Read Online The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle by Marcel Proust - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marcel Proust
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addressed to them both. Céline laughed.
Swann was puzzled, but went on: “ ‘I cannot say whether it was ignorance or cozenage,’ writes Saint-Simon. ‘He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.’ ”
My grandfather was already in ecstasies over “ignorance or cozenage,” but Mlle Céline—the name of Saint-Simon, a “man of letters,” having arrested the complete paralysis of her auditory faculties—was indignant:
“What! You admire that? Well, that’s a fine thing, I must say! But what’s it supposed to mean? Isn’t one man as good as the next? What difference can it make whether he’s a duke or a groom so long as he’s intelligent and kind? He had a fine way of bringing up his children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn’t teach them to shake hands withall decent folk. Really and truly, it’s abominable. And you dare to quote it!”
And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother: “Just tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on these occasions. Oh, yes: ‘What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!’ 2 How good that is!”
I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to kiss her several times in public, as I would have done in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter’s absence. But tonight, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: “The little man looks tired; he’d better go up to bed. Besides, we’re dining late tonight.”
And my father, who was less scrupulous than mygrandmother or my mother in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: “Yes; run along; off to bed.”
I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang.
“No, no, leave your mother alone. You’ve said good night to one another, that’s enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.”
And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the staircase “against my heart,” 3 as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by kissing me, given my heart leave to accompany me. That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely
Swann was puzzled, but went on: “ ‘I cannot say whether it was ignorance or cozenage,’ writes Saint-Simon. ‘He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.’ ”
My grandfather was already in ecstasies over “ignorance or cozenage,” but Mlle Céline—the name of Saint-Simon, a “man of letters,” having arrested the complete paralysis of her auditory faculties—was indignant:
“What! You admire that? Well, that’s a fine thing, I must say! But what’s it supposed to mean? Isn’t one man as good as the next? What difference can it make whether he’s a duke or a groom so long as he’s intelligent and kind? He had a fine way of bringing up his children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn’t teach them to shake hands withall decent folk. Really and truly, it’s abominable. And you dare to quote it!”
And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother: “Just tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on these occasions. Oh, yes: ‘What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!’ 2 How good that is!”
I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to kiss her several times in public, as I would have done in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter’s absence. But tonight, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: “The little man looks tired; he’d better go up to bed. Besides, we’re dining late tonight.”
And my father, who was less scrupulous than mygrandmother or my mother in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: “Yes; run along; off to bed.”
I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang.
“No, no, leave your mother alone. You’ve said good night to one another, that’s enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.”
And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the staircase “against my heart,” 3 as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by kissing me, given my heart leave to accompany me. That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely
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