• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1660 0

one hand, thanks to the calm induced by Albertine’s docility, there was the possibility, and in consequence the resolve, to break with her; on the other—the fruit of my reflexions during the interval that I had spent waiting for her, seated at the piano—the idea that Art, to which I would try to devote my reconquered liberty, was not something that was worth a sacrifice, something above and beyond life, that did not share in its fatuity and futility; the appearance of genuine individuality achieved in works of art being due merely to the illusion produced by technical skill. If my afternoon had left behind it other deposits, possibly more profound, they were not to impinge upon my consciousness until much later. As for the two which I was able thus to ponder, they were not to be long-lived; for, from that very evening, my ideas about art were to recover from the diminution that they had suffered in the afternoon, while on the other hand my calm, and consequently the freedom that would enable me to devote myself to it, was once again to be withdrawn from me.

As my cab, driving along the riverside, was approaching the Verdurins’ house, I made the driver pull up. I had just seen Brichot alighting from a tram at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte, after which he dusted his shoes with an old newspaper and put on a pair of pearl-grey gloves. I went up to him on foot. For some time past, his sight having grown steadily worse, he had been equipped—as richly as an observatory—with new spectacles of a powerful and complicated kind, which, like astronomical instruments, seemed to be screwed into his eyes; he focused their exaggerated beams upon myself and recognised me. They—the spectacles—were in marvellous condition. But behind them I could see, minute, pallid convulsive, expiring, a remote gaze placed under this powerful apparatus, as, in a laboratory too richly endowed for the work that is done in it, you may watch the last throes of some tiny insignificant beast under the latest and most advanced type of microscope. I offered the purblind man my arm to steady his steps. “This time it is not by great Cherbourg that we meet,” he said to me, “but by little Dunkirk,” a remark which I found extremely tiresome, as I did not understand what it meant; and yet I dared not ask Brichot, dreading not so much his scorn as his explanations. I replied that I was longing to see the drawing-room in which Swann used to meet Odette every evening. “What, so you know that old story, do you?” he said.

Swann’s death had deeply distressed me at the time. Swann’s death! Swann’s, in this phrase, is something more than a mere genitive. I mean thereby his own particular death, the death assigned by destiny to the service of Swann. For we talk of “death” for convenience, but there are almost as many deaths as there are people. We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see, moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that. Often they are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until two or even three years later. They come in haste to plant a tumour in the side of a Swann, then depart to attend to other tasks, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their operations, it is necessary to plant the tumour there afresh. Then comes the moment when we read in the Gaulois that Swann’s health has been causing anxiety but that he is now making an excellent recovery. Then, a few minutes before the last gasp, death, like a sister of charity who has come to nurse rather than to destroy us, enters to preside over our last moments, and crowns with a final aureole the cold and stiffening creature whose heart has ceased to beat. And it is this diversity of deaths, the mystery of their circuits, the colour of their fatal badge, that makes so moving a paragraph in the newspapers such as this:

“We learn with deep regret that M. Charles Swann passed away yesterday at his residence in Paris after a long and painful illness. A Parisian whose wit was widely appreciated, a discriminating