Du côté de chez Swann
Esquisse LI
(Cahier 14, 8v-16r)
Two or three metres beyond Swann's park if one turned to the left
instead of carrying on towards Pinçonville, in a low lying sheltered spot
close up to a small hill whose thickly shrubbed opposite side descended in
an incline the length of the house, one came upon La Taupinière, no doubt
so-called on account of its somewhat subterranean situation, which
belonged to M. Vington, an old scholar who had lost his wife and now lived
there with his daughter. Whenever I had met M. Vington in Combray the
first concern of my parents was to make sure that I had behaved properly
and was neatly dressed because this excellent gentleman - "the finest man
I ever knew", my grandmother would say, "the sort of man we don't find any
more" - was very easily shocked. When he came to visit my parents it was
always with some lamentation about modern manners. He had met the children
of one or other of his friends or ours and heard them "speaking
inappropriately". He was so good, saying all this in such a sympathetic
tone of voice that you could not help but smile at him tenderly, but all
the same Mama would say with a smile and at the same time reproaching
herself for it: "You didn't say anything inappropriate did you?" When he
saw some urchin beating a smaller child in the street, he was not
satisfied simply with making them stop but he also had to deliver them a
sermon. My father did not like it when people made fun of M. Vington. "You
talk about him as if he were an old fool," he would often say angrily,
"you know that he is one of the most distinguished of men, who has made
some wonderful discoveries." But now, ever since the death of his wife,
when M. Vington was not with his daughter he never did anything else apart
from visiting the cemetery. Whenever we were taking a walk in the area we
were always certain to bump into him. And he would say evasively: "I
needed to come out, I had a few little things to do", but we could see the
redness of his eyes and we understood. He would sometimes come and see us
with his daughter, a real tomboy, who must have been quite irritated with
him, because in his fear of her feeling too cold or too hot, he was always
taking off his coat for her, covering her feet with a shawl, taking care
of her like a children's nanny even though this young Vington girl seemed
far from fragile, always driving a little buggy at top speed when she was
alone. "She isn't very pretty the poor little thing, and such a harsh
expression," my great-aunt would say. But my grandmother said, and this
was true, that at times you would see crossing her harsh features an
expression that was almost child-like, timid, delicate and sweet * (see
the part about eyes) *. "In any case she seems very nervous", my
great-aunt said. "Her father says that he sometimes has all the trouble in
the world to get her to eat." We must have been closer to M. Vington in
the past than we were now because at one time he had given a small
collection of minerals to my father to give to me that I kept in my glass
case, a sea-blue [blank], some silvery lead [blank], and
an opal mineral that took the form of a slice of banana. The whole
exterior part of it was black and corroded, making you think that it could
not be anything precious. But the cut face was polished like a mirror and
allowed you to see as if under glass a surface like the pale blue wing of
a butterfly, on which were delicately traced as if in pastel three
concentric circles of pearl grey.
But one year a friend of his daughter had come to live with them at
Rousselière, a young woman who was older than his daughter and who it
seemed had a very dubious reputation. People would whisper: "Poor M.
Vington must be blinded by his tenderness, and he being somebody who is
shocked by the slightest little thing, to allow this woman to live with
his daughter. It's madness." And you would meet them both crossing through
the countryside, both wrapped up in the same cloak, whipping their buggy
and driving along madly. The visits of this woman to Rousselière increased
in frequency, until she began to spend the whole season there. Certain
bizarre situations must perhaps be the privilege of certain so-called
bohemian circles where they talk perhaps about less painful things.
Unfortunately they are born from psychological or other circumstances
where they may be produced in more bourgeois circles, where the purest
family spirit reigns. And they find in them as antagonist, as accomplice,
as victim, tenderness, tenderness that just like belief denies everything
that goes against its affirmations, or tells itself that it has been
misinterpreted and that that is the way it must be. For which reason M.
Vington could be seen at that time to avoid the people he knew, to turn
away if he could do so without it being too obvious, when he spotted us,
for which reason he could be seen to have aged by twenty years, it being
very difficult to think that he did not know what people were saying, even
if he perhaps did not believe it. But have we ever seen a fervent Catholic
believe less in the goodness of God because his children had been taken
from him one after the other, or somebody have less faith in medicine or
cast doubt on his diet because he is always ill. All of his faith was
placed in this child, which no contrary proofs could diminish. One day
when we were in the street with Swann who hardly knew him, we could not
avoid stopping and
meeting him. Much to our astonishment and that of M. Vington Swann rushed
forward to greet him, asking him twenty times over for news of his
daughter, and a host of other amiable things. This sceptical and
charitable man of the world felt no indignation against M. Vington
whatsoever, but much pity and hoped that his amiability towards him would
be agreeable. And indeed Swann's amiability towards the poor old gentleman
to whom now nobody barely spoke gave vent to a great feeling of
tenderness. It seems that there are certain social circumstances which are
the same for all, and which are accompanied for those who are there by a
strange humility, by an avowed, deep, almost elastic need to rise back to
the surface. When Swann proposed to M. Vington to invite his daughter to
come and have her photograph taken at Serrepelière, M. Vington's red eyes
shone with eagerness, pride, uncertainty as to whether to accept it as if
his daughter had been a street girl. Then when Swann had taken his leave
of us: "What a wonderful man," he told us, "what a charming man. Such a
shame that he made a most... inappropriate marriage." I saw then that even
the best and most frank circles can include hypocrisy, that everyone
deplored Swann's marriage in front of M. Vington, who seemed to imply that
nobody could possibly find anything "inappropriate" in the life of his
daughter.
Shortly afterwards we learned of his death. He approached it full of
worries about the future of the child for whom he had given his life,
failing to bring forth the great botanical labour that should have been
his life's work, tormented by sadness and anxiety.
I found out some time later that one evening, a year after Vington's
death, my cousin was wanting to get a clearer idea about certain scenes
that had taken place, so he had been told, at La Rousselière, Mlle
Vington's home, and with the window carelessly left open, it was true that
she may have thought she was alone in the area. He acted as if he was
going to take the train, locked up after himself and came back in the
evening to hide just outside the very room in which Mlle Vington was
spending the evening with her friend. Mlle Vington was sitting on her
friend's knee with her arm draped around her neck. Her friend was holding
up a photograph of M. Vington. The lamp lit them up clearly. "You see, he
isn't here any more to annoy you, the old thing." With a spasm of pleasure
and a cavalier smile Mlle Vington pressed herself against her friend. "He
can't tell you: 'You're going to get cold' any more, do you remember when
he made you put your coat on when he had been snivelling in the cemetery?"
Mlle Vington embraced her again. "Do you know what I'd like to do to him?"
And she whispered something in her ear. "You wouldn't dare", Mlle Vington
replied with an air of defiance, to make her do it, but in a voice,
according to my cousin, in which in spite of her desire to convince
herself that she was carrying out quite naturally and gaily the height of
debauchery, he sensed a little pretence and timidity. "Oh! you think I
wouldn't dare." But Mlle Vington had thrown herself onto her friend who
shook her with all her strength, drew her towards her, and pushed her down
so that my cousin was unable to see anything else. "Oh if poor old man
Vington had heard all that", my cousin said to me. Well, if he had have
heard it he would have immediately placed it in the category of facts that
are difficult to interpret, but which in no shape or form could prevail
over the love he felt for his daughter. And perhaps he would not have been
wrong in that. Sadism is not in its origins at least the sign of an
entirely wicked nature. An entirely wicked nature could not be sadistic
because evil would appear to it as something far too natural to feel any
voluptuousness in affecting it for a moment. To profane the host cannot
cause any pleasure to an unbeliever for whom the host is meaningless; to
profane respect for the dead, for virtue, for our loved ones, implies the
habitual practice of that respect, the culture of mourning, the religion
of family, of virtue. Sadism is the pathological expression of too little
familiarity with physical pleasure, which makes it consider it as
something bad and that it seems we cannot know, in the moment when the
will bends and where we allow ourselves to go as if we are taking upon
ourselves the soul of the sinners who habitually engage in it. And we
think we are bestowing it momentarily by revelling in the most inhuman
feelings.
When her friend said these terrible words to her she laughed, because it was with laughter that the wicked daughter who she found it pleasurable to make herself, would have taken them, and because the game was to not feel any sensitivity. And yet she resisted a little, she said: "You wouldn't dare", because she was playing several characters at the same time, she was the perverted young girl at the same time as the wicked accomplice and also to push her friend into protesting that the supreme outrage against the memory of her father, which she did not care about, so that they both achieved perfect insensitivity, and they could both experience the real games of two truly wicked girls. Maybe she thought that her friend was only doing it to give her pleasure, but at least she had the pleasure of seeing a truly base expression in her, of hearing her utter dreadful words, in short, in the same way that art can resemble nature, to hold in her arms a creature with none of the finer instincts that belong to the world of virtue, of suffering and not of pleasure. And then to give herself the feeling of perverting herself even further, it was for this immoral creature that she reserved the manifestations of an almost filial tenderness. And she offered her brow up to her to be kissed as she had in the past to her father, and when she had made her grossly injure the memory of her father, as she sat on her knees, she reclaimed from her a paternal sweetness which, their previous phrases having lost any foundation of goodness, beneath all morality, simply by creating the intoxicating sweetness that can be found only in physical preference and sensuality, and gave it also the feeling that they put both at the summit of their villainy, by making herself the daughter of another, by raising M. Vington from beyond the grave, to that which he held onto more than to life, not only the tenderness and respect of his daughter, but his own paternity.
But if sadists reflect that cruelty is no more the privilege of the
wicked than pleasure, any more than those who in their habitual life are
respectful of goodness and pity - the life that they want to put aside for
a moment of pleasure - twenty times a day they are wicked without telling
themselves so, they cause harm, they are cruel, and it is not in such a
different way that the truly wicked are wicked - then evil does not appear
to them as anything so extraordinary, they would not have had the
impression of coming out of themselves by pretending to be wicked, and so
to initiate themselves into a life different to their own.
I do not think that she must have felt any great remorse. It must have
been a long time before then that her blasé sensuality over the slightest
signs of weakness in her friend had had to go so far. It must have been a
long time before then too that she would have dared to lead her friend so
far and would have succeeded. So during the long period of time which must
have preceded scenes such as these, she must have accustomed herself to
consider the things that she desired at that time as a brief folly to
which it was no more culpable to surrender to as to an epileptic fit. Soon
afterwards she became good once again, affectionate, and told herself that
that was her true nature. She was obliged to think that her father
recognized her for what she really was and took no account of the rest.
Remorse, had she considered this scene in a true sense, would have been
too frightful. Yet perhaps this frightful thing did happen. Perhaps, at
intervals, she could no longer think about her father and look at his
photograph without them reawakening certain desires inside her. Is it
worth the pain to have passionately loved his child to then be the subject
after his death of profanation as the most unnatural father who must no
doubt have been afflicted for ever by the coarsest and most indifferent
daughter? Poor Mlle Vington.
No doubt the uncouth, timid and savage young girl that she was, who
only really knew her father and her horse, dreamed of a moment of pleasure
by perverting a woman, just as the timid and delicate young girl that she
was from time to time then dreamed of being perverted. For her like for
all sadists, had she ended up by indissolubly uniting the idea of pleasure
and wickedness, it was not so much because for her wickedness was
accompanied by ideas of voluptuousness than because ideas of
voluptuousness were accompanied for her with bad dreams. So in the end she
identified the idea of pleasure with that idea of wickedness that it
always evoked, she judged it much more severely in her conscience, but
just as much she judged it indispensable to associate wickedness with
pleasure if one wished to savour it fully. And yet no doubt she did not
savour it in this way, because even though her temperament led her to
savour it in an amoral way, even in this way she was all the same just
like all of us the mirror of all the ideas connected with love in the
universe, such as we find in books, in works of art, in morality, and she
needed to have tender, pure and scrupulous love affairs. Is it not a fact
that it is always in the crucible that we imagine nature most successfully
accomplishes genius or the loftier tendencies of moral tenderness. I have
seen families of the most perfect morality, respectability, honesty, in
which every action from birth to death was good but without creating in it
any real and profound tenderness. But several years ago, at Mme
Verdurin's, I encountered Mlle Vington, now an old lady, with her friend.
The forgotten games of the past had created between them an affection such
as there ought to be, but such as there rarely is, between sisters, along
with everything that abnegation, disinterestedness, delicate tenderness,
respect, devotion unto death can cause to flower in the most heroic and
saintly way. Mlle Vington's friend, who was extremely intelligent, had
just spent several years revising his manuscripts, classifying his
collections, following up his experiments, in short, reconstructing the
life's work of Vington. She had had it published at her own expense,
because Mlle Vington was penniless, and without putting her name to it. It
is a wonderful scientific work, without which nobody could ever have
suspected Vington's genius, and which eclipsed entirely his first works.
It is through this posthumous work that his name will live on for ever.
Mlle Vington died last year. Her friend did not think it her duty to
follow her. She lives the whole time at La Rousselière and goes every day,
so I have been told, to Combray cemetery, to weep in front of a small
enclosure containing three tombstones. The first is that of M. Vington.
The second is that of his daughter and bears the words: "I wait for you".
The third is the one under which she promised to Mlle Vington on her death
bed she will be buried. It seems that she will not have to make her wait
for very long.
Created 06.10.19