Proust Moment, May 4, 2003

The Party's Over; So, In Its Way, Is Life

Marcel, listening from the upstairs window after Swann has made his exit, recalls the family's after-dinner chat. The coffee-and-pistachio ice, according to Mamma, was not a very big hit, the great-aunt thinks Swann has grown a good deal older, and indulges in some gossip about "that wretched wife of his, who 'lives' with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It's the talk of the town." Charlus, the kind of predatory dandy you might see in a Fassbinder movie, plays a much bigger role in Cities of the Plain.

Mamma notes that Swann looks less unhappy lately than he has before, seems less stressed-out, a fact she attributes to the fact that he no longer loves his wife. This is old news to the grandfather, who would rather chastise the aunts for not properly thanking Swann for the champagne he sent. They assure him they did, but the old man is unconvinced.

Now, as Mamma and Papa are getting ready for bed, is the moment for Marcel to strike. Mamma sees the light in the servants' hall and decides to check on Francoise:

"My mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the staircase. Presently I heard her coming upstairs to close her window. I went quietly into the passage; my heart was beating so violently that I could hardly move, but at least it was throbbing no longer with anxiety, but with terror and with joy. I saw in the well of the stair a light coming upwards, from Mamma's candle. Then I saw Mamma herself: I threw myself upon her. For an instant she looked at me in astonishment, not realising what could have happened. Then her face assumed an expression of anger. She said not a single word to me; and, for that matter, I used to go for days on end without being spoken to, for far less offences than this. A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility, and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still, as indicating that, with such a punishment as was in store for me, mere silence, and even anger, were relatively puerile.

"A word from her then would have implied the false calm in which one converses with a servant to whom one has just decided to give notice; the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off to enlist, which would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being angry with him for a few days. But she heard my father coming from the dressing-room, where he had gone to take off his clothes, and, to avoid the 'scene' which he would make if he saw me, she said, in a voice half-stifled by her anger: `Run away at once. Don't let your father see you standing there like a crazy jane!'

"But I begged her again to `Come and say good night to me!' terrified as I saw the light from my father's candle already creeping up the wall, but also making use of his approach as a means of blackmail, in the hope that my mother, not wishing him to find me there, as find me he must if she continued to hold out, would give in to me, and say: `Go back to your room. I will come.'

"Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively I murmured, though no one heard me, `I am done for!'"

But things, actually, turn out better than expected. For no apparent reason, except that maybe he's too tired to hash the matter out, Papa shrugs the matter off and tells Mamma to comfort Marcel, even stay with him in the bigger of the two beds in the boy's room.

Marcel is overcome with gratitude to his father at this happy turn of events and, quite suddenly, pulls out of his reverie. Midway through the following paragraph, he is reminded by his own laborious reconstruction of the past that it is no longer there. It has vanished and so, too, will he, eventually:

"It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to `Go with the child.' Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air."

When the city grows quiet, he hears the church bells; when life grows quiet, he hears voices from the past.

There will be much more to hear.

--"Overture," Swann's Way