Extract from Within a Budding Grove

The doctor who was attending me – the same who had forbidden me to travel – advised my parents not to let me go to the theatre; I should only be ill again afterwards, perhaps for weeks, and should in the long run derive more pain than pleasure from the experience. The fear of this might have availed to stop me, if what I had anticipated from such a spectacle had been only a pleasure for which a subsequent pain could so compensate as to cancel it. But what I demanded from this performance – just as from the visit to Balbec, the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed – was something quite different from pleasure; a series of verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me again by any of the trivial incidents – even though it were the cause of bodily suffering – of my otiose existence. At best, the pleasure, which I was to feel during the performance, appeared to me as the inevitable form of the perception of these truths; and I hoped only that the illness that had been forecast for me would not begin until the play was finished so that my pleasure should not be in any way compromised or spoiled. I implored my parents, who, after the doctor’s visit, were no longer inclined to let me go to Phèdre. I repeated, all day long, to myself, the speech beginning,

[private]”On dit qu’un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous,—-”

seeking out every intonation that could be put into it, so as to be able to better measure my surprise at the way in which Berma would have found to utter the lines. Concealed, like the Holy of Holies, beneath the veil that screened her from my gaze, behind which I invested her, every moment, with a fresh aspect, according to which of the words of Bergotte – in the pamphlet that Gilberte had found for me – was passing through my mind; “plastic nobility,” “Christian austerity” or “Jansenist pallor,” “Princess of Troezen and of Cleves” or “Mycenean drama,” “Delphic symbol,” “Solar myth”; that divine Beauty, whom Berma’s acting was to reveal to me, night and day, upon an altar perpetually illumined, sat enthroned in the sanctuary of my mind, my mind for which not itself but my stern, my fickle parents were to decide whether or not it was to enshrine, and for all time, the perfections of the Deity unveiled, in the same spot where her invisible form now was. And with my eyes fixed upon that inconceivable image, I strove from morning to night to overcome the barriers that my family was putting in my way. But when those had at last fallen, when my mother – albeit this matinée was actually to coincide with the meeting of the Commission from which my father had promised to bring M. de Norpois home to dinner – had said to me, “Very well, we don’t wish you to be unhappy; if you think that you will enjoy it so very much, you must go; that’s all;” when this day of theatre-going, hitherto forbidden and unattainable, depended now only upon myself, for the first time being no longer troubled by the wish that it might cease to be impossible, I asked myself if it were desirable, if there were not other reasons than my parents’ prohibition which should make me abandon my design. In the first place, whereas I had been detesting them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me with a pain through which the purpose of life showed itself as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and life itself seemed good or evil only as my parents were happy or sad. “I would rather not go, if it hurts you,” I told my mother, who, on the contrary, strove hard to expel from my mind any lurking fear that she might regret my going, since that, she said, would spoil the pleasure that I should otherwise derive from Phèdre, and it was the thought of my pleasure that had induced my father and her to reverse their earlier decision. But then this sort of obligation to find a pleasure in the performance seemed to me very burdensome. Besides, if I returned home ill, should I be well again in time to be able to go to the Champs-Elysées as soon as the holidays were over and Gilberte returned? Against all these arguments I set, so as to decide which course I should take, the idea, invisible there behind its veil, of the perfections of Berma. I cast into one pan of the scales “Making Mamma unhappy,” “risking not being able to go on the Champs-Elysées,” and the other, “Jansenist pallor,” “Solar myth,” until the words themselves grew dark and clouded in my mind’s vision, ceased to say anything to me, lost all their force; and gradually my hesitations became so painful that if I had now decided upon the theatre it would have been only that I might bring them to an end, and be delivered from them once and for all. It would have been to fix a term to my sufferings, and no longer in the expectation of an intellectual benediction, yielding to the attractions of perfection that I would let myself be taken, not now to the Wise Goddess, but to the stern, implacable Divinity, featureless and unnamed, who had been secretly substituted for her behind the veil. But suddenly everything was altered. My desire to go and hear Berma received a fresh stimulus which enabled me to await the coming of the matinee with impatience and with joy; having gone to take up, in front of the column on which the playbills were, my daily station as excruciating as that of a stylite saint, I had seen there the complete bill of Phèdre, which had just been pasted up for the first time (and on which, I must confess, the rest of the cast furnished no additional attraction which could help me to decide). But it gave to one of the points between which my indecision wavered a form at once more concrete and – inasmuch as the bill was dated not from the day on which I read it but from that on which the performance would take place, and from the very hour at which the curtain would rise – almost imminent, well on the way to its realisation, so that I jumped for joy before the column at the thought that on that day, and at that hour precisely, I should be sitting there in my place, ready to hear the voice of Berma; and for fear lest my parents might not now be in time to secure two good seats for my grandmother and myself, I raced back to the house, whipped on by the magic words which had now taken the place, in my mind, of “Jansenist pallor” and “Solar myth”; – “Ladies will not be admitted to the stalls in hats. The doors will be closed at two o’clock.”

(…)

No doubt, so long as I had not yet heard Berma speak, I still felt some pleasure. I felt it in the little square that lay in front of the theatre, in which, in two hours’ time, the bare boughs of the chestnut trees would gleam with a metallic lustre as the lighted gas-lamps showed up every detail of their structure; before the attendants in the box-office, the selection of whom, their promotion, all their destiny depended upon the great artist – for she alone held power in the theatre, where ephemeral managers followed one after the other in an obscure succession–who took our tickets without even glancing at us, so preoccupied were they with their anxiety lest any of Mme. Berma’s instructions had not been duly transmitted to the new members of the staff, lest it was not clearly understood that the hired applause must never sound for her, that the windows must all be kept open so long as she was not on the stage, and every door closed tight the moment that she appeared; that a bowl of hot water must be concealed somewhere close to her, to make the dust settle: and, for that matter, at any moment now her carriage, drawn by a pair of horses with flowing manes, would be stopping outside the theatre, she would alight from it muffled in furs, and, crossly acknowledging everyone’s salute, would send one of her attendants to find out whether a stage box had been kept for her friends, what the temperature was ‘in front,’ who were in the other boxes, if the programme sellers were looking smart; theatre and public being to her no more than a second, an outermost cloak which she would put on, and the medium, the more or less ‘good’ conductor through which her talent would have to pass. I was happy, too, in the theatre itself; since I had made the discovery that – in contradiction of the picture so long entertained by my childish imagination – there was but one stage for everybody, I had supposed that I should be prevented from seeing it properly by the presence of the other spectators, as one is when in the thick of a crowd; now I registered the fact that, on the contrary, thanks to an arrangement which is, so to speak, symbolical of all spectatorship, everyone feels himself to be the centre of the theatre; which explained to me why, when Françoise had been sent once to see some melodrama from the top gallery, she had assured us on her return that her seat had been the best in the house, and that instead of finding herself too far from the stage she had been positively frightened by the mysterious and living proximity of the curtain. My pleasure increased further when I began to distinguish behind the said lowered curtain such confused rappings as one hears through the shell of an egg before the chicken emerges, sounds which speedily grew louder and suddenly, from that world which, impenetrable by our eyes, yet scrutinised us with its own, addressed themselves, and to us indubitably, in the imperious form of three consecutive hammer-blows as moving as any signals from the planet Mars. And – once this curtain had risen – when on the stage a writing-table and a fireplace, in no way out of the ordinary, had indicated that the persons who were about to enter would be, not actors come to recite, as I had seen them once and heard them at an evening party, but real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me – my pleasure still endured; it was broken by a momentary uneasiness; just as I was straining my ears in readiness before the piece began, two men entered the theatre from the side of the stage, who must have been very angry with each other, for they were talking so loud that in the auditorium, where there were at least a thousand people, we could hear every word, whereas in quite a small café one is obliged to call the waiter and ask what it is that two men, who appear to be quarrelling, are saying; but at that moment, while I sat astonished to find that the audience was listening to them without protest, drowned as it was in a universal silence upon which broke, presently, a laugh here and there, I understood that these insolent fellows were the actors and that the short piece known as the ‘curtain-raiser’ had now begun.

(…)

But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased; in vain might I strain towards Berma’s eyes, ears, mind, so as not to let one morsel escape me of the reasons which she would furnish for my admiring her, I did not succeed in gathering a single one. I could not even, as I could with her companions, distinguish in her diction and in her playing intelligent intonations, beautiful gestures. I listened to her as though I were reading Phèdre, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma’s talent had added anything at all to them. I could have wished, so as to be able to explore them fully, so as to attempt to discover what it was in them that was beautiful, to arrest, to immobilise for a time before my senses every intonation of the artist’s voice, every expression of her features; at least I did attempt, by dint of my mental agility in having, before a line came, my attention ready and tuned to catch it, not to waste upon preparations any morsel of the precious time that each word, each gesture occupied, and, thanks to the intensity of my observation, to manage to penetrate as far into them as if I had had whole hours to spend upon them, by myself. But how short their duration was! Scarcely had a sound been received by my ear than it was displaced there by another. In one scene, where Berma stands motionless for a moment, her arm raised to the level of a face bathed, by some piece of stagecraft, in a greenish light, before a back-cloth painted to represent the sea, the whole house broke out in applause; but already the actress had moved, and the picture that I should have liked to study existed no longer. I told my grandmother that I could not see very well; she handed me her glasses. Only, when one believes in the reality of a thing, making it visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that it is close at hand. I thought now that it was no longer Berma at whom I was looking, but her image in a magnifying glass. I put the glasses down, but then possibly the image that my eye received of her, diminished by distance, was no more exact; which of the two Bermas was the real? As for her speech to Hippolyte, I had counted enormously upon that, since, to judge by the ingenious significance which her companions were disclosing to me at every moment in less beautiful parts, she would certainly render it with intonations more surprising than any which, when reading the play at home, I had contrived to imagine; but she did not attain to the heights which Œnone or Aricie would naturally have reached, she planed down into a uniform flow of melody the whole of a passage in which there were mingled together contradictions so striking that the least intelligent of tragic actresses, even the pupils of an academy, could not have missed their effect; besides which, she ran through the speech so rapidly that it was only when she had come to the last line that my mind became aware of the deliberate monotony which she had imposed on it throughout.[/private]

Marcel Proust, French novelist, essayist, and critic, wrote À la recherche du temps perdu (in English now usually known as In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work of fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927. The section extracted here comes from the second volume, first published as À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (literally ‘In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower’) in 1918. You can download the entire work here: https://gutenberg.net.au/.

CK Scott-Moncrieff (1889-1930) is the celebrated author of the majority of the first English translation of À la recherche… He was a prolific translator, whose publications also included Stendhal’s great novels and works by Pirandello as well as a number of medieval poems.