In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [144]
’s possible actions were performed. Of every person we know we possess a double; but, being habitually situated on the horizon of our imagination, of our memory, it remains more or less extraneous to us, and what it has done or may have done has no greater capacity to cause us pain than an object situated at a certain distance which provides us with only the painless sensations of vision. The things that affect these people we perceive in a contemplative fashion; we are able to deplore them in appropriate language which gives other people a sense of our kindness of heart, but we do not feel them. But ever since the wound I had received at Balbec, it was deep in my heart, and very difficult to extricate, that Albertine’s double was lodged. What I saw of her hurt me, as a sick man would be hurt whose senses were so seriously deranged that the sight of a colour would be felt by him internally like an incision in his living flesh. It was fortunate that I had not already yielded to the temptation to break with Albertine; the tedium of having to rejoin her presently, when I went home, was a trifling matter compared with the anxiety that I should have felt if the separation had occurred when I still had a doubt about her and before I had had time to grow indifferent to her. And at the moment when I thus pictured her waiting for me at home like a beloved wife, finding the time of waiting long, perhaps having fallen asleep for a while in her room, my ears were caressed by a passing phrase, tender, homely and domestic, of the septet. Perhaps—everything being so interwoven and superimposed in our inner life—it had been inspired in Vinteuil by his daughter’s sleep (that daughter who was today the cause of all my distress) when it enveloped the composer’s work on peaceful evenings with its quiet sweetness, this phrase which had so much power to calm me by virtue of the same soft background of silence that gives a hushed serenity to certain of Schumann’s reveries, during which, even when “the Poet speaks,” one can tell that “the child sleeps.” Asleep or awake, I should find her again this evening, Albertine, my little child, when I chose to return home. And yet, I said to myself, something more mysterious than Albertine’s love seemed to be promised at the outset of this work, in those first cries of dawn. I tried to banish the thought of my mistress and to think only of the musician. Indeed, he seemed to be present. It was as though, reincarnate, the composer lived for all time in his music; one could feel the joy with which he chose the colour of some timbre, harmonising it with the others. For with other and more profound gifts Vinteuil combined that which few composers, and indeed few painters, have possessed, of using colours not merely so lasting but so personal that, just as time has been powerless to spoil their freshness, so the disciples who imitate their discoverer, and even the masters who surpass him, do not dim their originality. The revolution that their apparition has effected does not see its results merge unacknowledged in the work of subsequent generations; it is unleashed, it explodes anew, when, and only when, the works of the once-for-all-time innovator are performed again. Each tone was identified by a colour which all the rules in the world could not have taught the most learned composers to imitate, with the result that Vinteuil, although he had appeared at his appointed hour and had his appointed place in the evolution of music, would always leave that place to stand in the forefront whenever any of his compositions was performed, compositions which would owe their appearance of having originated after the works of more recent composers to this apparently paradoxical and indeed deceptive quality of permanent novelty. A page of symphonic music by Vinteuil, familiar already on the piano, revealed, when one heard it played by an orchestra—like a ray of summer sunlight which the prism of the window decomposes before it enters a dark dining-room—all the jewels of the Arabian Nights in unsuspected, multicoloured splendour.