In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [24]
Similarly the gestures of the players said to their arms, to their garments: “Be majestic.” But the unsubmissive limbs allowed a biceps which knew nothing of the part to flaunt itself between shoulder and elbow; they continued to express the triviality of everyday life and to bring into prominence, instead of fine shades of Racinian meaning, mere muscular relationships; and the draperies which they held up fell back again along vertical lines in which the natural law that governs falling bodies was challenged only by an insipid textile pliancy. At this point the little woman who was sitting near me exclaimed:
“Not a clap! And did you ever see such a get-up? She’s too old; she can’t do it any more; she ought to give up.”
Amid a sibilant protest from their neighbours the two young men with her quietened her down and her fury raged now only in her eyes. This fury could be prompted only by the notion of success and fame, for Berma, who had earned so much money, was overwhelmed with debts. Since she was always making business or social appointments which she was prevented from keeping, she had messengers flying with apologies along every street in Paris, hotel suites booked in advance which she would never occupy, oceans of scent to bathe her dogs, heavy penalties for breaches of contract with all her managers. Failing any more serious expenses, and being less voluptuous than Cleopatra, she would have found the means of squandering provinces and kingdoms on telegrams and hired carriages. But the little woman was an actress who had never tasted success, and had vowed a deadly hatred against Berma. The latter had just come on to the stage. And then, miraculously, like those lessons which we have laboured in vain to learn overnight and find intact, got by heart, on waking up next morning, and like those faces of dead friends which the impassioned efforts of our memory pursue without recapturing and which, when we are no longer thinking of them, are there before our eyes just as they were in life, the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to grasp its essence, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself on my admiration with the force of self-evidence. Formerly, in my attempts to isolate this talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard, the part itself, a part, the common property of all the actresses who appeared as Phèdre, which I myself had studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of gleaning as a residuum Mme Berma’s talent alone. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it. So with a great musician (it appears that this was the case with Vinteuil when he played the piano), his playing is that of so fine a pianist that one is no longer aware that the performer is a pianist at all, because (by not interposing all that apparatus of digital effort, crowned here and there with brilliant effects, all that spattering shower of notes in which at least the listener who does not quite know where he is thinks that he can discern talent in its material, tangible reality) his playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself—he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art. I had been able to distinguish the intentions underlying the voices and the mime of Aricie, Ismène and Hippolyte, but Phèdre had interiorised hers, and my mind had not succeeded in wresting from her diction and attitudes, in apprehending in the miserly simplicity of their unbroken surfaces, those inventions, those effects of which no sign emerged, so completely had they been absorbed into it. Berma’s voice, in which there subsisted not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind, betrayed no visible sign of that surplus of tears which, because