In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [9]
the first time, being no longer troubled by the wish that it might cease to be impossible, I wondered whether it was desirable, whether there were not other reasons than my parents’ prohibition which should have made me abandon it. In the first place, whereas I had hated them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me also with a pain through which the purpose of life now appeared to me as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and life itself seemed good or evil only in so far as my parents were happy or sad. “I would rather not go, if it distresses you,” I told my mother, who, on the contrary, strove hard to expel from my mind any lurking fear that she might regret my going, since that, she said, would spoil the pleasure which I should otherwise derive from Phèdre and in consideration of which she and my father had reversed their earlier decision. But then this sort of obligation to find pleasure in the performance seemed to me very burdensome. Besides, if I returned home ill, should I be well again in time to be able to go to the Champs-Elysées as soon as the holidays were over and Gilberte returned? Against all these arguments I set, in order to decide which course I should take, the idea, invisible there behind its veil, of Berma’s perfection. I placed on one side of the scales “Making Mamma unhappy,” “risking not being able to go to the Champs-Elysées,” and on the other, “Jansenist pallor,” “solar myth,” until the words themselves grew dark and clouded in my mind’s vision, ceased to say anything to me, lost all their force; and gradually my hesitations became so painful that if I had now opted for the theatre it would have been only in order to bring them to an end and he delivered from them once and for all. It would have been to fix a term to my sufferings, and no longer in the expectation of an intellectual benediction, yielding to the attractions of perfection, that I would have allowed myself to be led, not now to the Wise Goddess, but to the stern, implacable Divinity, faceless and unnamed, who had been surreptitiously substituted for her behind her veil. But suddenly everything was altered. My desire to go and see Berma received a fresh stimulus which enabled me to await the coming of the matinée with impatience and with joy. Having gone to take up my daily station, as excruciating, of late, as that of a stylite, in front of the column on which the playbills were displayed, I had seen there, still moist and wrinkled, the complete bill of Phèdre, which had just been pasted up for the first time (and on which, I must confess, the rest of the cast furnished no additional attraction which could help me to decide). But it gave to one of the goals between which my indecision wavered a form at once more concrete and—inasmuch as the bill bore the date not of the day on which I was reading it but that on which the performance would take place, and the very hour at which the curtain would rise—almost imminent, already well on the way to its realisation, so that I jumped for joy before the column at the thought that on that day, and at that hour precisely, I should be sitting there in my seat, ready to hear the voice of Berma; and for fear lest my parents might not now be in time to secure two good seats for my grandmother and myself, I raced back to the house, whipped on by the magic words which had now taken the place in my mind of “Jansenist pallor” and “solar myth”: “Ladies will not be admitted to the stalls in hats. The doors will be closed at two o’clock.”
Alas! that first matinée was to prove a bitter disappointment. My father offered to drop my grandmother and me at the theatre, on his way to the Commission. Before leaving the house he said to my mother: “Try and have a good dinner for us tonight; you remember I’m bringing de Norpois back with me.” My mother had not forgotten. And ever since the day before, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of cooking at which she was so gifted, stimulated, moreover,