In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [16]
The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by affection that, in practice, his attitude towards everything I did was one of blind indulgence. And so he had no qualm about sending me to fetch a little prose poem which I had made up years before at Combray on coming home from a walk. I had written it in a state of exaltation which must, I felt certain, communicate itself to everyone who read it. But it was not destined to captivate M. de Norpois, for he handed it back to me without a word.
My mother, who was full of respect for all my father’s occupations, came in now to ask timidly whether dinner might be served. She was afraid to interrupt a conversation in which she herself could have no part. And indeed my father was continually reminding the Marquis of some useful measure which they had decided to support at the next meeting of the Commission, speaking in the peculiar tone always adopted in a strange environment by a pair of colleagues—akin, in this respect, to a pair of schoolfellows—whose professional routine has furnished them with a common fund of memories to which others have no access and to which they apologise for referring in their presence.
But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. At length my father became uneasy: “I had thought,” he ventured, after an endless preamble, “of asking the advice of the Commission . . .” Then from the face of the noble virtuoso, who had maintained the passivity of an orchestral player whose moment has not yet come, there emerged with an even delivery, on a sharp note, and as though they were no more than the completion (but scored for a different voice) of the phrase that my father had begun, the words: “of which you will not hesitate, of course, to call a meeting, more especially as the members are all known to you personally and can easily make themselves available.” It was not in itself a very remarkable ending. But the immobility that had preceded it made it detach itself with the crystal clarity, the almost mischievous unexpectedness of those phrases with which the piano, silent until then, takes over, at a given moment, from the cello to which one has just been listening, in a Mozart concerto.
“Well, did you enjoy your matinée?” asked my father as we moved to the dining-room, hoping to draw me out and with the idea that my enthusiasm would give M. de Norpois a good opinion of me. “He has just been to see Berma. You remember we talked about it the other day,” he went on, turning towards the diplomat, in the same tone of retrospective, technical and mysterious allusiveness as if he had been referring to a meeting of the Commission.
“You must have been enchanted, especially if you had never seen her before. Your father was alarmed at the possible repercussions that this little jaunt might have upon your health, which is none too good, I am told, none too robust. But I soon set his mind at rest. Theatres today are not what they were even twenty years ago. You have more or less comfortable seats now, and a certain amount of ventilation, although we have still a long way to go before we come up to the standard of Germany or England, who in that respect as in many others are immeasurably ahead of us. I have never seen Mme Berma in Phèdre, but I have always heard that she is excellent in the part. You were charmed with her, of course?”
M. de Norpois, a man a thousand times more intelligent than myself, must know that hidden truth which I had failed to extract from Berma’s playing, and would reveal it to me; in answering his question I would ask him to let me know in what that truth consisted; and he would thereby justify me in the longing that I had felt to see and hear the actress. I had only a moment; I must take advantage of it and bring my