Marcel Proust

“ In the hall where I asked a footman for my snowboots which I had brought as a precaution against the snow, several flakes of which had already fallen, to be converted rapidly into slush, not having realised that they were hardly fashionable, I felt, at the contemptuous smile on all sides, a shame which rose to its highest pitch when I saw that Mme. de Parme had not gone and was watching me put on my American “rubbers”. The Princess came towards me. “Oh! What a good idea,” she exclaimed, “it’s so practical! There’s a sensible man for you. ”

“ To the dignity of his attitude was added, without being conspicuous, the suppleness of a perfect figure. A face in itself too good-looking was toned down by the convention due to distressing circumstances. In the sable majesty of his frock coat the Professor entered the room, melancholy without affectation, uttered not the least word of condolence, which might have been thought insincere, nor was he guilty of the slightest infringement of the rules of tact. At the foot of a deathbed it was he and not the Duc de Guermantes who was the great gentleman. ”

“ And one can easily imagine some triply disillusioned soul, rebuffed of love and ambition and the fount of life itself, entering on a course of the Master, content to live, lullabyed by the slight movement as of flickering woodland leaves, warmed by the soft light that falls on grey cathedral walls and white, dusty roads, quietly appreciative of the Master’s passionless, infallible display of the complications and unconscious betrayals of their ego by Françoise and Tante Léonie, Odette and the Duchess ”

“ Mme. de Villeparisis was startled. But doubtless, while still bent upon giving an immediate satisfaction to the librarian and the anti-Dreyfusard clan, she wished at the same time to provide for the future, and so contented herself with letting her eyelids droop over her closing eyes.
“I believe she’s asleep,” said Bloch to the librarian who, feeling that he had the support of the Marquise, assumed an indignant air. “Good-bye, madame,” shouted Bloch.
The old lady made the slight movement with her lips of a dying woman who wants to open her mouth but whose eye can no longer recognise people. ”

“ But it is more particularly because Marcel Proust seems here to stand head and shoulders above his generation, and not on account of his many other merits as an artist, that he has such a passionate, if still comparatively small, following to-day.
He is, perhaps, if we return to that definition of the difference between a novel and a play, more of the essential novelist than any man has ever been. ”

“ Thus it was that we saw Saint-Loup’s handclasp thrust out as though involuntarily at the moment of his hearing one’s name, without any participation by his eyes, without the addition of a bow. Any unfortunate commoner who for a particular reason—which, for that matter, very rarely occurred—was presented to anyone of the Saint-Loup subsection racked his brains over this abrupt minimum of a greeting, which deliberately assumed the appearance of non-recognition, to discover what in the world the Guermantes—male or female—could have against him. ”

“ I had the impression that he had something to tell me, and could not find the right words to express it.
"I have another volume of Bergotte here; I will fetch it for you," he went on, and rang the bell. Presently a page came. "Go and find me your head waiter. He is the only person here who is capable of obeying an order intelligently," said M. de Charlus stiffly. "Monsieur Aimé, sir?" asked the page. "I cannot tell you his name; yes, I remember now, I did hear him called Aimé. Run along, I am in a hurry." ”

“ Dressed in a clinging, almost white material such as I could never have believed that any man would have the audacity to wear, the thinness of which suggested no less vividly than the coolness of the dining-room the heat and brightness of the glorious day outside, he was walking fast. His eyes, from one of which a monocle kept dropping, were of the colour of the sea. Everyone looked at him with interest as he passed, knowing that this young Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray was famed for the smartness of his clothes. ”

“ Proust, let us own to it at once, is not every one’s novelist. He is difficult to read in the sense that he does demand complete attention and considerable efforts of memory. He has an outlook on life which is bound to be unsympathetic to a good many Englishmen—and a good many Frenchmen too, for that matter. He is very “long”; and it is necessary to have read A la Recherche du Temps Perdu more than once to be able to see the general plan for the hosts of characters and scenes that, as one reads it book by book, so vividly hold the stage. ”

“ It amuses you more to do nothing? What a pity it is that it’s the useless fellows like me who are always ready to work, and the ones who could if they wanted to, won’t. There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is. Her Proudhons are in safe keeping. I never part from them.”
An officer, tall, handsome, majestic, emerged with slow and solemn gait from the foot of a staircase. Saint-Loup saluted him and arrested the perpetual instability of his body for the moment occupied in holding his hand against the peak of his cap. ”

“ Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves, one by one, from the shades of night which they patterned, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their semi-nude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the limit of their course, at the luminous, shaded surface on which their brilliant faces appeared behind the gaily breaking 45foam of the feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved, beneath their hyacinthine locks begemmed with pearls, which the flow of the tide seemed to have caught and drawn with it ”

“ Within the flux of our past and our present, figures outside ourselves seem to rise, to move, to act. But such movements have reality only in so far as they are reflected in the unique mirror of a soul. And for Proust this mirror is combined of the individual and his memory.
No wonder if such a novelist is sometimes called difficult. He is too like life to be easy. ”

“ It is always a pleasure to do anything for M. le Marquis!” “But you must decide,” said Saint-Loup to me. “Foix is a good fellow, he may bore you or he may not; anyhow he’s not such a fool as most of them.” I told Robert that of course I should like to meet his friend but that now that I was for once in a way dining with him and was so entirely happy, I should be just as well pleased to have him all to myself. “He’s got a very fine cloak, the Prince has,” the proprietor broke in upon our deliberation. “Yes, I know,” said Saint-Loup. ”

“ I can see that you know no more about flowers than you do about styles; don’t protest that you know about styles,” he cried in a shrill scream of rage, “you can’t even tell me what you are sitting on. You offer your hindquarters a Directory chauffeuse as a Louis XIV bergère. One of these days you’ll be mistaking Mme. de Villeparisis’s knees for the seat of the rear, and a fine mess you’ll make of things then. It’s precisely the same; you didn’t even recognise on the binding of Bergotte’s book the lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. ”

“ She could not make up 198her mind to go back to Méséglise, where “the people are so stupid,” where in the market the gossips at their stalls would call cousins with her, and say “Why, it’s never poor Bazireau’s daughter?” She would sooner die than go back and bury herself down there, now that she had “tasted the life of Paris,” and Françoise, traditionalist as she was, smiled complacently nevertheless at the spirit of innovation that was incarnate in this new Parisian when she said: “Very well, mother, if you don’t get your day out, you have only to send me a pneu.” ”

“ We can light the lamp, make a clear fire, and sit down to the book with the old thrill. There is only the thought that we must be content with what we have, that we are to get no more from that hand. With Marcel Proust, however, it seems that we are spared even that mortification. He has left behind him the completion of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This is great news. The announcements from the press of La Nouvelle Revue Française will be eagerly awaited. Even a new Anatole France is not so important an event. ”

“ Émile Combesville; we ought-84- not to be surprised if literature even gets splashed a little in the dirty dog-fight. Because Marcel Proust is supposed to have chosen as the subject of his epic the faubourg St. Germain, it is assumed that he admired and believed in it. Was not L’Action française amongst the first to hail his rising genius? Is he not half a Jew and therefore wholly a renegade? He is a black reactionary and an enemy of light. He is not a good man, so how can he be a good writer? ”

“ And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust. Before these triumphs we must pause. English poetry fears no one—excels in quality as well as quantity. But English Action is less triumphant: it does not contain the best stuff yet written, and if we deny this we become guilty of provincialism.
Now, provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a prig or a fool would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault. ”

“ Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. ”

“ I have often wondered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good or even a possible thing if the novel is to be what Balzac made it, history added to poetry. A novelist with style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision.
There is no naked vision in Proust; his vision is like a clouded mirror, in whose depths strange shapes flash and vanish. The only faultless style in French is Flaubert’s; that style, which has every merit and hardly a fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most writers careful of form. ”

“ it was always to the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know well, if a passer-by who is 'putting me on the right road' shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the walk that I had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; ”

“ While you are on your way to your tea-party your old friend will be more fortunate than you, for alone in an outlying suburb he will be watching the pink moon rise in a violet sky. The truth is that I scarcely belong to this Earth upon which I feel myself such an exile; it takes all the force of the law of gravity to hold me here, to keep me from escaping into another sphere. I belong to a different planet. Good-bye; do not take amiss the old-time frankness of the peasant of the Vivonne, who has also remained a peasant of the Danube. ”

“ And all that day, and overnight, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of the kitchen,—of which she was indeed a past-master, stimulated, moreover, by the prospect of having a new guest to feed, the consciousness that she would have to compose, by methods known to her alone, a dish of beef in jelly, had been living in the effervescence of creation; since she attached the utmost importance to the intrinsic quality of the materials which were to enter into the fabric of her work, she had gone herself to the Halles to procure the best cuts of rump-steak, shin of beef, calves'-feet, as Michelangelo passed eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Julius II.—Françoise expended on these comings and goings so much ardour that Mamma, at the sight of her flaming cheeks, was alarmed lest our old servant should make herself ill with overwork, like the sculptor of the Tombs of the Medici in the quarries of Pietrasanta. ”