have any value at all, when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an aeroplane, or in the outline of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc.) so that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from them?
Preserved by our memory, it is the piecemeal sequence of all those inaccurate expressions, in which nothing of what we have really experienced remains, which constitutes our thought, our life, reality, and all that the so-called art of ‘real life’ can do is to reproduce that lie, in an art which is as simple as life, devoid of beauty, and such a tedious and pointless duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records that one wonders where anyone who engages in it can find the joyous, dynamic spark capable of setting his task in motion and then keeping it going. The greatness of true art, on the other hand, the sort of art that M. de Norpois would have called dilettante amusement, lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize this reality, distant as it is from our daily lives, and growing more and more distant as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes denser and more impermeable, this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life.
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never ‘developed’ them. Our lives; and the lives of other people, too; because style for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different one from another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fire from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light.
This labour of the artist, this attempt to see something different beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words, is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life. To put it briefly, this art, complicated though it be, is actually the only art that is alive. It alone can express for others, and make us see for ourselves, our own lives, lives which are unable to keep a watch on themselves, and whose visible manifestations, such as they are, need to be translated and frequently to be read against the grain and painstakingly deciphered. The work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us.
And of course it was very tempting to recreate real life and rejuvenate one’s impressions in this way. But it called for all kinds of courage, including emotional courage. Because above all it involved giving up one’s most cherished illusions, ceasing to believe in the objectivity of what one had elaborated oneself, and instead of comforting oneself for the hundredth time with the words: ‘She was very nice,’ reading what underlay them: ‘I enjoyed kissing her.’ Certainly what I had felt in these hours of love was what all men feel. One feels, but what one has felt is like those negatives which show nothing but blackness until thev are held close to a lamp, and which also have to be looked at from the other side: one does not know what it is until it has been brought into contact with the intellect. Only when that has clarified it, when that has intellectualized it, can one make out, and even then only with difficulty, the form of what one felt. But I also realized that the suffering I had first known because of Gilberte, that our love does not belong to the creature who inspires it, is salutary. To a lesser extent as a means to an end (because, short as our life may be, it is only during suffering that our thoughts, in a sense shaken up by endless and shitting impulses, elevate, as in a storm, to a level at which it becomes visible, all that regulated immensity, which we, stationed at a badly placed window, do not normally see, because the calm of happiness leaves it smooth and at too low a level; perhaps only for some great geniuses does this movement of thought continue all the time without any need for the agitations of grief; yet we cannot be certain, when we contemplate the expansive and even development of their cheerful works, that we are not too inclined to infer from the happiness of the work that the life was happy too, when it may perhaps, on the contrary, have been permanently miserable) — but principally because, if our love is not only the love of a Gilberte (and this is what we find so hard to bear), this is not because it is also the love of an Albertine, but because it is a part of our soul, longer lasting than the various selves which die successively within us and which selfishly would like to hold on to it, and a part which must — whatever pain, and it may even be productive pain, this may cause — detach itself from individuals and recreate its general nature and give this love, the understanding of this love, to everyone, to the universal mind, and not first to this woman and then another in whom one or another of the selves that we have successively been has wanted to be dissolved.
I needed to restore to even the slightest of the signs which surrounded me (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) the meaning which habit had made them lose for me. And when we have attained reality, if we are to express it and preserve it we must eliminate everything that is not a part of it and which is constantly being introduced by the speed that accompanies habit. Most of all, I would eliminate all words which come from the tongue rather than the mind, humorous remarks of the sort we make in conversation and which after a long conversation with other people we continue to address artificially to ourselves and which fill our minds with untruths, these purely automatic remarks which, in the writer who sinks so far as to transcribe them, are accompanied by the little smile, the litrle grimace which constantly spoils, for example, the spoken sentence of a Sainte-Beuve, whereas true books must be the product not of daylight and chitchat but of darkness and silence. And as art exactly reconstructs life, an atmosphere of poetry will always hover around the truths that one has reached in oneself, a gentle sense of mystery which is merely the remains of the semi-darkness we have had to pass through, the indication, as precisely marked as on an altimeter, of the depth of a work. (For depth is not inherent in certain subjects as, not being able to go beneath the world of appearances, some materialistically spiritual novelists believe, all of whose noble intentions, like the virtuous tirades common among the sort of people who are incapable of the smallest act of kindness, should not prevent us from noticing that they have not even had the strength of mind to get rid of all the banalities of form they have acquired through imitation.)
As for the truths which the intellect — even of the finest minds — gathers in the open, in front of it, in broad daylight, their value may be very great; but their outlines are starker and they are featureless, without any depth, because no depths had to be negotiated in order to reach them, because they have not been recreated. It is often the case that writers in whose deeps those mysterious truths no longer appear write, after a certain age, only with their intelligence, which becomes increasingly powerful; because of this, the books of their mature years have greater power than those of their youth, but none of the same aura of sweetness.
I felt, however, that these truths which the intelligence derives directly from reality are not to be despised completely, for they could provide a setting, in a material less pure but still imbued with mind, for those impressions which are conveyed to us outside time by the essence common to both past and present sensations, but which, because they are more precious, are also too rare for a work of art to be composed from them alone. I felt thronging within me a crowd of truths relating to passions, characters and conduct, all capable of being used in that way. Their perception caused me joy; yet it seemed to remind me that I had discovered more than one of them in suffering, and others in very ordinary pleasures.
Each person who makes us suffer can be linked by us to a divinity of which he or she is only a fragmentary reflection at the lowest level, a divinity (or Idea) the contemplation of which immediately gives us joy in place of the pain we had before. The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.
Then, less dazzling no doubt than the one which had shown me that the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again, a new light dawned on me. And I understood that all these raw materials for a literary work were actually my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in sorrow, that they had been stored up by me without my divining their ultimate purpose, even their survival, any more than a seed does as it lays up a reserve of all the nutrients which will feed the plant. Like the seed, I would be able to die when the plant had developed, and I began to see that I had lived for its sake without knowing it, without ever having realized that there should be some contact between my life and the books I had wanted to write and for which, when I used to sit down at my table, I could not find a subject. So all my life up to that day could, and at the same time could not, have been summed up under the title: A vocation. It could not have been, in the sense that literature had not played any role in my life. It could have been, to the extent that this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy, formed a reserve comparable to that of the albumen stored in the ovule of a plant and from which it draws the nourishment it needs to transform itself into a seed, before anybody is aware that the embryo of a plant is developing, despite the fact that it is the site of secret but very active chemical and respiratory phenomena. In the same way my life was linked to that which would bring about its maturation. And those who might subsequently draw nourishment from it for themselves would have no idea, any more than people do when they eat food grains, that the rich substances which they contain were made for its nourishment, had first nourished the seed and enabled it to ripen.
In this area, comparisons which are false if one takes them as a starting-point can be true if one ends up with them. The man of letters envies the painter, he would like to make sketches, to take notes, but if he does so it is a waste of time. When he writes, though, there is not one gesture of his characters, not one mannerism, one tone of voice, which has not been supplied to his inspiration by his memory, there is not one name of an invented character beneath which he cannot subsume sixty names of characters he has seen, one of whom has posed for the grimace, another for the monocle, this one for anger, that one for the conceited movement of the arm, etc. And then the writer realizes that while his dream of being a painter was not realizable in a conscious and deliberate manner, it has nevertheless been realized and that the writer, too, has created a sketch book without being aware of it.
For, driven by the instinct that was in him, the writer, long before he thought that he might one day become one, regularly failed to look at a large number of things that other people looked at, which caused him to be accused by other people of not paying attention and by himself of not knowing how to listen or look; during that time he was telling his eyes and ears to retain for ever things that to other people seemed puerile trivialities, the tone of voice in which a phrase had been said, and the facial expression and movement of the shoulders that at a certain moment, many years before, some person had made about whom perhaps he knows nothing else, and that because this tone of voice was one that he had already heard, or felt that he might hear again, that it was something that might be repeated, something durable; it is this feeling for the general which, in the future writer, itself selects things that are general and that will be able to be part of the work of art. For he has listened to the others only when, stupid or demented as they may have been, repeating like parrots all the things that other people of similar character say, they make themselves into birds of prophecy, mouthpieces of a psychological law. The only things he remembers are the general. It was by tones of voice like these, by such facial movements, even if seen in his earliest childhood, that the life of others was represented in his mind, and when later he comes to write, he will describe a common movement of the shoulders, as realistically as if it had been written in an anatomist’s note-book, but in order here to express a psychological truth, and then on to those shoulders graft somebody else’s neck-movement, each person having contributed his momentary pose.
It may well be that, for the creation of a work of literature, imagination and sensitivity are interchangeable qualities, and that the second may without any great disadvantage be substituted for the first, in the same way as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting pass that function over to their intestine. A man born sensitive but with no imagination might none the less write admirable novels. The suffering that other people caused him, his efforts to prevent it, the conflicts that it and the cruel other person created, all of this, interpreted by the inteiligence, might make the raw material of a book not only as beautiful as it would have been if it had been imagined, invented, but also as unrelated to the daydreams the author would have had if he had been been happily left to his own devices, as surprising for himself, and as accidental as a fortuitous vagary of the imagination. The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder; indeed, he is less likely than anyone to make fun of people’s foibles. Unfortunately, he is more unhappy than malicious: where his own passions are concerned, even though he knows all about them in general terms, he has more difficulty is extracting himself from the personal sufferings they cause. Obviously, when some insolent person insults us, we would rather he had been singing our praises, so when a woman we adore betrays us, we feel even more intensely that we would have given anything for it to be otherwise! But the resentment at the affront, or the pain of rejection would then have been territories we would never have known, and discovering them, painful though it is for a man, is a valuable experience for an artist. Which is why the malicious and the heartless, despite both their wishes, feature in his work. The pamphleteer cannot help but share his fame with the riff-raft he has stigmatized. In every work of art one can recognize those the author hated most and also, alas! those whom he loved best. All they have done is to pose for the artist at the moment when, against his will, they were causing him the most suffering. When I was in love with Albertine, I had to recognize that she did not love me, and I was forced to resign myself to the fact that all she would do was show me what it was like to experience suffering, love and even, at the outset, happiness.
And when we try to extract the generalizable features from our grief, to write about it, we are perhaps slightly consoled by one other factor in addition to the ones I adduce here, which is that to think in terms of generalities, to write, is for the writer a healthy and necessary function, the fulfilment of which makes him happy, just as exercise, sweating and baths do men of a more physical bent. In truth, I was a little unwilling to accept this. I was prepared to believe that the supreme truth of life was in art, and, at the same time, I could see that I was no more capable of the effort of remembering that would be necessary if { were still to love Albertine than I was of continuing to mourn my grandmother; all the same, I wondered whether a work of art of which they were unaware would be a fulfilment for them, for the destiny of those poor dead creatures. My grandmother, whom I had with so much indifference watched as she suffered her last moments and died before my eyes! Oh, that I might, in expiation, when my work were finished, fatally injured, suffer for long hours, abandoned by everybody, before finally dying! In addition, I felt infinite pity even for less cherished beings, even for people I cared nothing about, and for all the human destinies, which my thought, in its attempt to comprehend them, had reduced to their suffering or even to their foibles, All those people who had revealed truths to me, and who now were no longer living, appeared to me to have lived lives which had profited only myself, and to have died for my benefit.
It was sad for me to think that my love, which I had prized so highly, would in my book be so detached from an actual person that the readers of all sorts would apply it in all its detail to what they had felt for other women. But ought I to be scandalized by this posthumous infidelity, or by the fact that some person or other might provide unknown women as objects of my feelings, when this infidelity, this division of love among a number of beings, had begun in my lifetime, and even before I started to write? I had indeed suffered one after another for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine. One after another, too, I had forgotten them, and only my love, dedicated to different beings, had lasted. The profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was something I had already accomplished myself. 1 felt something close to horror at myself, as perhaps might some nationalist party in whose name hostilities had been fought out, and who alone would benefit from a war in which large numbers of noble victims had suffered and died, without even knowing (which for my grandmother at least would have been some compensation) the outcome of the struggle. And my only consolation for the thought that she did not know that I was finally setting myself to work was that (such is the lot of the dead), while she was unable to enjoy my progress, she had long since ceased to to be aware of my inaction, my failed life, which had been such a source of unhappiness to her. And certainly it was not only from my grandmother or from Albertine, but from many others as well, that I had been able to incorporate a remark, a look, although I might no longer remember them at all as individuals; a book is a great cemetery where the names have been effaced from most of the tombs and are no longer legible. Yet there are times when one remembers a name perfectly well, but without knowing whether anything of the person who bore it survives within these pages. That girl with the very deep-set eyes and the drawling voice, is she here? And if she really does repose here, then do we any longer know in what part, or how to find her underneath the flowers?
But since we live our lives detached from individual beings, since after a few years our strongest feelings, such as had been my love for my grandmother and for Albertine, are forgotten, since they mean no more to us than words we cannot understand, since we can talk about these dead people with society acquaintances in houses we still frequent with pleasure even though everything we loved is dead, then, if there is a way for us to learn to understand these forgotten words, ought we not to use it, even if it entails first transcribing them into a universal, but at least therefore permanent, language, and thereby making out of those who are no longer with us, in their truest essence, an acquisition of lasting value for all human beings? Indeed, if we could succeed in explaining the law of change which made these words unintelligible to us, would not our weakness become a new kind of strength?
In addition to that, the work to which our sorrows have contributed may be interpreted, so far as our future is concerned, both as a baneful sign of suffering and as an auspicious sign of consolation. Indeed, when we say that the loves and sorrows of a poet have been useful to him, have helped him to build up his work, when unknown women who never had the slightest idea that they might, by an act of malice here, or a mocking remark there, each have brought their stone to the construction of the monument which they will never see, we tend to forget that the writer’s life does not come to an end with this work, that the temperament which has caused him to have these sufferings, the ones that have entered into his work, will still be his when the work is finished, will make him love other women in conditions which would be almost identical, if all the modifications which time brings to circumstances did not result in slight variations, in the subject himself, in his appetite for love and in his resistance to pain. From this first point of view, then, the work is to be regarded solely as if it were an unfortunate love which fatally presages more of the same, assuming that the life to come will resemble the work, and that the poet will have almost no further need to write, because for most of the time he will be able to find the shape of future events anticipated in what he has already written. Thus my love for Albertine, to the extent that it is different from it, would already be inscribed in my love for Gilberte, in the middle of which happy time I had first heard Albertine’s name spoken, and her character described, by her aunt, without my having the slightest idea that this insignificant seed would grow, expand and one day spread its branches over the whole of my life.
But from another point of view, the work is a sign of happiness, because it shows us that in every love the general is to be found alongside the particular, and shows us how to pass from the latter to the former by means of exercises which fortify us against unhappiness by detaching our attention from its cause in order to focus on its essential qualities. Indeed, as I was shortly to discover for myself, even while you are in love and suffering, if you have finally achieved your vocation, then during the hours you are working you feel very strongly that the being whom you love is dissolving into a greater reality, and you start intermittently to forget her and, while you are working, suffer no more from love than from any purely physical illness that has nothing to do with the loved being, such as some sort of heart ailment. It is true, though, that this is a matter of timing and that the effect seems to be the opposite if the work comes more slowly. Because there are some individuals who, having managed, in spite of us, by their unkindness or their insignificance to destroy our illusions, have themselves been reduced to nothing and severed from the chimera of love we had conjured up in our minds; and if we then set to work, our mind raises them up again, identifies them, for the purposes of our self-analysis, with individuals who have loved us, and in such cases literature, reconstructing the demolished work of amorous illusion, gives a sort of afterlife to feelings which were no longer in existence.
It is true, then, that we are obliged to relive our private suffering with all the courage of a doctor who continues to give himself a dangerous course of injections. At the same time, though, we have to think about it in its general form, which enables us to some extent to escape its grasp, makes everybody sharers in our pain, and may even offer a kind of joy. Where life walls us in, the intellect cuts a way out, for although there may be no cure for love that is not reciprocated, the investigation of one’s suffering does provide a way out, even if only by revealing its likely consequences. The intelligence does not recognize closed situations in life, with no way out.
So I had to resign myself, since nothing can last unless it is generalized, nor without the mind dying to itself, to the idea that even those who were dearest to the writer had done nothing in the end except pose for him like models for a painter.
In love, a favoured rival, in other words our enemy, is our benefactor. To a being who was arousing in us nothing but an insignificant physical desire he immediately adds immense value, quite unrelated, but which we confuse with her. If we had no rivals, pleasure would not be transformed into love. If we did not have any, or even if we thought we did not have any. Because there is no need for them actually to exist. The illusory life which our suspicion, our jealousy, ives to non-existent rivals is enough for our needs.
Sometimes, when a painful section is still in rough draft, a new attachment, and new suffering, come along which enable us to finish it, to give it substance. One cannot really complain too much about these great but useful sorrows, because there is no shortage of them and they do not make us wait long for them. None the less we have to hurry if we are to profit from them, for they do not last very long: one finds consolation, or else, if they are too overwhelming, and if one’s heart is no longer very sound, one dies. Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind. Moreover, even if it did not reveal a law to us each time this happened, it would be no less indispensable for returning us each time to the truth, forcing us to take things seriously, and uprooting each time the weeds of habit, scepticism, levity and indifference. Admittedly this truth, which is not compatible with happiness, or with health, is not always compatible with life either. Sorrow kills in the end. At each new, unbearable affliction, we feel yet another vein stand out, extending its deadly sinuosity across our temples, or under our eyes. And it is in this way that are gradually formed those terrible, ravaged faces of the old Rembrandt, and the old Beethoven, whom everybody used to laugh at. The bags under the eyes and the wrinkled forehead would not matter, of course, if there were not also suffering of the heart. But since forces can change into other forces, since accumulated heat becomes light and since the electricity in lightning can power a camera, since the dull pain in our heart can raise above itself, like a flag, the permanently visible image of each new sorrow, let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of the sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life. Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; the moment they change into ideas they lose a part of their power to hurt our hearts and, for a brief moment, the transformation even releases some joy. Substitutes only in the order of time, though, because it seems that the primary element is actually the idea, and the sorrow merely the mode in which certain ideas first enter our minds. But there are numerous families within the general group of ideas, some of which are joys from the start.
These reflections allowed me to give a firmer and more precise meaning to the truth that I had always felt, particularly when Mme de Cambremer used to wonder how I could abandon a man as remarkable as Elstir for Albertine. Even from an intellectual point of view I sensed that she was wrong, but I did not know what it was that she did not understand: which was the kind of lessons through which one serves one’s apprenticeship as a man of letters. The objective value of the arts is hardly relevant to that; what we have to draw out, to bring to light, are our feelings, our passions, in other words the passions and the feelings of everyone. A woman whom we need, and who makes us suffer, arouses in us a series of feelings far more profound and far more intense than does an unusually gifted man who interests us. It remains to be seen, depending on the sphere in which we live, to what extent we regard some betrayal by which a woman has made us suffer as insignificant in relation to the truths which the betrayal has revealed to us and which the woman, happy to have made us suffer, would scarcely have been able to understand. But, whatever else, there will be no shortage of betrayals. A writer may start work on a lengthy task without any anxiety about that. Let his intelligence begin the work, plenty of sorrows will arise along the way and look after the business of finishing it. As for happiness, almost its only useful quality is to make unhappiness possible. We need, during periods of happiness, to form particularly pleasant and powerful bonds of trust and affection in order that their destruction can cause us the precious laceration called unhappiness. If one had not been happy, even if only in expectation, unhappinesses would be devoid of cruelty and consequently fruitless.
And more than the painter, the writer, in order to obtain depth and substance, generality, literary reality, just as he needs to have seen a number of churches in order to depict a single one, also needs a number of individuals for one single feeling. For if art is long and life short, one may also say that, while inspiration is short, the feelings it has to depict are not much longer. It is our passions which provide the outline of our books, the intervening periods of respite which write them. When inspiration returns, when we can take up work again, the woman who was sitting for us to illustrate some feeling has already lost the ability to make us experience it. To continue to depict her we have to use another model, and while this may be a betrayal of the individual, from the literary point of view, thanks to the similarity of our feelings, which means that a work is both the recollection of our past loves and the prophecy of our new ones, there is no real disadvantage to these substitutions. This is one reason why studies where people try to work out who an author is talking about are pointless. Because any work, even if it is directly confessional, is at the very least intercalated between a number of episodes in the author’s life, the earlier ones which inspired it and the later ones which are no less characteristic, the details of subsequent love affairs being traced from the ones which came before. Because we are not so faithful even to the person we have loved the most as we are to ourselves, and sooner or Jater we forget her in order to be able — since this is one of our own traits — to start loving again. At most, this woman whom we have loved so much has given a particular form to our love, which will make us faithful to her even in infidelity. With the next woman we shall need the same morning walks, need to see her home in the same way in the evening, or to give her a hundred times too much money. (It is a curious thing, this circulation of the money we give to women, who because of that make us unhappy, that is, enable us to write books — one can almost say that books, as in artesian wells, rise to a height that is proportionate to the depth to which suffering has bored down into the heart.) These substitutions add something disinterested, something more general, to the work, something which at the same time is an austere lesson that it is not to individuals that we must attach ourselves, that it is not individuals who really exist and are consequently capable of being expressed, but ideas. So one has to hurry and lose none of the time during which one has the models at one’s disposal; for those who pose for happiness do not generally have many sittings to offer, nor alas, as it too passes so quickly, do those who pose for grief.
All the same, even when that does not, by uncovering it, provide us with the raw material of our work, it is useful to us as a spur to doing it. Imagination and thinking can be admirable mechanisms in themselves, but they can also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion. And the individuals who pose to us for grief give us such frequent Sittings, in the studio we go into only during those periods and which is within ourselves! Those periods are like an image of our life, with all its different griefs. For they in turn contain more griefs, and just when you think they have been quieted, a new one arises. New in every sense of the word: perhaps because these unpredictable situations force us come into closer contact with ourselves, and the painful dilemmas with which love is constantly presenting us instruct us and show us, little by little, what we are made of. So when Francoise, seeing Albertine having the run of my place like a dog, spreading chaos everywhere, ruining me, causing me so much pain, told me (for at that point I had already done a few articles and some translations): ‘Ah, if only Monsieur, instead of this girl who makes him waste all his time, had taken on a nicely brought-up young secretary who would have sorted out all Monsieur’s manuscribbles!’ I was perhaps wrong to think she was speaking wisely. By making me waste my time, by causing me pain, Albertine might perhaps have been more useful, even from the literary standpoint, than a secretary who could have organized my ‘manuscribbles’. But all the same, when a living creature is so badly constituted (and perhaps it is natural for man to be that creature) that he cannot love without suffering, and that he needs to suffer in order to learn truths, the life of such a creature must in the end be very tedious. Years of happiness are years wasted, waiting for a bout of suffering to make one work. The idea of this preliminary suffering then comes to be associated with the idea of work, and one is afraid of each new work because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it. And when one realizes that suffering is the best thing one can encounter in life, one thinks without terror, almost as of a release, about death.
Yet although I rather recoiled from this, I was still very much aware that writers have frequently not treated life as a game, and exploited individuals in order to use them for books, but quite the opposite. I did not, alas, have the nobility of young Werther.®* Without for a moment believing in Albertine’s love, I had twenty times wanted to kill myself for her, I had ruined myself, I had destroyed my health for her. Where writing is concerned, one is scrupulous, one examines things very closely, one rejects everything that is not the truth. But when it is only a matter of living, one ruins oneself, makes oneself ill, kills oneself, for lies. The vein that these lies come from may, it 1s true, still (if one has passed the age of being a poet) yield a small quantity of truth. Sorrows are obscure, detested servants, against whom one struggles, under whose influence one increasingly falls, unbearable, irreplaceable servants who lead us by devious ways tq truth and to death. Fortunate are those who met the former before the latter, and for whom, however close together the two may be, the hour of truth struck before the hour of death.
I also understood that the most insignificant episodes from my past life had contributed towards giving me the lesson in idealism from which I was going to benefit today. Had not my encounters with M. de Charlus, for example, even before his pro-German attitudes taught me the same lesson, done more even than my love for Mme de Guermantes or for Albertine, or than Saint-Loup’s love for Rachel, to convince me how utterly neutral matter itself is, and how thought can give it any characteristics it wants; a truth which is more profoundly emphasized by the widely misunderstood and pointlessly censured phenomenon of sexual inversion even than by that, which has already proved so instructive, of love? This latter may show us beauty deserting the woman we no longer love and taking up residence in a face which other people would find extremely ugly, and which once we might have disliked ourselves, as one day we shall again; but it is even more striking to see it, capturing the complete devotion of a great nobleman who instantly abandons a beautiful princess, migrate to a position beneath the cap of a bus conductor. And was not my astonishment each new time that I had seen, on the Champs-Elysées, in the street, or on the beach, the face of Gilberte, of Mme de Guermantes, or of Albertine, proof of the extent to which a memory persists only in a direction which diverges from the impression with which it originally coincided but from which it becomes increasingly remote?
A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces. This mildly deviant behaviour is the only means by which the invert can proceed to give full general significance to what he is reading. For Racine to be able to give her full universal value to the Phaedra of antiquity, he had first for a moment to turn her into a Jansenist; similarly, if M. de Charlus had not given to the ‘faithless one’ over whom de Musset weeps in La Nuit d’octobre or in Le Souvenir the face of Morel, he would not have wept, nor understood, since it was by that narrow and circuitous way alone that he gained access to the truths of love. It is only out of a habit derived from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications that writers talk about ‘my reader’. In reality each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself. The recognition within himself, by the reader, of what the book is saying, is the proof of its truthfulness, and vice versa, at least to a certain extent, it often being possible to impute the difference between the two texts not to the author but to the reader. In addition to this, the book may be too learned, too obscure, for the unsophisticated reader, and thus present him with a blurred lens, with which he will not be able to read. But other characteristics (such as inversion) may mean that the reader needs to read in a particular way in order to read properly; the author should not take offence at this, but instead should allow the reader the greatest possible freedom by saying to him: “Look for yourself, try whether you see better with this lens, or that one, or the other one.’ If I had always been so interested in the dreams we have while we are asleep, was it not because, making up in potency what they lack in duration, they help you better to understand the subjective element in, for instance, love, by the simple fact that they produce — but with amazing speed — the effect commonly known as being crazy about a woman, even making us, in the course of a few minutes’ sleep, love an ugly woman passionately, something which in real life would have needed years of familiarity and cohabitation — and that they are like intravenous injections of love, the invention of some miracle-working doctor, even though they can also be injections of suffering? With equal rapidity the amorous suggestion which they have instilled in us vanishes, and sometimes not only has the nocturnal lover ceased to occupy that guise, becoming once more the ugly woman familiar to us, but something more precious has also vanished, a wonderful array of feelings of tenderness, of voluptuous pleasure, of vaguely blurred regrets, a whole Embarquement pour Cythére®’ of passion, of which we should like to record, for our waking state, the subtle gradations ofa delicious truth to life, but which disappears like a canvas faded far beyond restoration. And it was perhaps also because of the extraordinary tricks it plays with Time that the Dream fascinated me. Had ! not often seen in one night, in one minute of one night, remote periods of time, consigned to those vast distances at which we can no longer distinguish the feelings we had then, rushing to overwhelm us, blinding us with their clarity, as if they were giant aeroplanes rather than the pale stars we believed them to be, bringing back before our eyes everything they had ever held for us, giving us the emotion, the shock, the clarity of their immediate proximity, only to resume, the moment we awake, the distance they had miraculously overcome, to the point of making us believe, wrongly in fact, that they are one of the means of finding Lost Time again?
I had realized that it is only coarse and inaccurate perception which places everything in the object, when everything is in the mind; I had lost my grandmother in reality many months after having lost her in fact, I had seen people vary in appearance according to the idea that I or others had of them, a single person being several according to the people who were observing him (various Swanns in the opening volume, for example; the Princess of Luxembourg for the judge), even for the same person over the course of years (the name of Guermantes or the various Swanns, for me). I had seen love placing qualities in a person which are only in the person who loves. J had realized this all the more forcefully because I had seen stretched to the utmost the distance between objective reality and love (Rachel for Saint-Loup and for me, Albertine for me and Saint-Loup, Morel or the omnibus conductor for Charlus, and other people, despite which Charlus was still affectionate; verses by de Musset, etc.). Finally, the pro-Germanism of M. de Charlus, like the way Saint-Loup had looked at the photograph of Albertine, had to a certain extent helped me to detach myself for a moment, if not from my Germanophobia, at least from my belief in the pure objectivity of it, and made me think that perhaps the same applied to hatred as to love and that, in the terrible judgment which at this moment France pronounced on Germany, which she deemed to be beyond the bounds of humanity, the primary factor was an objectification of feelings like those which once made Rachel and Albertine seem so precious, the one to Saint-Loup, the other to me. What in fact made it possible that this perversity was not entirely intrinsic to Germany was that, just as I individually had had successive love affairs, after the end of which the object of that love would seem valueless to me, I had already seen in my country successive hatreds
which had, for example, made traitors — a thousand times worse than the Germans to whom they delivered France — of Dreyfusards such as Reinach** with whom today patriots were collaborating against a country every member of which was by definition a liar, a wild animal, ora fool, exceptions being made for those Germans who had embraced the French cause, like the King of Romania, the King of the Belgians or the Empress of Russia. The anti-Dreyfusards, it is true, might have replied: ‘It’s not the same thing.’ But in fact it never is the same thing, any more than it is the same person: if it were not for that, anyone faced with the same phenomenon and taken in again by it would have only his subjective state to blame and would be able to believe that the qualities or failings were inherent in the object. The intellect, therefore, has no difficulty at all in basing a theory on this difference (church schools against nature according to the Radicals, impossibility of assimilation for the Jewish race, perpetual hatred of the Germanic race for the Latin race, the yellow race being temporarily rehabilitated”). This subjective aspect was also evident in the conversation of neutrals, where the pro-Germans, for example, had the capacity to stop understanding for a moment, even to stop listening, when one was talking to them about German atrocities in Belgium. (And yet they were quite real: the subjective element that I had observed in hatred, as in sight itself, did not mean that the object could not possess real qualities and defects, and did not in any way cause reality to vanish into a pure relativism.) And if after so many years had passed and so much time had been lost, I was aware of the crucial influence of this inner reality even in international relations, had I not suspected it at the very beginning of my life, when I was reading in the garden at Combray one of those novels by Bergotte which, even today, if I flick through a few forgotten pages of it and come across a villain’s cunning plans, I cannot put down again until I have assured myself, by skipping a hundred pages, that as the end approaches this villain is duly humiliated and lives long enough to learn that his shady plans have failed? Because I never really remembered what happened to these characters, although in this they were no different from the people present at Mme de
Guermantes’s this afternoon and whose past lives, in a number of cases at least, were as vague for me as if I had read them in a half-forgotten
?
novel. Had the Prince d’Agrigente ended up marrying Mlle X Or was it not rather Mlle X ’s brother who was to have married the Duc d’Agrigente? Or else was I confusing it with something I had read a long time ago, or with a recent dream? Dreams were another, very striking, fact of my life, and had probably done more than anything else to convince me of the purely mental nature of reality, and I did not spurn their help in the composition of my work. When I was living, in a somewhat less disinterested manner, for the sake of a love affair, a dream would come to me bringing strangely close, across vast distances of lost time, my grandmother, or Albertine, whom I had started to love again because she had provided me in a dream with a rather toned-down version of the affair with the laundry-girl. I thought that in this way they would sometimes bring closer to me truths or impressions which my efforts alone or even the chances of nature did not provide; that they would awaken in me the desire or the regret for certain non-existent things which is the condition for working, for being cut off from habit, for detaching oneself from the concrete. So I would not disregard this second muse, this nocturnal muse which sometimes compensated for the other one.
I had seen members of the nobility become common when their minds, like that of the Duc de Guermantes for example, were common (‘Don’t stand on ceremony,’ as Cottard would have said). During the Dreyfus Affair, during the war, in medicine, I had seen people believe truth to be a kind of fact, believe that ministers or doctors possess a yes or no which requires no interpretation, and which ordains that an X-ray photograph indicate what the patient has without interpretation, believe that the men in power Anew whether Dreyfus was guilty, knew (without needing to send Roques to make enquiries on the spot) whether Sarrail did or did not have the means to mobilize at the same time as the Russians.°° There is no moment in my life which would not have served to teach me that only coarse and inaccurate perception places everything in the object when the opposite is true: everything is in the mind.
In short, when I thought about it, the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte.
It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the Wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann. Rather a slender stem, perhaps, to support in this way the whole span of my life (the ‘Guermantes way’ thus being seen to derive from the ‘way by Swann’s’). But this source of the different aspects of our life is frequently a person much inferior to Swann, somebody of complete insignificance. Would it not have been enough for any school-friend to have told me about a good-looking girl to be had there (whom I would probably not have met) for me to have gone to Balbec? Thus it often happens that later in life one encounters some dislikable school-mate and scarcely even shakes his hand, whereas if one ever thought about it, it is from some passing comment he made to us, like “You ought to come to Balbec,’ that our whole life and our whole work have sprung. We make no recognition of this to him, but that does not constitute proof of ingratitude. For when he said those words he did not for a moment think of the tremendous consequences they would have for us. It is our sensibility and our intellect which have exploited the circumstances which, once the primary impetus has been given, have generated themselves, one after another, without his ever having been able to foresee anything, whether my living with Albertine, or the masked ball at the Guermantes’. No doubt his impetus was necessary, and in that sense the external form of our life and the very material of our work derive from him. Without Swann, it would never have occurred to my parents to send me to Balbec. Yet he was not responsible for the sufferings which he himself had indirectly caused me. They were due to my weakness. His had caused sufferings of his own through Odette. But by determining in this way the life that we have led, he has thereby excluded all the lives that we might have led in place of this one. If Swann had not talked to me about Balbec, I would not have known Albertine, the dining-room in the hotel, the Guermantes. But I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which J cannot even imagine, and the novelty of which, in its unfamiliarity, is appealing enough to make me regret not having gone in that direction instead, and regret too that Albertine and the beach at Balbec and Rivebelle and the Guermantes had not remained for ever unknown to me.
Of course, it is with that face, as I had seen it for the first time by the sea, that I associated certain things which I should no doubt be writing about. In a sense, I was right to associate them with her, because if I had not walked along the sea-front that day, if I had not met her, all these ideas would not have been developed (unless they had been developed by another woman). I was also wrong, though, because this generative pleasure which we try retrospectively to situate in a beautiful feminine face comes from our own senses: it was actually quite clear that the pages I would write were something that Albertine, especially the Albertine of those days, would not have understood. That is precisely why (and this is a recommendation not to live in too intellectual an atmosphere), because she was so different from me, that she had fertilized me through grief, and even at the beginning through the sheer effort of imagining something different from oneself. If she had been capable of understanding these pages then, for that very reason, she would not have inspired them.
Jealousy is a good recruiting officer who, when there is a gap in our picture, goes searching through the streets for the beautiful girl we needed. If she is no longer beautiful, she regains her looks because we are jealous of her, and she will fill the empty space.
Once we are dead, we shall feel no joy at the picture being completed in this way. But there is nothing at all discouraging about that thought. Because we sense that life is a little more complicated than people say, and circumstances likewise. And there is an urgent necessity to demonstrate this complexity. Jealousy, for all its usefulness, does not necessarily arise from a look, or from a tale, or from a backward glance. It can turn up, ready to sting us, between the pages of a directory — the ones called Tout-Paris for Paris, and the Annuaire des chateaux for the country.”! We had absent-mindedly heard the girl we are no longer interested in saying she had to go and see her sister for a few days in the Pas-de-Calais, near Dunkirk; we had also at one time vaguely thought that M. E had perhaps made advances to the girl, though now she never saw him, as she never went to the bar where she used to meet him. What could her sister be? Maybe a housemaid? Being discreet, we had never asked. And now, opening the Annuaire des chéteaux at random, we discover that M. E—has a country place in the Pas-de-Calais, near Dunkirk. Suddenly everything becomes clear, to please the girl he has taken her sister on as a housemaid, and if the girl no longer meets him in the bar, it is because he has had her come to his house, living as he does in Paris almost all of the year, but unable to do without her even for the period he is in the Pas-de-Calais. The brushes, drunk with rage and love, continue to paint it all in. And yet, what if it was not like that? If M. E really was not seeing the girl any longer but, out of a wish to be helpful, had recommended her sister to one of his brothers who lives all the year round in the Pas-de-Calais? So that she goes, perhaps even quite by chance, to see her sister at a time when M. E is not there, as they no longer have any interest in each other? Or again perhaps the sister is not a housemaid in that country house or anywhere else but has relatives in the Pas-de-Calais. Our initial grief subsides in the face of these latter conjectures and jealousy is allayed. But what difference does it make? Hidden among the pages of the Annuaire des chateaux, it came at the right time, because now the empty space that was there in the canvas has been filled in. And the whole design comes together thanks to the presence, created by jealousy, of the beautiful girl of whom already we are no longer jealous and whom we no longer love.
&
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 chequered 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 traveller makes briefly in a town and whom he is forced to abandon when he leaves it, because it is there that they who are not leaving will end that day and their lives as if he were still there, in front of the church, down by the harbour and beneath the trees of the promenade. So that the shadow of Gilberte, for instance, lay not only in front of a church in the Ile-de-France where I had imagined her, but also across the path of a park on the Méséglise way, the shadow of Mme de Guermantes on a wet road where violet and reddish clusters rose in spikes, or on the morning gold of a Paris pavement. And this second person, born not of desire but of memory, was not for any of these women a single figure. For I had known each of them more than once, at different times, when each was a different woman for me, or I myself was different, steeped in dreams of a different colour. And the law which had governed the dreams of each year kept gathered around them the memories of a woman I had known, so that everything relating, for example, to the Duchesse de Guermantes at the time of my childhood was concentrated by a magnetic force around Combray, and everything which had to do with the Duchesse de Guermantes, when she was about to invite me to lunch, around a quite different sensitive entity; there were several Duchesses de Guermantes, as there had been several Mme Swanns since the lady in pink, separated by the colourless ether of the years, and from one to the other of whom I could no more jump than if I had to leave one planet and travel to another across the intervening
&
You had a girl who was coming to see you after midnight. Basin laughed so much at the thought of somebody calling on you at that time of night.’ Albertine had indeed come to see me after the Princesse de Guermantes’s party. 1 remembered it as clearly as the Duchesse, although Albertine was as unimportant to me now as she would have been to Mme de Guermantes, if Mme de Guermantes had known that the girl because of whom I had not been able to go in was Albertine. Long after the poor departed have gone from our hearts, their insignificant dust continues to be mingled, to be used as an alloy, with the events of the past. And although we no longer love them, it sometimes happens that when we are describing a room, or a garden path, or a road, where at a certain time they once were, we are obliged, in order to fill the gap they occupied, to mention them, but without missing them, without naming them even, and without enabling anybody else to identify them. (Mme de Guermantes was hardly likely to have identified the girl who was due to visit me that evening, had never known who she was and only mentioned her because of the eccentricity of the time and the circumstances.) Such are the final, and unenviable, forms in which we survive.
&
The Duc stayed no more than a few minutes, long enough for me to have understood that Odette, attentive to her younger suitors, was treating him with contempt. But the strange thing was that he who in the past had been almost ridiculous when he behaved like a stage-king had taken on a genuinely grand appearance, rather like his brother, whom old age, by stripping him of all inessentials, made him resemble. And he, once proud, like his brother although in a different way, seemed almost deferential, although also in a different way. For he had never undergone the same decline as his brother, reduced by forgetfulness brought on by illness to greeting with politeness people whom he would once have scorned to know. But he was very old, and as he tried painfully to pass through the door and descend the staircase on his way out, old age, which is really the most wretched human state and which hurls people from their life’s eminence as if they were kings in Greek tragedies, old age, by forcing him to stop on the via dolorosa that life becomes for the impotent and endangered, to wipe his dripping brow, t grope around as his eyes searched for a step which eluded him, because he really needed support for his faltering steps, and for his douded eyes, giving him without his knowing it an air of gently and timidly imploring it from other people, more than august, old age had made him suppliant.
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 hotel 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 no break in continuity, I must not have ceased for a moment, not taken a rest from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, because this moment from long ago still stuck to me, so that I could still find it again, still go back to it, simply by going more deeply back into myself. And it is because they contain in this way every hour of the past that human bodies can do so much damage to those who love them, because they contain so many memories of joys and desires already effaced from their minds, but cruel indeed for anyone who contemplates and projects back through the array of time the cherished body of which he is jealous, so jealous as to wish for its destruction. For, after death, Time leaves the body, and the memories — so indifferent, so pale now — are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture, but in whom they will eventually die, when the desire of a living body is no longer there to support them. The depths of Albertine, whom I saw sleeping, and who was dead.
I felt a sense of tiredness and fear at the thought that all this length of time had not only uninterruptedly been lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, that it was myself, but also that I had to keep it attached to me at every moment, that it supported me, that I was perched on its vertiginous summit, and that I was unable to move without its collaboration, without taking it with me. The date at which I heard the sound of the garden bell at Combray, so distant and yet still within me, was a benchmark in that vast dimension which I did not know I had. I felt giddy at the sight of so many years below me, yet within me, as if I were miles high.
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 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.
