In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (3 page)

They say a prompt departure takes you from us,
Prince . . .

I was familiar with them from the simple reproduction in black and white which was given of them upon the printed page; but my heart beat furiously at the thought—as of the realisation of a long-planned voyage—that I should see them at length bathed and brought to life in the atmosphere and sunshine of the golden voice. A Carpaccio in Venice, Berma in
Phèdre
, masterpieces of pictorial or dramatic art which the glamour, the dignity attaching to them made so vividly alive for me, that is to say so indivisible, that if I had been to see Carpaccios in one of the galleries of the Louvre, or Berma in some piece of which I had never heard, I should not have experienced the same delicious amazement at finding myself at last, with wide-open eyes, before the unique and inconceivable object of so many thousand dreams. Then, expecting as I did from Berma’s playing the revelation of certain aspects of nobility and tragic grief, it seemed to me that whatever greatness, whatever truth there might be in her playing must be enhanced if the actress superimposed it upon a work of real value, instead of what would, after all, be but embroidering a pattern of truth and beauty upon a commonplace and vulgar web.

Finally, if I went to see Berma in a new play, it would not be easy for me to assess her art and her diction, since I should be unable to discriminate between a text which was not already familiar to me and what she added to it by her vocal inflexions and gestures, an addition which would seem to me to be an integral part of it; whereas the old plays, the classics which I knew by heart, presented themselves to me as vast and empty walls, reserved and made ready for my inspection, on which I should be able to appreciate without restriction the devices by which Berma would cover them, as with frescoes, with the perpetually fresh discoveries of her inspiration.
Unfortunately, for some years now, since she had abandoned the serious stage to throw in her lot with a commercial theatre where she was the star, she had ceased to appear in classic parts, and in vain did I scan the hoardings, they never advertised any but the newest pieces, written specially for her by authors in fashion at the moment. When, one morning, searching through the column of theatre advertisements to find the afternoon performances for the week of the New Year holidays, I saw there for the first time—at the foot of the bill, after some probably insignificant curtain-raiser, whose title was opaque to me because it contained all the particulars of a plot I did not know—two acts of
Phèdre
with Mme Berma, and, on the following afternoons,
Le Demi-Monde
and
Les Caprices de Marianne
, names which, like that of
Phèdre
, were for me transparent, filled with light only, so familiar were those works to me, illuminated to their very depths by the revealing smile of art. They seemed to me to invest with a fresh nobility Mme Berma herself when I read in the newspapers, after the programme of these performances, that it was she who had decided to show herself once more to the public in some of her early creations. She was conscious, then, that certain roles have an interest which survives the novelty of their first production or the success of a revival; she regarded them, when interpreted by herself, as museum pieces which it might be instructive to set once more before the eyes of the generation which had admired her in them long ago, or of the one which had never yet seen her in them. In thus advertising, in the middle of a column of plays intended only to while away an evening, this
Phèdre
, whose title was no bigger than any of the rest, nor set in different type, she added to it, as it were, the unspoken comment of a hostess who, on introducing you to her other guests before going in to dinner, casually mentions amid the string of names which are the names of guests and nothing more, and without any change of tone:—“M. Anatole France.”

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 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 which a subsequent pain could offset and annul. But what I demanded from this performance—as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from pleasure: 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 trivial incident—even though it were to cause me bodily suffering—of my otiose existence. At most, the pleasure which I might experience during the performance appeared to me as the perhaps necessary form of the perception of these truths; and I hoped only that the predicted ailments would not begin until the play was finished, so that this pleasuse 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 recited to myself all day long the speech beginning,

They say a prompt departure takes you from us . . .

trying out every inflexion and intonation that could be put into it, the better to appreciate the unexpected way which Berma would have found of uttering the lines. Concealed, like the Holy of Holies, beneath the veil that screened her from my gaze and behind which I invested her from one moment to the next with a fresh aspect, according to whichever of the words of Bergotte (in the booklet that Gilberte had found for me) came to my mind—“plastic nobility,” “Christian hair shirt” or “Jansenist pallor,” “Princess of Troezen and of Cleves,” “Mycenean drama,” “Delphic symbol,” “solar myth”—the goddess of beauty whom Berma’s acting was to reveal to me was enthroned, night and day, upon an altar perpetually lit, in the sanctuary of my mind—on whose behalf my stern and fickle parents were to decide whether or not it was to enshrine, and for all time, the perfections of the Deity unveiled in that same spot where her invisible form now reigned. And with my eyes fastened on that inconceivable image, I strove from morning to night to overcome the barriers which my family were putting in my way. But when these had at last fallen, when my mother—although 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 want to make you unhappy—if you think you will enjoy it so very much, you must go,” when this visit to the theatre, hitherto forbidden and unattainable, depended now on myself alone, then for the first time, being no longer troubled by the wish that it might cease to be impossible, I wondered whether it was desirable, whether there were not other reasons than my parents’ prohibition which should have made me abandon it. In the first place, whereas I had hated them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me also with a pain through which the purpose of life now appeared to me as the pursuit not of truth but of loving-kindness, and life itself seemed good or evil only in so far as my parents were happy or sad. “I would rather not go, if it distresses 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 which I should otherwise derive from
Phèdre
and in consideration of which she and my father had reversed their earlier decision. But then this sort of obligation to find 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, in order to decide which course I should take, the idea, invisible there behind its veil, of Berma’s perfection. I placed on one side of the scales “Making Mamma unhappy,” “risking not being able to go to the Champs-Elysées,” and on 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 opted for the theatre it would have been only in order to bring them to an end and he 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 have allowed myself to be led, not now to the Wise Goddess, but to the stern, implacable Divinity, faceless and unnamed, who had been surreptitiously substituted for her behind her veil. But suddenly everything was altered. My desire to go and see Berma received a fresh stimulus which enabled me to await the coming of the matinée with impatience and with joy. Having gone to take up my daily station, as excruciating, of late, as that of a stylite, in front of the column on which the playbills were displayed, I had seen there, still moist and wrinkled, 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 goals between which my indecision wavered a form at once more concrete and—inasmuch as the bill bore the date not of the day on which I was reading it but that on which the performance would take place, and the very hour at which the curtain would rise—almost imminent, already 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 seat, 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.”

Alas! that first matinée was to prove a bitter disappointment. My father offered to drop my grandmother and me at the theatre, on his way to the Commission. Before leaving the house he said to my mother: “Try and have a good dinner for us tonight; you remember I’m bringing de Norpois back with me.” My mother had not forgotten. And ever since the day before, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of cooking at which she was so gifted, stimulated, moreover, by the prospect of a new guest, and knowing that she would have to compose, by methods known to her alone, a dish of
boeuf à la gelée
, had been living in the effervescence of creation; since she attached the utmost importance to the intrinsic quality of the materials which were to enter into the fabric of her work, she had gone herself to the Halles to procure the best cuts of rump-steak, shin of beef, calves’-feet, just as Michelangelo spent eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Julius II. Françoise expended on these comings and goings so much ardour that Mamma, at the sight of her flaming cheeks, was alarmed lest our old servant should fall ill from overwork, like the sculptor of the Tombs of the Medici in the quarries of Pietrasanta. And overnight Françoise had sent to be cooked in the baker’s oven protected with breadcrumbs, like a block of pink marble packed in sawdust, what she called a “Nev’-York ham.” Believing the language to be less rich in words than it is, and her own ears untrustworthy, the first time she had heard someone mention York ham she had thought, no doubt—feeling it to be hardly conceivable that the dictionary could be so prodigal as to include at once a “York” and a “New York”—that she had misheard, and that the ham was really called by the name already familiar to her. And so, ever since, the word York was preceded in her ears, or before her eyes when she read it in an advertisement, by the affix “New” which she pronounced “Nev’.” And it was with the utmost conviction that she would say to her kitchen-maid: “Go and get me some ham from Olida’s. Madame told me especially that it must be Nev’-York.”

On that particular day, if Françoise was consumed by the burning certainty of creative genius, my lot was the cruel anxiety of the seeker after truth. 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; and before the ticket attendants, whose selection, advancement and ultimate fate depended upon the great artist—for she alone held power in this administration at the head of which ephemeral and purely nominal managers followed one after the other in an obscure succession—who took our tickets without even glancing at us, so preoccupied were they in seeing that all Mme Berma’s instructions had been duly transmitted to the new members of the staff, that it was 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 she appeared, that a bowl of hot water must be concealed somewhere close to her to make the dust settle. And, indeed, 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 people’s salutes, 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, how the programme sellers were turned out; theatre and audience being to her no more than a second, outer 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—contrary to the notion 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, as it were, 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 this lowered curtain such obscure noises as one hears through the shell of an egg before the chicken emerges, sounds which presently grew louder and suddenly, from that world which, impenetrable to our eyes, yet scrutinised us with its own, addressed themselves indubitably to us in the imperious form of three consecutive thumps as thrilling 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 once seen some of them do 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 pricking up my ears in readiness before the piece began, two men appeared on the stage obviously furious with one another since they were talking so loud that in this auditorium where there were at least a thousand people one could hear every word, whereas in quite a small café one is obliged to ask the waiter what two individuals 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, submerged as it was in a unanimous silence upon which presently a little wave of laughter broke here and there, that these insolent fellows were the actors, and that the short piece known as “the curtain-raiser” had now begun. It was followed by an interval so long that the audience, having returned to their seats, grew impatient and began to stamp their feet. I was terrified at this; for just as in the report of a criminal trial, when I read that some noble-minded person was coming, in defiance of his own interests, to testify on behalf of an innocent man, I was always afraid that they would not be nice enough to him, would not show enough gratitude, would not recompense him lavishly, and that he, in disgust, would then range himself on the side of injustice, so now, assimilating genius with virtue, I was afraid lest Berma, vexed by the bad behaviour of so ill-bred an audience—in which, on the contrary, I should have liked her to recognise with gratification a few celebrities to whose judgment she would be bound to attach importance—should express her displeasure and disdain by acting badly. And I looked round imploringly at these stamping brutes, who were about to shatter, in their insensate rage, the rare and fragile impression which I had come to seek. The last moments of my pleasure were during the opening scenes of the
Phèdre
. The heroine herself does not appear in these first scenes of the second act; and yet, as soon as the curtain rose, and another curtain, of red velvet this time, was drawn aside (a curtain which was used to halve the depth of the stage in all the plays in which the star appeared), an actress entered from the back who had the face and voice which, I had been told, were those of Berma. The cast must therefore have been changed; all the trouble that I had taken in studying the part of the wife of Theseus was wasted. But a second actress now responded to the first. I must have been mistaken in supposing that the first was Berma, for the second resembled her even more closely and, more than the other, had her diction. Both of them, moreover, embellished their roles with noble gestures—which I could clearly distinguish, and could appreciate in their relation to the text, while they raised and let fall the folds of their beautiful robes—and also with skilful changes of tone, now passionate, now ironical, which made me understand the significance of lines that I had read to myself at home without paying sufficient attention to what they really meant. But all of a sudden, in the cleft of the red curtain that veiled her sanctuary, as in a frame, a woman appeared, and instantly, from the fear that seized me, far more anxious than Berma’s own fear could be, lest someone should upset her by opening a window, or drown one of her lines by rustling a programme, or annoy her by applauding the others and by not applauding her enough, from the way in which, from that moment, more absolutely than Berma herself, I considered theatre, audience, play and my own body only as an acoustic medium of no importance save in the degree to which it was favourable to the inflexions of that voice, I realised that the two actresses whom I had been admiring for some minutes bore not the least resemblance to her whom I had come to hear. But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased; in vain did I strain towards Berma eyes, ears, mind, so as not to let one morsel escape me of the reasons which she would give me for admiring her, I did not succeed in gleaning a single one. I could not even, as I could with her companions, distinguish in her diction and in her playing intelligent modulations or 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—in order to be able to explore them fully, to try to discover what it was in them that was beautiful—to arrest, to immobilise for a time before my senses every inflexion of the artist’s voice, every expression of her features; at least I did attempt, by dint of mental agility, by 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 contrive 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 her face, bathed, by some artifice of lighting, in a greenish glow, before a back-cloth painted to represent the sea, the whole house broke out in applause; but already the actress had moved, and the tableau that I should have liked to study existed no longer. I told my grandmother that I could not see very well, and she handed me her glasses. But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand. I thought that it was no longer Berma but her image that I was seeing in the magnifying lenses. I put the glasses down. But perhaps the image that my eye received of her, diminished by distance, was no more exact; which of the two Bermas was the real one? As for her declaration to Hippolyte, I had greatly counted on that, since, to judge by the ingenious significance which her companions were disclosing to me every moment in less beautiful passages, she would certainly render it with modulations more surprising than any which, when reading the play at home, I had contrived to imagine; but she did not attain even to the heights which Oenone or Aricie would naturally have reached, she planed down into a uniform chant the whole of a speech in which there were mingled together contrasts so striking that the least intelligent of actresses, even the pupils of an academy, could not have missed their effect; besides which, she delivered it 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.