In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [99]
I realised—something that had escaped me in Paris—that it was no longer my mother that I had before my eyes, but my grandmother. As, in royal and ducal families, on the death of the head of the house his son takes his title and, from being Duc d’Orléans, Prince de Tarente or Prince des Laumes, becomes King of France, Duc de La Trémoïlle, Duc de Guermantes, so by an accession of a different order and more profound origin, the dead annex the living who become their replicas and successors, the continuators of their interrupted life. Perhaps the great sorrow that, in a daughter such as Mamma, follows the death of her mother simply breaks the chrysalis a little sooner, hastens the metamorphosis and the appearance of a being whom we carry within us and who, but for this crisis which annihilates time and space, would have emerged more gradually. Perhaps, in our regret for her who is no more, there is a sort of auto-suggestion which ends by bringing out in our features resemblances which potentially we already bore, and above all a cessation of our most characteristically individual activity (in my mother, her common sense and the mocking gaiety that she inherited from her father), which, so long as the beloved person was alive, we did not shrink from exercising, even at her expense, and which counterbalanced the traits that we derived exclusively from her. Once she is dead, we hesitate to be different, we begin to admire only what she was, what we ourselves already were, only blended with something else, and what in future we shall be exclusively. It is in this sense (and not in that other sense, so vague, so false, in which the phrase is generally understood) that we may say that death is not in vain, that the dead continue to act upon us. They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a mental process, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to re-create by thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life . . . Lastly, in this cult of grief for our dead, we pay an idolatrous worship to the things that they loved. My mother could not bear to be parted, not only from my grandmother’s bag, which had become more precious than if it had been studded with sapphires and diamonds, from her muff, from all those garments which served to accentuate the physical resemblance between them, but even from the volumes of Mme de Sévigné which my grandmother took with her everywhere, copies which my mother would not have exchanged even for the original manuscript of the Letters. She had often teased my grandmother, who could never write to her without quoting some phrase of Mme de Sévigné or Mme de Beausergent. In each of the three letters that I received from Mamma before her arrival at Balbec, she quoted Mme de Sévigné to me as though those three letters had been written not by her to me but by my grandmother to her. She must at once go out on to the front to see that beach of which my grandmother had spoken to her every day in her letters. I saw her from my window, dressed in black, and carrying her mother’s sunshade, advancing with timid, pious steps over the sands which beloved feet had trodden before her, and she looked as though she were going in search of a corpse which the waves would cast up at her feet. So that she should not have to dine alone, I had to join her downstairs. The judge and the president’s widow asked to be introduced to her. And everything that was in any way connected with my grandmother was so precious to her that she was deeply touched, and remembered ever afterwards with gratitude what the judge said to her, just as she was hurt and indignant that on the contrary the president’s wife had not a word to say in memory of the dead woman. In reality, the judge cared no more about my grandmother than the president’s wife. The affecting words of the one and the other’s silence, for all that my mother put so vast a distance between them, were but alternative ways of expressing that indifference which we feel towards