The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (3 page)

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.

J
OACHIM
N
EUGROSCHEL
Belle Harbor, New York
October 2000

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.

A
NATOLE
F
RANCE
Paris
April 21, 1896

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:

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 an 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

“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.