In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [205]
“All this reminds me,” I said to her, “of that first evening when I went to the Princesse de Guermantes’s, when I wasn’t sure that I had been invited to her party and half expected to be shown the door, and when you wore a red dress and red shoes.” “Good heavens, how long ago all that was!” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, accentuating by her words my own impression of time elapsed. She seemed to be gazing into this remote past in a melancholy mood, and yet she laid a particular emphasis upon the red dress. I asked her to describe it to me, which she did most willingly. “One couldn’t possibly wear a thing like that now. It was the sort of dress that was worn in those days.” “But it was pretty, wasn’t it?” I said. She was always afraid of giving away a point in conversation, of saying something that might depreciate her in the eyes of others. “Personally, I found it a charming fashion. If nobody wears those dresses today, it is simply because it isn’t done. But they will come back, as fashions always do—in clothes, in music, in painting,” she added with vigour, for she supposed there to be a certain originality in this philosophic reflexion. Then the sad thought that she was growing old caused her to resume her languid manner, which a smile, however, momentarily contradicted: “Are you sure that they were red shoes that I wore? I thought they were gold.” I assured her that I had the most vivid recollection of the colour of her shoes, though I preferred not to describe the incident which made me so certain on this point. “How kind of you to remember that!” she said to me sweetly, for women call it kindness when you remember their beauty, just as painters do when you admire their work. And then, since the past, however remote it may be for a woman like the Duchess who has more head than heart, may nevertheless chance to have escaped oblivion, “Do you recall,” she said, as though to thank me for remembering her dress and her shoes, “that Basin and I brought you home in our carriage? You couldn’t come in with us because of some girl who was coming to see you after midnight. Basin thought it the funniest thing in the world that you should receive visits at such an hour.” Indeed that was the evening when Albertine had come to see me after the Princesse de Guermantes’s party and I recalled the fact just as clearly as the Duchess, I to whom Albertine was now as unimportant as she would have been to Mme de Guermantes had Mme de Guermantes known that the girl because of whom I had had to refuse their invitation was Albertine. (In fact, she was quite in the dark as to the identity of this girl, had never known it and only referred to the incident because of the circumstances and the singular lateness of the hour.) Yes, I recalled the fact, for, long after our poor dead friends have lost their place in our hearts, their unvalued dust continues to be mingled, like some base alloy, with the circumstances of the past. And though we no longer love them, it may happen that in speaking of a room, or a walk in a public park, or a country road where they were present with us on a certain occasion, we are obliged, so that the place which they occupied may not be left empty, to make allusion to them, without, however, regretting them, without even naming them or permitting others to identify them. Such are the last, the scarcely desirable vestiges of survival after death.
If the opinions which the Duchess expressed about Rachel were in themselves commonplace, they interested me for the reason that they too marked a new hour upon the dial. For Mme de Guermantes had no more completely forgotten than Rachel the terrible evening which the latter had endured in her house, but in the Duchess’s mind too this memory had been transformed. “Of course,” she said to me, “it interests me all the more to hear her, and to hear her acclaimed, because it was I who discovered her, who saw her worth and praised her and got people to listen