The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, Page 2

  Like James Joyce’s Dubliners, the various stories that Proust wrote in the 1890s are psychological epiphanies fusing into a mosaic in which the privileged metropolis itself plays the lead role, while each human character presents yet another emotional angle.

  A number of Proust’s short texts may have rural settings—as do many of the paintings he loves. But whether as a direct or as an artistic experience, these locales form a rustic mythology that never exists in an absolute state. Rather, the forests, the beaches, the ocean, in offering a temporary escape from, a contrast with, the city, throw the latter into relief. The country reminds us of the city, but not vice versa: enhancing the mythology of Paris, the resulting dialectic is one-sided.

  In his endless Ciceronian periods and in sprawling paragraphs that stress prosiness and thereby challenge the lyrical rhythms and the sumptuous vocabulary, Proust coalesces a variety of forms: tales, sketches, narrative prose poems, biographical verses. His goal is to produce a subjective collage that binds all those elements together while fostering their individuality.

  In providing a new and contemporary translation that tries to render the vital strength, delicacy, and irony of Proust’s bewitching psychology and language, I have added a half dozen pieces that were originally published in journals but not included in Pleasures and Days. Most of what ultimately imbues the seven huge volumes of Remembrance of Things Past (often translated today as In Search of Lost Time) is already explored and adumbrated in Proust’s first book.

  The author probes the precarious nuances of physical and spiritual love, the frail mysteries of time and memory. We find his deft, pungent, and even humorous characterizations, his vivid, sometimes tongue-in-cheek descriptions of Parisian high society, the visual and aural details, the tastes and fragrances, the decadence, the sexual confusion, the amorous adventures and follies, the indifference to politics and to life outside the aristocratic cosmos. In addition to displaying the writer’s precise, evocative, and sensual diction, these stories reveal his very fine ear for dialogue, while his monologues hint at the technique of stream of consciousness invented by Édouard Desjardins in the 1880s and then developed mainly by Arthur Schnitzler, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

  A social climber who poked fun at other social climbers, yet hoped that his writings would make him more acceptable to high society, Marcel Proust conjured up his ideal of an aristocratic Paris that was all light—despite the agonies of unrequited love, the lurking of old age and death. Proust turned these universal elements into experiences endured purely by the city’s bourgeoisie and aristocracy. His mythology, so exclusive in ignoring the outside world, was self-contained. In the minds of his characters and in the consciousness of the people they were based on, this mythology was indisputable and infinite. Nothing else existed. It was their sole reality.

  For Proust, however, the reality of art vied with the art of reality. Along with the mythology of Paris, it is art, style, especially language art and style, that hold all these pieces together: the author’s personal sensibility fuses with the disposition of French high society and its specific, mythical Paris.

  JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL

  Belle Harbor, New York

  October 2000

  PLEASURES AND DAYS

  PREFACE

  Why has he asked me to present his book to curious minds? And why did I promise to take on this very agreeable but quite unnecessary task? His book is like a young countenance imbued with rare charm and delicate grace. It recommends itself on its own, speaks for itself, and presents itself, willingly or not.

  It is young, I daresay. It is young with the youth of the author. Yet it is old with the oldness of the world. It is the springtime of leaves on ancient boughs in the forest of centuries. One might think that the new sprouts are saddened by the profound past of the woods and that they are mourning so many dead springtimes.

  Grave Hesiod spoke to the goatherds of Helicon about Works and Days. It is a more melancholy effort to tell our sophisticates, male and female, about Pleasures and Days if, as that British statesman says, life would be tolerable but for its amusements. Thus our young friend’s book contains weary smiles and jaded attitudes that are not without beauty and nobility.

  We will find its very sadness amusing and quite varied, guided and sustained as it is by a marvelous sense of observation, by a limber, piercing, and truly subtle intelligence. This almanac of Pleasures and Days indicates nature’s hours through harmonious depictions of sky, sea, woods, and it indicates human hours through faithful portraits and genre paintings that are marvelously rendered.

  Marcel Proust enjoys describing both the desolate splendor of the setting sun and the vanities that agitate a snobbish soul. He excels in portraying the elegant sorrows, the artificial sufferings that are at least as cruel as the ones that nature inflicts on us with motherly extravagance. I admit that these fictitious sufferings, these sorrows discovered by human genius, these artistic sorrows strike me as endlessly interesting and precious, and I am grateful to Marcel Proust for studying and describing a few chosen examples.

  He draws us into a hothouse atmosphere, keeping us among intricate orchids that do not nourish their strange and morbid beauty in earth. All at once a luminous arrow whizzes through the heavy and delicious air, a lightning bolt that, like the German doctor’s ray, passes through solid bodies. In a flash the poet has penetrated secret thoughts and unavowed desires.

  That is his manner and his art. He reveals a self-assurance that surprises us in so young an archer. He is not the least bit innocent. But he is so sincere and so truthful as to become naive and therefore appealing. There is something of a depraved Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and an ingenuous Petronius about him.

  This is a fortunate book! It will go into the city, go all decorated by, all fragrant with, the flowers that Madeleine Lemaire has strewn through its pages with her divine hand, which scatters roses glistening with their dew.

  ANATOLE FRANCE

  Paris

  April 21, 1896

  PROUST’S DEDICATION

  To My Friend Willy Heath

  Died in Paris on October 3, 1893

  From the bosom of God wherein you rest . . . reveal to me those truths that conquer death, preventing us from fearing it and almost making us love it.

  The ancient Greeks brought cakes, milk, and wine to their dead. Seduced by a more refined if not more sagacious illusion, we offer them flowers and books. I give you this book because, for one thing, it is a picture book. Despite the “legends,” it will be, if not read, then at least viewed by all the admirers of the great artist who has, in all her simplicity, brought me this magnificent present. One could say that, to quote Alexandre Dumas, the younger, “it is she who has created the most roses after God.” Monsieur Robert de Montesquiou, in still unpublished verses, has also sung her praises with that ingenious gravity, that sententious and subtle eloquence, that rigorous order that sometimes recalls the seventeenth century. In speaking about flowers he told her:

  To pose for your brushes impels them to blossom.

  You are their Vigée and you are their Flora,

  Who makes them immortal while the other one kills.

  Her admirers are an elite, yet they form a throng. I wanted them to see your name on the very first page, the name of the person whom they had no time to get to know and whom they would have admired. I myself, dear friend, I knew you very briefly. It was in the Bois de Boulogne that I found you on numerous mornings when you had noticed me and awaited me under the trees, standing, but relaxed, like one of Van Dyck’s aristocrats, whose pensive elegance you shared. Indeed, their elegance, like yours, resides less in their clothes than in their bodies, and their bodies themselves appear to have received it and to keep receiving it from their souls: it is a moral elegance. Everything, incidentally, contributed to emphasizing that melancholy resemblance down to the leafy background in whose shade Van Dyck often captured the strolling of a king. Like so many of his sitters, you had to die a
n early death, and in your eyes as in theirs, one could see the gloom of forebodings alternating with the soft light of resignation. But if Van Dyck’s art could properly be credited with the grace of your pride, the mysterious intensity of your spiritual life actually derived from Da Vinci. Frequently, with your finger raised, your impenetrable eyes smiling at the enigma that you concealed, you looked like Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist. We developed a dream, almost a plan, to live together more and more, in a circle of select and magnanimous women and men, far enough from vice, stupidity, and malice to feel safe from their vulgar shafts.

  Your life, such as you wished it, was to be one of those works that require a sublime inspiration. We could derive inspiration from love as we could from faith and genius. But it was death that would give it to you. In death and even in its approach there are hidden forces and secret aids, a “grace” that does not exist in life. Akin to lovers when falling in love, akin to poets when singing, ill people feel closer to their souls. Life is a hard thing that presses us too tightly, forever hurting our souls. Upon feeling those restraints loosen for a moment, one can experience clear-sighted pleasures. When I was a little boy, no biblical figure struck me as suffering a more wretched fate than Noah, because of the Deluge that imprisoned him in the ark for forty days. Later on I was often sick and I, too, had to spend long days in the “ark.” I now understood that Noah could not have seen the world so clearly as from the ark, even though the ark was shut and the earth was shrouded in night. When my convalescence began, my mother, who had not left my side, remaining with me every night, “opened the door of the ark” and left. Yet like the dove, “she returned that evening.” Then I was fully recovered, and like the dove, “she did not return.” I had to resume living, to turn away from myself, to hear words harsher than my mother’s; furthermore, her words, always gentle until this point, were no longer the same; they were stamped with the severity of life, the severity of the duties that she had to teach me.

  Gentle dove of the Deluge, how could I but think that the Patriarch, in seeing you flutter away, felt some sadness mingling with the joy at the rebirth of the world. Gentleness of the abeyance of life, gentleness of the real “Truce of God,” which suspends labors, evil desires, “Grace” of the illness that brings us closer to the realities beyond death—and its charms, too, charms of “those vain ornaments and those veils that crush,” charms of the hair that an obtrusive hand “took care to arrange”; a mother’s and a friend’s sweet signs of fidelity, which have so often looked like the very face of our sadness or like the protective gesture begged for by our weakness, signs that will halt at the threshold of convalescence—I have often suffered at feeling you so far away from me, all of you, the exiled descendants of the dove in the ark. And who among us has not had moments, dear Willy, when he has wanted to be where you are. We accept so many commitments in regard to life that a time comes when, despairing of ever managing to fulfill them all, we face the graves, we call upon death, “death, which brings help to destinies that have trouble coming true.” But while death may exempt us from commitments we have made in regard to life, it cannot exempt us from our commitments to ourselves, especially the most important one: namely, the commitment to live in order to be worthy and deserving.

  More earnest than the rest of us, you were also the most childlike, not only because of your purity of heart, but also because of your unaffected and delightful merriment. Charles de Grancy had a gift for which I envy him: by recalling school days he could abruptly arouse that laughter, which was never dormant for long and which we will never hear again.

  While a few of these pages were written when I was twenty-three, many others (“Violante,” nearly all the “Fragments of Commedia dell’Arte,” etc.) go back to my twentieth year. They are all nothing but the vain foam of an agitated life that is now calming down. May my life someday be so limpid that the Muses will deign to mirror themselves in it and that we can see the reflections of their smiles and their dances skimming across its surface.

  I give you this book. You are, alas, my only friend whose criticism it need not fear. I am at least confident that no freedom of tone would have shocked you anywhere. I have never depicted immorality except in people with delicate consciences. Too feeble to want good, too noble to fully enjoy evil, they know nothing but suffering; I therefore could speak about them only with a pity too sincere not to purify these little texts. I hope that the true friend and the illustrious and beloved Master—who gave them, respectively, the poetry of his music and the music of his incomparable poetry—and also Monsieur Darlu, the great philosopher, whose inspired words, more certain to endure than any writings, have stirred my mind and so many other minds—I hope they can forgive me for reserving for you this final token of affection and I hope they realize that a living man, no matter how great or dear, can be honored only after a dead man.

  July 1894

  THE DEATH OF BALDASSARE SILVANDE,

  VISCOUNT OF SYLVANIA

  The poets say that Apollo tended the flocks of Admetus; so too each man is a God in disguise who plays the fool.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  “Don’t cry like that, Master Alexis. Monsieur the Viscount of Sylvania may be giving you a horse.”

  “A big horse, Beppo, or a pony?”

  “Perhaps a big horse, like Monsieur Cardenio’s. But please don’t cry like that . . . on your thirteenth birthday of all days!”

  The hope of getting a horse and the reminder that he was thirteen made Alexis’s eyes light up through his tears. Yet he was not consoled since he had to go and visit his uncle, Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania. Granted, ever since he had heard that his uncle’s disease was incurable, Alexis had been to see him several times. But meanwhile everything had changed. Baldassare was now aware of the full scope of his disease and he knew he had at most three years to live. Without, incidentally, grasping why the anguish had not killed his uncle, the certainty had not driven him insane, Alexis felt incapable of enduring the pain of seeing him. Convinced that his uncle would be talking to him about his imminent end, Alexis did not think he had the strength not only to console him, but also to choke back his own sobs. He had always adored his uncle, the grandest, handsomest, youngest, liveliest, gentlest of his relatives. He loved his gray eyes, his blond moustache, his lap—a deep and sweet place of delight and refuge when Alexis had been younger, a place that had seemed as unassailable as a citadel, as enjoyable as the wooden horses of a merry-go-round, and more inviolable than a temple.

  Alexis, who highly disapproved of his father’s severe and somber wardrobe and dreamed about a future in which, always on horseback, he would be as elegant as a lady and as splendid as a king, recognized Baldassare as what he, the nephew, considered the most sublime epitome of a man. He knew that his uncle was handsome, that he, Alexis, resembled him; he also knew that his uncle was intelligent, generous, and as powerful as a bishop or a general. Truth to tell, his parents’ criticism had taught Alexis that the viscount had his faults. He even remembered his uncle’s violent anger the day his cousin Jean Galeas had made fun of him; his blazing eyes had hinted at the joys of his vanity when the Duke of Parma had offered him his sister’s hand (trying to disguise his pleasure, the viscount had clenched his teeth in a habitual grimace that Alexis despised); and the boy recalled his uncle’s scornful tone when talking to Lucretia, who had openly stated that she did not care for his music.

  Often Alexis’s parents would allude to other things that his uncle had done and that the boy did not understand, though he heard them being sharply condemned.

  But all of Baldassare’s faults, his commonplace grimace, had undoubtedly disappeared. When he had learned he might be dead in two years, how indifferent he must have become to the mockeries of Jean Galeas, to his friendship with the Duke of Parma, and to his own music. Alexis pictured his uncle as still handsome, but solemn and even more perfect than he had been before. Yes, solemn, and already not completely of this world. Hence,
a little disquiet and terror mingled with the boy’s despair.

  The horses had been harnessed long ago, it was time to leave; the boy stepped into the carriage, then climbed down again in order to ask his tutor for some final advice. When Alexis spoke, his face turned very crimson:

  “Monsieur Legrand, is it better for my uncle to believe or not believe that I know that he knows that he’s dying?”

  “He must not believe it, Alexis!”

  “But what if he brings it up?”

  “He won’t bring it up.”

  “He won’t bring it up?” said Alexis, astonished, for that was the only alternative he had not foreseen: whenever he imagined his visit with his uncle, he could hear him talking about death with the gentleness of a priest.

  “But what if he does bring it up after all?”

  “You’ll tell him he’s mistaken.”

  “And what if I cry?”

  “You’ve cried too much this morning, you won’t cry in his home.”

  “I won’t cry!” Alexis exclaimed in despair. “But he’ll think that I don’t care, that I don’t love him . . . my dear, sweet uncle!”

  And he burst into tears. His mother, losing patience, came looking for him; they left.

  After handing his little overcoat to a servant who stood in the vestibule, wearing a green and white livery with the Sylvanian arms, Alexis momentarily halted with his mother and listened to a violin melody coming from an adjacent room. Then the visitors were ushered into a huge, round, glass-enclosed atrium, where the viscount spent much of his time. Upon entering, you faced the ocean, and upon turning your head, you saw lawns, pastures, and woods; at the other end of the room there were two cats, plus roses, poppies, and numerous musical instruments. The guests waited for an instant.