This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that may enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers such as Ossian. We are so astonished that bards long dead should have modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an ancient Gaelic epic we come across one which we should have thought as most ingenious in a contemporary. A translator of talent has only to add to an ancient writer whom he is reconstructing more or less faithfully a few passages which, signed with a contemporary name and published separately, would seem agreeable merely; at once he imparts a moving grandeur to his poet, who is thus made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once. The translator was capable only of a mediocre book, if that book had been published as his original work. Offered as a translation, it seems a masterpiece. The past is not fugitive, it stays put. It is not only months after the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can effectively influence its course, it is not only fifteen years after a crime which has remained obscure that a magistrate can still find the vital evidence which will throw light on it; after hundreds and thousands of years the scholar who has been studying the place-names and the customs of the inhabitants of some remote region may still extract from them some legend long anterior to Christianity, already unintelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus, which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, still dwells in the midst of the present, like a denser emanation, immemorial and stable. There was an emanation too, though far less ancient, of the life of the court, if not in the manners of M. de Guermantes, which were often vulgar, at least in the mind that controlled them. I was to experience it again, like an ancient odour, when I rejoined him a little later in the drawing-room. For I did not go there at once.
As we left the outer hall, I had mentioned to M. de Guermantes that I was extremely anxious to see his Elstirs. “I am at your service. Is M. Elstir a friend of yours, then? I’m mortified not to have known that you were so interested in him. I know him slightly, he’s an amiable man, what our fathers used to call an ‘honest fellow.’ I might have asked him to honour us with his company at dinner tonight. I’m sure he would have been highly flattered at being invited to spend the evening in your company.” Very untrue to the old world when he tried thus to assume its manner, the Duke then relapsed into it unconsciously. After inquiring whether I wished him to show me the pictures, he conducted me to them, gracefully standing aside for me at each door, apologising when, to show me the way, he was obliged to precede me, a little scene which (since the time when Saint-Simon relates that an ancestor of the Guermantes did him the honours of his house with the same punctilious exactitude in the performance of the frivolous duties of a gentleman) before reaching our day must have been enacted by many another Guermantes for many another visitor. And as I had said to the Duke that I would like very much to be left alone for a few minutes with the pictures, he discreetly withdrew, telling me that I should find him in the drawing-room when I had finished.
However, once I was face to face with the Elstirs, I completely forgot about dinner and the time; here again as at Balbec I had before me fragments of that world of new and strange colours which was no more than the projection of that great painter’s peculiar vision, which his speech in no way expressed. The parts of the walls that were covered by paintings of his, all homogeneous with one another, were like the luminous images of a magic lantern which in this instance was the brain of the artist, and the strangeness of which one could never have suspected so long as one had known only the man, in other words so long as one had only seen the lantern boxing its lamp before any coloured slide had been slid into its groove. Among these pictures, some of those that seemed most absurd to people in fashionable society interested me more than the rest because they re-created those optical illusions which prove to us that we should never succeed in identifying objects if we did not bring some process of reasoning to bear on them. How often, when driving, do we not come upon a bright street beginning a few feet away from us, when what we have actually before our eyes is merely a patch of wall glaringly lit which has given us the mirage of depth. This being the case, it is surely logical, not from any artifice of symbolism but from a sincere desire to return to the very root of the impression, to represent one thing by that other for which, in the flash of a first illusion, we mistook it. Surfaces and volumes are in reality independent of the names of objects which our memory imposes on them after we have recognised them. Elstir sought to wrest from what he had just felt what he already knew; he had often been at pains to break up that medley of impressions which we call vision.
The people who detested these “horrors” were astonished to find that Elstir admired Chardin, Perronneau, and many other painters whom they, the ordinary men and women of society, liked. They did not realise that Elstir for his own part, in striving to reproduce reality (with the particular trademark of his taste for certain experiments), had made the same effort as a Chardin or a Perronneau and that consequently, when he ceased to work for himself, he admired in them attempts of the same kind, anticipatory fragments, so to speak, of works of his own. Nor did these society people add to Elstir’s work in their mind’s eye that temporal perspective which enabled them to like, or at least to look without discomfort at, Chardin’s painting. And yet the older among them might have reminded themselves that in the course of their lives they had gradually seen, as the years bore them away from it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by Ingres and what they had supposed must for ever remain a “horror” (Manet’s Olympia, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed like twins. But we never learn, because we lack the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be faced with an experience which has no precedents in the past.
I was moved by the discovery in two of the pictures (more realistic, these, and in an earlier manner) of the same person, in one of them in evening dress in his own drawing-room, in the other wearing a frock-coat and tall hat at some popular seaside festival where he had evidently no business to be, which proved that for Elstir he was not only a regular sitter but a friend, perhaps a patron, whom he liked to introduce into his paintings, as Carpaccio introduced—and in the most speaking likenesses—prominent Venetian noblemen into his; in the same way as Beethoven, too, found pleasure in inscribing at the top of a favourite work the beloved name of the Archduke Rudolph. There was something enchanting about this waterside carnival. The river, the women’s dresses, the sails of the boats, the innumerable reflexions of one thing and another jostled together enchantingly in this little square panel of beauty which Elstir had cut out of a marvellous afternoon. What delighted one in the dress of a woman who had stopped dancing for a moment because she was hot and out of breath shimmered too, and in the same way, in the cloth of a motionless sail, in the water of the little harbour, in the wooden landing-stage, in the leaves of the trees and in the sky. Just as, in one of the pictures that I had seen at Balbec, the hospital, as beautiful beneath its lapis lazuli sky as the cathedral itself, seemed (more daring than Elstir the theorist, than Elstir the man of taste, the lover of things mediaeval) to be intoning: “There is no such thing as Gothic, there is no such thing as a masterpiece, a hospital with no style is just as good as the glorious porch,” so I now heard: “The slightly vulgar lady whom a man of discernment wouldn’t bother to look at as he passed her by, whom he would exclude from the poetical composition which nature has set before him—she is beautiful too; her dress is receiving the same light as the sail of that boat, everything is equally precious; the commonplace dress and the sail that is beautiful in itself are two mirrors reflecting the same image; their virtue is all in the painter’s eye.” This eye had succeeded in arresting for all time the motion of the hours at this luminous instant when the lady had felt hot and had stopped dancing, when the tree was encircled with a perimeter of shadow, when the sails seemed to be gliding over
a golden glaze. But precisely because that instant impressed itself on one with such force, this unchanging canvas gave the most fleeting impression: one felt that the lady would presently go home, the boats drift away, the shadow change place, night begin to fall; that pleasure comes to an end, that life passes and that instants, illuminated by the convergence at one and the same time of so many lights, cannot be recaptured. I recognised yet another aspect, quite different it is true, of what the Moment means, in a series of water-colours of mythological subjects, dating from Elstir’s first period, which also adorned this room. Society people who held “advanced” views on art went “as far as” this earliest manner, but no further. It was certainly not the best work he had done, but already the sincerity with which the subject had been thought out took away its coldness. Thus the Muses, for instance, were represented as though they were creatures belonging to a species now fossilised, but creatures it would not have been surprising in mythological times to see pass by in the evening, in twos or threes, along some mountain path. Here and there a poet, of a race that would also have been of peculiar interest to a zoologist (characterised by a certain sexlessness), strolled with a Muse, as one sees in nature creatures of different but of kindred species consort together. In one of these water-colours one saw a poet exhausted by a long journey in the mountains, whom a Centaur, meeting him and moved to pity by his weakness, has taken on his back and is carrying home. In others, the vast landscape (in which the mythical scene, the fabulous heroes occupied a minute place and seemed almost lost) was rendered, from the mountain tops to the sea, with an exactitude which told one more than the hour, told one to the very minute what time of day it was, thanks to the precise angle of the setting sun and the fleeting fidelity of the shadows. In this way the artist had managed, by making it instantaneous, to give a sort of lived historical reality to the fable, painted it and related it in the past tense.*
While I was examining Elstir’s paintings, the bell, rung by arriving guests, had been pealing uninterruptedly and had lulled me into a pleasing unawareness. But the silence which followed its clangour and had already lasted for some time finally succeeded—less rapidly, it is true—in awakening me from my reverie as the silence that follows Lindor’s music arouses Bartolo from his sleep. I was afraid that I might have been forgotten, that they might already have sat down to dinner, and I hurried to the drawing-room. At the door of the Elstir gallery I found a servant waiting for me, white-haired, though whether with age or powder I could not say, and reminiscent of a Spanish minister, though he treated me with the same respect that he would have shown to a king. I felt from his manner that he would have waited for me for another hour, and I thought with alarm of the delay I had caused in the service of dinner, especially as I had promised to be at M. de Charlus’s by eleven.
It was the Spanish minister (though I also met on the way the footman persecuted by the porter, who, radiant with delight when I inquired after his fiancée, told me that tomorrow was a “day off” for both of them, so that he would be able to spend the whole day with her, and extolled the kindness of Madame la Duchesse) who conducted me to the drawing-room, where I was afraid of finding M. de Guermantes in a bad humour. He welcomed me, on the contrary, with a joy that was obviously to some extent factitious and dictated by politeness, but was in other respects sincere, prompted both by his stomach which so long a delay had begun to famish, and his consciousness of a similar impatience in all his other guests, who completely filled the room. Indeed I learned afterwards that I had kept them waiting for nearly three quarters of an hour. The Duc de Guermantes probably thought that to prolong the general torment for two minutes more would make it no worse and that, politeness having driven him to postpone for so long the moment of moving into the dining-room, this politeness would be more complete if, by not having dinner announced immediately, he could succeed in persuading me that I was not late and they had not been waiting for me. And so he asked me, as if we still had an hour before dinner and some of the party had not yet arrived, what I thought of his Elstirs. But at the same time, and without letting the cravings of his stomach become too apparent, in order not to lose another moment he proceeded in concert with the Duchess to the ceremony of introduction. It was only then that I perceived that, having until this evening—save for my novitiate in Mme Swann’s salon—been accustomed in my mother’s drawing-room, in Combray and in Paris, to the patronising or defensive attitudes of prim bourgeois ladies who treated me as a child, I was now witnessing a change of surroundings comparable to that which introduces Parsifal suddenly into the midst of the flower-maidens. Those who surrounded me now, their necks and shoulders entirely bare (the naked flesh appearing on either side of a sinuous spray of mimosa or the petals of a full-blown rose), accompanied their salutations with long, caressing glances, as though shyness alone restrained them from kissing me. Many of them were nevertheless highly respectable from the moral standpoint; many, not all, for the more virtuous did not feel the same revulsion as my mother would have done for those of easier virtue. The vagaries of conduct, denied by saintlier friends in the face of the evidence, seemed in the Guermantes world to matter far less than the social relations one had been able to maintain. One pretended not to know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no gaps.
As the Duke showed very little concern for his other guests (from whom he had for long had as little to learn as they from him), but a great deal for me, whose particular kind of superiority, being outside his experience, inspired in him something akin to the respect which the great noblemen of the court of Louis XIV used to feel for his bourgeois ministers, he evidently considered that the fact of my not knowing his guests mattered not at all—to me at least, though it might to them—and while I was anxious, on his account, as to the impression that I might make on them, he was thinking only of the impression they would make on me.
At the very outset, indeed, there was a little twofold imbroglio. No sooner had I entered the drawing-room than M. de Guermantes, without even allowing me time to shake hands with the Duchess, led me, as though to give a pleasant surprise to the person in question to whom he seemed to be saying: “Here’s your friend! You see, I’m bringing him to you by the scruff of the neck,” towards a lady of smallish stature. Well before I arrived in her vicinity, the lady had begun to flash at me continuously from her large, soft, dark eyes the sort of knowing smiles which we address to an old friend who perhaps has not recognised us. As this was precisely the case with me and I could not for the life of me remember who she was, I averted my eyes as the Duke propelled me towards her, in order not to have to respond until our introduction should have released me from my predicament. Meanwhile the lady continued to maintain in precarious balance the smile she was aiming at me. She looked as though she was in a hurry to be relieved of it and to hear me say: “Ah, Madame, of course! How delighted Mamma will be to hear that we’ve met again!” I was as impatient to learn her name as she was to see that I did finally greet her with every indication of recognition, so that her smile, indefinitely prolonged like the note of a tuning-fork, might at length be given a rest. But M. de Guermantes managed things so badly (to my mind, at least) that it seemed to me that only my own name was mentioned and I was given no clue as to the identity of my unknown friend, to whom it never occurred to name herself, so obvious did the grounds of our intimacy, which baffled me completely, seem to her. Indeed, as soon as I had come within reach, she did not offer me her hand, but took mine in a familiar clasp, and spoke to me exactly as though I had been as aware as she was of the pleasant memories to which her mind reverted. She told me how sorry Albert (who I gathered was her son) would be to have missed seeing me. I tried to remember which of my schoolfriends had been called Albert, and could think only of Bloch, but this could not be Bloch’s mother since she had been dead for many years. In vain I struggled to identify the past experience common to herself and me to which her thoughts had been carried
back. But I could no more distinguish it through the translucent jet of her large, soft pupils which allowed only her smile to pierce their surface than one can distinguish a landscape that lies on the other side of a pane of smoked glass even when the sun is blazing on it. She asked me whether my father was not working too hard, if I would like to come to the theatre some evening with Albert, if my health was better, and as my replies, stumbling through the mental darkness in which I was plunged, became distinct only to explain that I was not feeling well that evening, she pushed forward a chair for me herself, putting herself out in a way to which I had never been accustomed by my parents’ other friends. At length the clue to the riddle was furnished me by the Duke: “She thinks you’re charming,” he murmured in my ear, which felt somehow that it had heard these words before. They were the words Mme de Villeparisis had spoken to my grandmother and myself after we had made the acquaintance of the Princesse de Luxembourg. Everything was now clear; the present lady had nothing in common with Mme de Luxembourg, but from the language of the man who served her up to me I could discern the nature of the beast. She was a royal personage. She had never before heard of either my family or myself, but, a scion of the noblest race and endowed with the greatest fortune in the world (for, a daughter of the Prince de Parme, she had married an equally princely cousin), she sought always, in gratitude to her Creator, to testify to her neighbour, however poor or lowly he might be, that she did not look down upon him. And indeed I ought to have guessed this from her smile, for I had seen the Princesse de Luxembourg buy little rye-cakes on the beach at Balbec to give to my grandmother, as though to a caged deer in the zoo. But this was only the second princess of the blood royal to whom I had been presented, and I might be excused my failure to discern in her the generic features of the affability of the great. Besides, had not they themselves gone out of their way to warn me not to count too much on this affability, since the Duchesse de Guermantes, who had waved me so effusive a greeting with her gloved hand at the Opéra, had appeared furious when I bowed to her in the street, like the people who, having once given somebody a sovereign, feel that this has released them from any further obligation towards him. As for M. de Charlus, his ups and downs were even more sharply contrasted. And I was later to know, as the reader will learn, highnesses and majesties of another sort altogether, queens who play the queen and speak not after the conventions of their kind but like the queens in Sardou’s plays.