In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [12]
I had read to myself at home without paying sufficient attention to what they really meant. But all of a sudden, in the cleft of the red curtain that veiled her sanctuary, as in a frame, a woman appeared, and instantly, from the fear that seized me, far more anxious than Berma’s own fear could be, lest someone should upset her by opening a window, or drown one of her lines by rustling a programme, or annoy her by applauding the others and by not applauding her enough, from the way in which, from that moment, more absolutely than Berma herself, I considered theatre, audience, play and my own body only as an acoustic medium of no importance save in the degree to which it was favourable to the inflexions of that voice, I realised that the two actresses whom I had been admiring for some minutes bore not the least resemblance to her whom I had come to hear. But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased; in vain did I strain towards Berma eyes, ears, mind, so as not to let one morsel escape me of the reasons which she would give me for admiring her, I did not succeed in gleaning a single one. I could not even, as I could with her companions, distinguish in her diction and in her playing intelligent modulations or beautiful gestures. I listened to her as though I were reading Phèdre, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma’s talent had added anything at all to them. I could have wished—in order to be able to explore them fully, to try to discover what it was in them that was beautiful—to arrest, to immobilise for a time before my senses every inflexion of the artist’s voice, every expression of her features; at least I did attempt, by dint of mental agility, by having, before a line came, my attention ready and tuned to catch it, not to waste upon preparations any morsel of the precious time that each word, each gesture occupied, and, thanks to the intensity of my observation, to contrive to penetrate as far into them as if I had had whole hours to spend upon them by myself. But how short their duration was! Scarcely had a sound been received by my ear than it was displaced there by another. In one scene, where Berma stands motionless for a moment, her arm raised to the level of her face, bathed, by some artifice of lighting, in a greenish glow, before a back-cloth painted to represent the sea, the whole house broke out in applause; but already the actress had moved, and the tableau that I should have liked to study existed no longer. I told my grandmother that I could not see very well, and she handed me her glasses. But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand. I thought that it was no longer Berma but her image that I was seeing in the magnifying lenses. I put the glasses down. But perhaps the image that my eye received of her, diminished by distance, was no more exact; which of the two Bermas was the real one? As for her declaration to Hippolyte, I had greatly counted on that, since, to judge by the ingenious significance which her companions were disclosing to me every moment in less beautiful passages, she would certainly render it with modulations more surprising than any which, when reading the play at home, I had contrived to imagine; but she did not attain even to the heights which Oenone or Aricie would naturally have reached, she planed down into a uniform chant the whole of a speech in which there were mingled together contrasts so striking that the least intelligent of actresses, even the pupils of an academy, could not have missed their effect; besides which, she delivered it so rapidly that it was only when she had come to the last line that my mind became aware of the deliberate monotony which she had imposed on it throughout.
Then at last I felt my first impulse of admiration, which was provoked by the frenzied applause of the audience. I mingled my own with theirs, endeavouring to prolong it so that Berma, in her gratitude, should