The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [46]
Interwoven in Part Two’s opening chapter are two intriguing character studies: Bergotte, gravely ill, is nevertheless an assiduous and unassuming visitor during the grandmother’s final illness (G, 373–5; 998–9); the Duc de Guermantes, by contrast, appears just once, but his attentiveness to social formalities renders him chronically desensitized to the emotional drama on which he intrudes (G, 387–9; 1007–9). His blundering anticipates the obtuseness with which, in due course, he and the Duchesse greet Swann’s news of his terminal illness. Bergotte’s visits permit the Narrator a digression on the nature of artistic creation, which illustrates his developing sensibilities. Original artists proceed, he remarks, like oculists performing a treatment: when their work is done, we are asked to look on the world, which ‘appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear’. And this because the world ‘is not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist comes along’ (G, 376, trans. mod.; 1000). When the grandmother dies, the event is described in terms of an artistic process that connects several of the novel’s key thematic threads: ‘On that funerary bed, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl’ (G, 397, trans. mod.; 1014).
After this tender closure on the permanence of death, Chapter Two opens with that most transient but emotive of things: a change in the weather, which ‘is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew’ (G, 398; 1014). The Narrator, in bed, pieces together the world beyond his windows through his apprehensions of sound and colour, and reviews the memories roused by his observations. Saint-Loup, succumbing to family pressure, has split with Rachel and is posted to Morocco; he writes that in Tangier he has met Mme de Stermaria, a young woman in whom the Narrator had expressed an interest at Balbec, now a divorcee and willing to dine with him (G, 400–1; 1015–16). This prospect sets his mind whirring in anticipation of amorous possibilities, whereupon Françoise unexpectedly announces Albertine, who enters, resembling ‘an enchantress offering … a mirror that reflected time’ (G, 404; 1018). She seems to embody all that enraptured the Narrator about their spell by the sea, yet at the same time she has matured in appearance, become yet more confident in her language, her movements. Just as the Combray landscape sprang forth from the Narrator’s teacup, now he feels that preserved in Albertine are all his impressions of a cherished series of seascapes; ‘in kissing her cheeks’, he suggests ‘I should be kissing the whole of Balbec beach’ (G, 418; 1027).
When the kiss does occur, however, any romance there might have been dies in the detail of the description. But this is no surprise: beforehand he remarks that ‘the knowledge that to kiss Albertine’s cheeks was … possible … was a pleasure perhaps greater even than that of kissing them’ (G, 417; 1026), and, sure enough, the stimulus offered by the consideration of his various desires and their potential outcomes is greater than that offered by the rather paltry physical act itself. All the while, however, part of the Narrator’s mind remains preoccupied by the possible delights in store with Mme de Stermaria, but these are never tasted: she cries off at the last minute, and the pleasurable, tantalising ‘what ifs’ of anticipation become the despairing ‘if onlys’ of regret.
Between Albertine’s kiss and Mme de Stermaria’s no-show there glimmers a rare moment of hope