Kapital
Maybe immediately before Goncourt when I open the book say I knew that I did not know how to look - apart from at things deeper than on the exterior, so that if upon my arrival at a dinner party I neither heard the things people said to me nor saw what was in front of me, on the other hand an analogy (like the identity of the Verdurin salon) made me a different man for a moment, who in general relished with pure joy - (see in Barbouche) not to listen, which meant that first of all things had to be furnished to me through the imagination, I knew that the artists who provide the greatest visions of elegance take them from their friends (see Barbouche), that the most elegant people have themselves painted by Cotte Chaplin, and what will make them rival the great portraits from the Renaissance, what will evoke a modern form of beauty, is not the one of the Princesse de Sagan by Cotte but the one that Renoir did of the wife of the publisher Charpentier. But all of this, and many additional experiences, that my acquaintance with Vinteuil, with Elstir, with Bergotte had furnished me, did not prevent me from experiencing a strong feeling both of regret for all the desires that I had been unable to see realized before me and the disillusionment at the dreams that paintings and books confer on us, when I read the following page. Then follows the pastiche. And after the pastiche these simple words: Verdurin, the Duc de Guermantes, Mme Cottard, the young Cottards, Dr Cottard...
And that all this makes a star in the night!
Dinner yesterday at The day before yesterday Verdurin, the old critic at the Revue des Deux Mondes bleue, and it must be said the only real critic for painting and the decorative arts, dropped by, but who had utterly ceased to write since his marriage, to the point that, so he claimed, numerous habitués of his wife's salon seemed to be completely unaware of the remarkable books written by her husband. One of the curiosities of Paris this salon. [incomplete]
The day before yesterday, fearing that I had forgotten his invitation which I had accepted a fortnight before, Verdurin, the old critic at the Revue bleue and, it must be said, the only one who knew how to say anything about painting, dropped by, but he had absolutely renounced literature since his marriage to Delacroix's niece, to the point that numerous habitués of his wife's salon were unaware of the remarkable books written by her husband. He told me about their smoking-room, as a room that was completely Venetian that his wife had fitted out, with only the most authentic objects of the rarest provenance, such as a certain coffered and escutcheoned ceiling that had come out of the ancient palazzo Barberi, a ceiling that had no equivalent throughout Europe a palazzo whose well-head, representing the Coronation of the Virgin that Verdurin thought was by Sansovino, was used by their guests, through the over indulgence of his wife, as somewhere to drop the ash from their cigars. Which, one thing leading to another, because this Verdurin really is an erudite chap in every way, brings him around, as he is telling me about the brown marks left by the cigar ash, much to his regret, in its alabaster basin, to tell me about the dark spots that can be seen on the books that had belonged to Napoleon I, spots that had led people to believe that the Emperor was in the habit of chewing tobacco, when in actual fact, according to Verdurin, they came from his habit of always carrying liquorice pastilles in his hand which he used for soothing the pains in his liver, and that he took all the time, even during his greatest battles. And now here we are in the carriage that brought Verdurin to me, here we are setting off for the Quai Conti where their mansion is situated, a mansion that on its own already gives the impression of a Venetian palace, in its construction on the very banks of the Seine which the diffusive winter moonlight lends a look of the Grand Canal, a Grand Canal where the cupola of the Salute, silhouetted against the "glaucous" sky, forms part of the Institute, all of this in an Italianate hallucination by which, upon my word, we have been gently led, in the midst of [blank], through the courtyard of the Louvre. Cottard, the doctor, is there with his wife, the Polish sculptor Virovski, Swann the collector, a grand Russian lady, a princess, whose name - something off - I fail to catch, and about whom Swann whispers in my ear that she was the one who might have killed from point blank range the Archduke Rudolf whose mistress she was and according to whom in Galicia and all through the North of Poland my reputation was exceptionally high, no young girl ever consenting to promise her hand in marriage without first ascertaining whether her fiancé is an admirer of Chérie and La Faustin, a negative response being enough - still in the words of the princess - to call off the marriage. "You could never understand that, you Western Europeans", the princess throws in in conclusion, "that sort of penetration in a writer of a woman's most intimate feelings", penetration attested to by a curious fact that she told me had originated from the chief of police in Moscow. At the time of my brother's death the brothels did not close, because that was a thing that the Russian temperament could absolutely not allow to happen, but all the women wore a crêpe ribbon around their thighs. The mistress of the house, who had placed me next to her, told me amiably that she had decorated the table in my honour with nothing but Japanese chrysanthemums, but chrysanthemums in vases that are the rarest works of art, one of which was made of bronze upon which red copper petals seemed to be "alive", to have just fallen from the living flower. She is truly a charming and original woman this Madame Verdurin, with something of the malicious wit of a Madame Geoffrin of our times. To my astonishment, concerning the pearl necklace that she was wearing round her neck, pearls that were completely black yet the finest from the orient, she told me that they had become like this after a fire that had completely destroyed the house where she lived in the rue Montalivet in a street whose name I cannot remember, a fire after which all that could be found was the casket containing these pearls and some Sèvres figurines that had escaped intact, but whose royal blue colour had been turned into the most beautiful black. And the curious thing is that this pearl necklace came from Madame de La Fayette, who had been given them by Henrietta of England, pearls that had been bought by Verdurin at the sale of a descendant of the author of La Princesse de Clèves. Upon which Swann, the great collector, declares that the same thing had happened to one of his friends, M.S., whose porcelain had been requested by the actual manufacturer, where they were still being exhibited, as were his pearls at the Kensington Museum in London. And with a finesse that truly reveals the most distinguished gentleman that he is, as much a collector of minds as of trinkets, he leaps on to similar alterations that he says take place not only in inanimate nature, but in people's brains, and talks about a valet of this "disaster stricken" friend who, ever since the fire and his fear of being killed in it, had become a changed man, with a different character, different tastes, and as an example of generosity and sobriety had become stingy and a drunkard, a change in personality attested to even by his handwriting, which was so altered that when M.S. first received a letter from him giving an account of the event he thought it was a hoax, the writing not bearing any similarity with the way the valet usually wrote. Thereupon Dr Cottard cites some cases that he had seen with his own eyes and which, upon my word, were most curious, of what he calls dual personality. He still has on his hospital ward a patient who he is so kind enough to offer to bring to my house, who, so to speak, has two lives, during each of which he remembers nothing of what he did in the other, to such a degree that during the first life in which he is an honest man he has been arrested several times for significant thefts that he has committed in the second, which he would have denied with the best faith in the world. Whereupon Madame Verdurin acutely observes that medical science could provide truer subjects for all the theatre in the style of Regnard's plays in which the comedy of misunderstandings would rest upon pathological errors. From which Madame Verdurin goes back to the fire where in the same casket alongside of her pearls there remained intact another item of jewellery covered with Arabian characters and which had belonged to a painter who had died unexpectedly and who had left it to her. Curious to discover what the inscription said she had had Brichot show it to Oppert, his colleague at the Collège de France, who read that misfortune would come to whoever possessed the jewel. As the fire had broken out a few days afterwards Madame Verdurin gave it to Elstir. And to the question raised by one of the guests as to whether the stone had preserved its malignant power, the mistress of the house gave this amusing reply: "Judge for yourself. Two days later he met the woman on whose account he fell out with me. And he no longer produces anything but terrible paintings." Upon my remarking that this would make a singular subject for a short story in which could be imagined the successive lives where the jewel could lead on to various catastrophes, Madame Cottard said that the story already existed in Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights", a name which brought this statement to Swann's lips: "But he is a great writer, Stevenson, equal to the greatest, yes indeed, absolutely one of the greatest."
If I don't leave the above developments put somewhere else this
excellent phrase:
a name which brought to the lips of... this phrase.
***
The day before yesterday, fearing that I had forgotten his invitation which I had accepted a fortnight before, Verdurin, the old critic from the Revue bleue dropped by, the only critic since Gautier who knew how to talk about painting, but having [incomplete]
The day before yesterday, worried that I had forgotten his invitation to dine that evening, Verdurin, the old critic from the Revue bleue dropped by, such a critic as, apart from Fromentin and Gautier, had perhaps never existed in France, who believed in looking at a painting with his own eyes [incomplete]
The day before yesterday, Verdurin dropped in to find me and take me to dinner, Verdurin, the old critic from the Revue, author of that book on the Barbizon school Whistler in which the workmanship, the painterly colouration of the American eccentric is interpreted sometimes with great delicacy by the lover of delights of the eye of all the refinements, of all the delights of the painted subject that is Monsieur Verdurin. And while I am dressing to accompany him, he treats me to a long narrative, almost at times a timidly stammered confession, about his renunciation of writing immediately after his marriage to the daughter niece Fromentin's Madeleine "Dominica", a renunciation brought about, he says, by his addiction to morphine and which had the result, according to Verdurin, that most of the habitués of his wife's salon did not even know that her husband had written books and spoke to him of Charles Blanc, of Sainte-Beuve, of Yriarte Burty, as individuals to whom they considered him, Verdurin, altogether inferior. Then, through a dusk in which, as we pass the towers of the Trocadero, the last glimmer of a glint of daylight makes them positively resemble those towers of red-currant jelly that pastry-cooks used to make, the conversation continues in the carriage on its way to their mansion on the Quai Conti, which their owner claims was once the mansion of the Venetian Ambassadors and in which there is a smoking-room which Verdurin tells me was transported lock, stock and barrel, as in the tale of the Thousand and One Nights, from the Palazzo Falier from a celebrated palazzo whose name I forget, a palazzo boasting a well-head decorated with a Coronation of the Virgin which Verdurin maintains is positively one of Sansovino's finest creations and which now, he says, their guests use as a place to toss the ash from their cigars. And upon my word, when we arrive, in the glaucous and diffuse moonlight it is absolutely just like that in which the romantic paintings by Whistler Italian painting of the classic age enshrouds Venice, against which the silhouetted dome of the Institute makes one think of the Salute in Canaletto's Guardi's pictures. I have the illusion almost that I am looking out over the Grand Canal. And the illusion is maintained by the construction of the mansion, so that from the first floor one cannot see the ground, and by the evocative remarks of its owner, who affirms that the name of the Rue du Bac - the devil if I had ever thought of it - comes from the ferry which once upon a time used to take the order of nuns, the Miramiones, across to attend services in Notre-Dame. A whole quarter which I knew and which I am inspired to re-love as I went down it. In the drawing-room, where on a Persian enamel a king is depicted in a carriage drawn by two lions, a carriage in which he gives the appearance of being just as much at his ease as if he were in a goat carriage in the Champs-Élysées - there is a guest with chin and lips clean-shaven but with the side-whiskers of a major domo, in a ready-made tie, like a magistrate translator of Horace and this is Brichot, from the Sorbonne the academic, who sets about speaking to me with the amused condescension of a schoolmaster who is mixing with his pupils on the feast of St Charlemagne. On my being introduced to him by Verdurin he utters not a word in reference to our books, does not appear to suspect that he has a writer before him, and it is a real sadness to me, and I am filled with a mixture of discouragement and anger at this conspiracy organized against us by the Sorbonne, which brings even into this pleasant drawing-room where I am received as an honoured guest, the opposition, the hostility, of a deliberate silence. [interrupted]
[comes from the ferry] which once upon a time used to take an order of nuns, the Miramiones, across to attend services in Notre-Dame. A whole quarter which I used to idly explore in my childhood when my aunt Courmont lived there, and which I am inspired to re-love by rediscovering, almost, next door to the Verdurin mansion, the sign of 'Little Dunkirk', one of those shops where in the eighteenth century people came to spend a few idle moments making bargains, those rare sops that do not survive elsewhere than in the crayon and wash vignettes of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, the artist of "bistres" that babble inexhaustibly - a style so indiscreet that makes one forget the time for the delicate and titillating attention of the connoisseur those shops where throughout the eighteenth century the curious came to spend their moments of idleness to bargain for French and foreign trinkets "and all the newest products of the arts" as an invoice of the Little Dunkirk puts it, an invoice which we two, Verdurin and myself, are, I believe, alone in possessing copies, one of those flimsy masterpieces of engraved paper upon which the reign of Louis XV made out its accounts, with a headpiece representing a billowy sea laden with vessels, a sea with vignetted waves just like the waves in the sea in La Fontaine's 'The Oyster and the Litigants' in the Fermiers Généraux edition.
After this pastiche I need to say that as regards Little Dunkirk I would have wanted to see this shop. As long as it still existed. Say that all I needed to do was to ask Brichot. And the eighteenth century paper with the ornamented headpiece, that I would like to have some. I would certainly go back to see the Verdurins again and ask them to show me it.
The mistress of the
house had kindly had some dishes from Lorraine cooked for me. We
move over to the table and then there is an extraordinary procession of
plates which are masterpieces of the porcelain maker's art, an art whose
chatter is heard all the better by the excited attention of a connoisseur
during an exquisite meal - Yung Cheng plates with nasturtium-coloured
borders, to the blueness of leafless and swollen water iris, and those
supremely decorative flights of kingfishers and cranes in the dawn having
exactly those early-morning tones as glimpsed from Boulevard Montmorency
upon my awakening, Dresden plates daintier and more graceful in their
workmanship, with bloodless, drowsy pinks fading into violet, with
ragged-edged tulips the colour of wine-lees, with the rococo elegance of a
carnation or a forget-me-not, Sèvres plates with fine guilloche to their
white fluting whorled with gold, or knotted with a golden ribbon that
stands in delicate and gallant relief upon the creamy smoothness of the
paste, finally a whole set of silver plate arabesqued with those myrtles
of Luciennes that would have been familiar to the Du Barrys. And what is
perhaps equally rare is the truly quite remarkable quality of the things
served upon these plates, a delicately stewed dish, a whole feast such as
Parisians, one cannot say it too emphatically, never have at their really
grand dinner parties and which reminds me of certain prize dishes of Jean
d'Heurs. Even the foie gras bears no resemblance to the insipid mousse
customarily served under that name; and I do not know many places in which
a simple potato salad is made as it is here with potatoes firm as Japanese
ivory buttons and patina'd like those little ivory spoons with which
Chinese women sprinkle water on their new-caught fish. Into the Venetian
glass which I have before me is poured, like a rich cascade of red jewels,
an extraordinary Léoville bought at M. Montalivet's sale, the like of
which I have never tasted in my life. It is a delight to the imagination
of the eye and also, I am not afraid to say it, of what has been called
the gullet, to see a brill placed before us which has nothing in common
with those anything but fresh brill that are served at the most luxurious
tables, which in the slow course of their journey from the sea have had
the pattern of their bones imprinted upon their backs; a brill that is
served not with the sticky paste prepared under the name of white sauce by
so many chefs in great houses, but with genuine [incomplete]
And as I say to Verdurin what an exquisite pleasure it must be for him to
eat this rare and subtle grub from plates collected from the eighteenth
century and such as no prince possesses
the equal of in this day and age today possesses in his show
cases.
N.B. Perhaps this description ought to continue I shall have to see, in any case while I think of it I can benefit by putting in the very important section about Normandy, even put it between a few other things, section about Normandy that I could perhaps bring in quite differently than through food.
"It is easy to see that you don't know him," gloomily interjects the
mistress of the house. And she speaks to me of her husband as of an
original and a crank, indifferent to all these dainties, "a crank", she
repeats, "yes, that's the only word for it, a crank with an appetite for a
bottle of cider drunk in the somewhat plebeian coolness of a Normandy
farm."
[note] put: it must be said. - As far as possible the strange
adjectives shouldn't be underlined and underline the expressions drolleries,
the beautiful.
And this charming woman, whose speech betrays her positive adoration of
local colouring, talks with overflowing enthusiasm of the Normandy in
which they once lived, a Normandy, so she says, like an immense English
park, where the fragrance of tall woodlands that Lawrencee might have
painted, with the cryptomaria-coloured velvet of natural lawns bordered
with the porcelain of pink hydrangeas, with crumpled sulphur-roses which,
as they cascade over a cottage door, above which the incrustation of two
entwined pear trees has the effect of a purely decorative sign over a
shop, makes one think of the free arabesques of a flowery branch of bronze
in a candle-bracket by Gonthière, a Normandy absolutely unsuspected by the
Parisian holidaymakers, protected by the iron gates of each of its little
properties, gates which the Verdurins confessed to me that they did not
scruple to open one and all. At the end of the day, in the drowsiness of
all the colours where no light is given off other than from an almost
clotted sea, blue-white like whey, and through real forests of pink tulle
all in bloom that are rhododendrons, they returned completely tipsy with
the odour of sardine fisheries which gave her husband terrible attacks of
asthma; "Yes," she insists, "I mean it, real attacks of asthma."
Thereupon, the following summer, they returned, staying, upon my word, in
a wonderful medieval property, rented for next to nothing, a whole colony
of artists lodged by them in a dilapidated cloister. And, upon my word, as
I listen to this woman who, in passing through so many social circles of
real distinction, has nevertheless preserved in her speech a little of the
freshness and freedom of language of a woman of the people, a language
which shows you things with the colour which your imagination sees in
them, my mouth waters at the life which she avows me they lived down
there, each one working all morning in his cell and the whole party coming
together before luncheon, in a drawing-room so vast that it had two
fireplaces, for artistic discussions, little games mixed in with
conversation of the highest order, followed by walks in all weathers, even
in rain showers, where a burst of sunshine through the rain or showers
would outline the knotted swellings on a magnificent avenue of century-old
beech trees, which brought almost up to their gate that vegetable
embodiment of "the beautiful" so dear to eighteenth century taste, and
ornamental trees which held suspended in their branches not buds about to
flower but drops of rain, and they would stop to listen to the delicate
splish-splash of a bullfinch, enamoured of its coolness, bathing in the
tiny dainty Nymphenburg bath, a bath for small birds, which is the corolla
of a white rose; a life, upon my word, that absolutely makes me think of
the one evoked in that masterpiece by Diderot, the Lettres à
Mademoiselle Volland. And when I mention to Mme Verdurin Elstir's
delicate pastel sketches of the landscapes and flowers of that coast, she
has some angry things to say about him, commencing with these words: "But
it was through me that he discovered all those places," she bursts out
with an angry toss of the head, "all those parts of the countryside, yes,
I threw it all back in his face when he left us, all the subjects he
painted. Objects he has always known about, yes one must admit that. But
as for flowers, no, he knew nothing about them, he couldn't tell a mallow
from a marigold. Any flower you can think of. It was my husband who taught
him - you won't believe this - to recognize jasmine, yes, upon my word,
jasmine! All the roses he painted he has done them in our house, or else
it was I who took them to him, and I told him: "No, don't paint that,
that's no good, paint this." Ah! if only he had listened to us as much
about the arrangement of his life and hadn't made that vile marriage!" And
all of a sudden, the softness of her eyes become feverish from her
absorption in thoughts of the past, plucking nervously at the silk sleeves
of her bodice in the frenzied recollections of her fingers, she presents,
in the distortion of her grief-stricken pose, an admirable portrait which
has, I think, never been painted, a picture in which one would see
portrayed all the held back rebellion, all the passionate susceptibilities
of a female friend outraged in the delicate feelings, the modesty of
woman. Thereupon she talks about the admirable portrait which Elstir did
for her, the portrait of the Cottard family, which she gave to the
Luxembourg at the time of her quarrel with the painter, confessing that it
was she who gave him the idea of painting the man in evening dress in
order to get all that white ebullition of linen, and she who chose the
woman's black velvet gown which forms a solid support amid all the glitter
of the bright tones of the carpets, the flowers, the fruit, the gauze
dresses of the little girls that look like ballet dresses. It was she too,
she tells me, who gave him the idea of the woman brushing her hair, for
which the artist was subsequently praised, an idea which consisted simply
in painting her not as if she were on show but surprised in the intimacy
of her every day life. "In a woman doing her hair," I used to say to him,
"or drying her face, or warming her feet, when she thinks she is not being
observed, there is a multitude of interesting movements of a grace and
charm that are positively Leonardesque"."
[note] Somewhere there. Now I must say very high (don't say very
high but that is the meaning.)
Say the Duc d'Haussonville, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Swann and Doctor Cottard, Doctor Cottard, with a finesse of look both scrutinizing and good-natured.
Most Capital: in the section that will precede or conclude this pastiche, when I explain my astonishment that people have become famous, add these two reasons: because time so quickly devours peculiarities, notions, ways of thinking, celebrities, people, that a few years later nobody knows that a Verdurin held a literary position or a Swann a position in society. This forgetting, this renouncement of which the Memoirs speak in connection with pious people is more real than it seems in those memoirs in which forgetting quite stops, contemporaries no longer remember any of it, Verdurin really is unknown (Brancovan asked me if Joubert the thinker is related to Mme Hochon's), learning being a struggle against forgetting, against lost time, but so partial, hardly carrying off one forgotten thing in a thousand, like German submarines. On the other hand that is also due to what every day living causes to appear little by little, that does not assume its real importance, that is realized intellectually through the reading of memoirs or other works (so that this importance taken up by people outside of life, Pompadour, Verdurin etc., become part too of the end of my work, the only reality is intellectual reality.
This, which is absolutely capital, could come before or after the
Goncourt pastiche, but better in the last part when I conceive my work of
art. I'm writing it as if for the last part. If put after Goncourt the
first sentence needs taking out.
The limited view we have of others need not be that of the novelist but
to render what makes this view limited by showing the parts that are
hidden from it, this is perhaps one of the aims of the novelist. During
numerous circumstances in my life I understood how little we go beyond the
surface of people and facts, and even how much that surface differs
according to the spectator. Among many other discoveries a word of Bloch's
had made me understand a lie of Mme Swann's and the continuation of her
misconduct, a conversation with Charlus had provided me with the key to
many things that were obscure to me, the stories that had been told in the
Verdurin's salon had shown me an Elstir in whom I could have had no
suspicion of the man of genius who I had known, just as inversely in
Combray I had never suspected in the mild-mannered Vinteuil the sublime
composer of the Sonata and the Quartet, nor in frequenting the Verdurin's
house had I ever seen what I learned in the Goncourt journal, which in any
case quite often perhaps, as does History, depicts to us as charming and
as singular creatures those people who are in no way superior to the
mediocre people we have known, the more does our imagination become
exalted over a book, the less has humanity to furnish us with. But I had
made these discoveries little by little. If I were to be given the
strength to write I would not treat the reader the way life had treated
me. I would show what we see of life (my trust in Albertine, my
misunderstanding of Vinteuil, my absence of suspicions towards M. de
Charlus, etc., I quote these facts from my life to serve as examples and
to make what I want to say be understood), in a word I would show that
thin layer of superficiality that we believe to be reality and beyond
which our eyes go so little way that what is beneath escapes us, and that
will constitute the book, then all of a sudden, in a final chapter,
abruptly and rapidly just as we close up a beehive so that the bees do not
have time to escape, I will show the other face, the one that gives the
sensation of the weak outer surface of the depths to which we are
penetrating in comparison with what is, just as we might show somebody who
has never seen what was two paces away from him how small a distance his
view extends, if we suddenly disclosed to him what another person situated
in his field of vision sees and which he never suspected. In short, the
sudden appearance of a second novel which will be the same but viewed
through different eyes, an epilogue if you will, which will not be the
usual epilogue in which one is briefly informed of what becomes of the
characters after the end of the story, but in which one is told what those
characters were to other people, or what they were in themselves during
the course of the same story, a second novel, if I consider the story told
here as a novel, in which what appears here and there would on the
contrary be drawn together, and there would appear before the reader who
would not be expecting it any more than me, all of a sudden the passage by
Goncourt, the true life of Charlus, of Albertine, the genius of Vinteuil
and Elstir, in a thunderous and condensed accumulation. Perhaps this
ending since "in short, suddenly a second novel" would be placed
immediately after "outer surface of the depths to which we are penetrating
in comparison with what is. And"
Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 1971,
p.817-826.Le Pastiche Goncourt dans "Le Temps retrouvé,
Jean Milly.
For some passages that have remained the same in the final version I
have used Terence Kilmartin's translations.
Created 13.05.20