Aimé on receiving my instructions sent one of his underlings to explain that he was busy and could not come out at the moment, and (should the gentleman ask for the Marquis de Saint-Loup) that they did not know any such person. But Saint-Loup’s mistress, who had failed to catch our whispered conversation and thought that it was still about the young man at whom Robert had been finding fault with her for making eyes, broke out in a torrent of rage.
“Oh, indeed! So it’s the young man over there, now, is it? Thank you for telling me; it’s a real pleasure to have this sort of thing with one’s meals! Don’t listen to him, please; he’s rather cross to-day, and, you know,” she went on, turning to me, “he just says it because he thinks it smart, that it’s the gentlemanly thing to appear jealous always.”
And she began with feet and fingers to shew signs of nervous irritation.
“But, Zézette, it is I who find it unpleasant. You are making us all ridiculous before that gentleman, who will begin to imagine you’re making overtures to him, and an impossible bounder he looks, too.”
“Oh, no, I think he’s charming; for one thing, he’s got the most adorable eyes, and a way of looking at women — you can feel he must love them.”
“You can at least keep quiet until I’ve left the room, if you have lost your senses,” cried Robert. “Waiter, my things.”
I did not know whether I was expected to follow him.
“No, I want to be alone,” he told me in the same tone in which he had just been addressing his mistress, and as if he were quite furious with me. His anger was like a single musical phrase to which in an opera several lines are sung which are entirely different from one another, if one studies the words, in meaning and character, but which the music assimilates by a common sentiment. When Robert had gone, his mistress called Aimé and asked him various questions. She then wanted to know what I thought of him.
“An amusing expression, hasn’t he? Do you know what I should like; it would be to know what he really thinks about things, to have him wait on me often, to take him travelling. But that would be all. If we were expected to love all the people who attract us, life would be pretty ghastly, wouldn’t it? It’s silly of Robert to get ideas like that. All that sort of thing, it’s only just what comes into my head, that’s all; Robert has nothing to worry about.” She was still gazing at Aimé. “Do look, what dark eyes he has. I should love to know what there is behind them.”
Presently came a message that Robert was waiting for her in a private room, to which he had gone to finish his luncheon, by another door, without having to pass through the restaurant again. I thus found myself alone, until I too was summoned by Robert. I found his mistress stretched out on a sofa laughing under the kisses and caresses that he was showering on her. They were drinking champagne. “Hallo, you!” she cried to him, having recently picked up this formula which seemed to her the last word in playfulness and wit. I had fed badly, I was extremely uncomfortable, and albeit Legrandin’s words had had no effect on me I was sorry to think that I was beginning in a back room of a restaurant and should be finishing in the wings of a theatre this first afternoon of spring. Looking first at the time to see that she was not making herself late, she offered me a glass of champagne, handed me one of her Turkish cigarettes and unpinned a rose for me from her bodice. Whereupon I said to myself: “I have nothing much to regret, after all; these hours spent in this young woman’s company are not wasted, since I have had from her, charming gifts which could not be bought too dear, a rose, a scented cigarette and a glass of champagne.” I told myself this because I felt that it endowed with an aesthetic character and thereby justified, saved these hours of boredom. I ought perhaps to have reflected that the very need which I felt of a reason that would console me for my boredom was sufficient to prove that I was experiencing no aesthetic sensation. As for Robert and his mistress, they appeared to have no recollection of the quarrel which had been raging between them a few minutes earlier, or of my having been a witness to it. They made no allusion to it, sought no excuse for it any more than for the contrast with it which their present conduct formed. By dint of drinking champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that used to come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same. Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which the sun or travelling gives us to that which we get from exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication — and each must have a different figure, like the numbers of fathoms on a chart — lays bare in us exactly at the depth to which it reaches a different kind of man. The room which Saint-Loup had taken was small, but the mirror which was its sole ornament was of such a kind that it seemed to reflect thirty others in an endless vista; and the electric bulb placed at the top of the frame must at night, when the light was on, followed by the procession of thirty flashes similar to its own, give to the drinker, even when alone, the idea that the surrounding space was multiplying itself simultaneously with his sensations heightened by intoxication, and that, shut up by himself in this little cell, he was reigning nevertheless over something far more extensive in its indefinite luminous curve than a passage in the Jardin de Paris. Being then myself at this moment the said drinker, suddenly, looking for him in the glass, I caught sight of him, hideous, a stranger, who was staring at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger than my disgust; from gaiety or bravado I smiled at him, and simultaneously ne smiled back at me. And I felt myself so much under the ephemeral and Potent sway of the minute in which our sensations are so strong, that I am not sure whether my sole regret was not at the thought that this hideous self of whom I had just caught sight in the glass was perhaps there for the last time on earth, and that I should never meet the stranger again in the whole course of my life.
Robert was annoyed only because I was not being more brilliant before his mistress.
“What about that fellow you met this morning, who combines snobbery with astronomy; tell her about him, I’ve forgotten the story,” and he watched her furtively.
“But, my dear boy, there’s nothing more than what you’ve just said.”
“What a bore you are. Then tell her about Françoise in the Champs-Elysées. She’ll enjoy that.”
“Oh, do! Bobby is always talking about Françoise.” And taking Saint-Loup by the chin, she repeated, for want of anything more original, drawing the said chin nearer to the light: “Hallo, you!”
Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending that what I saw before me were the characters in some old humorous novel, by watching, struck by the fresh face of the young man who had just come into the stalls, the heroine listen distractedly to the declaration of love which the juvenile lead in the piece was addressing to her, while he, through the fiery torrent of his impassioned speech, still kept a burning gaze fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his eye; and thus, thanks especially to the information that Saint-Loup gave me as to the private lives of the players, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of no merit, interested me also; for I could feel in it that there were budding and opening for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease paint and pasteboard, on his own human soul the words of a part.
These ephemeral vivid personalities which the characters are in a play that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time are already disintegrated into a comedian who is no longer in the position which he occupied in the play, a text which no longer shews one the comedian’s face, a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned in short to elements that contain nothing of them, since their dissolution, effected so soon after the end of the show, make us — like the dissolution of a dear friend — begin to doubt the reality of our ego and meditate on the mystery of death.
One number in the programme I found extremely trying. A young woman whom Rachel and some of her friends disliked was, with a set of old songs, to make a first appearance on which she had based all her hopes for the future of herself and her family. This young woman was blessed with unduly, almost grotesquely prominent hips and a pretty but too slight voice, weakened still farther by her excitement and in marked contrast to her muscular development. Rachel had posted among the audience a certain number of friends, male and female, whose business it was by their sarcastic comments to put the novice, who was known to be timid, out of countenance, to make her lose her head so that her turn should prove a complete failure, after which the manager would refuse to give her a contract. At the first notes uttered by the wretched woman, several of the male audience, recruited for that purpose, began pointing to her backward profile with jocular comments, several of the women, also in the plot, laughed out loud, each flute-like note from the stage increased the deliberate hilarity, which grew to a public scandal. The unhappy woman, sweating with anguish through her grease-paint, tried for a little longer to hold out then stopped and looked round the audience with an appealing gaze of misery and anger which succeeded only in increasing the uproar. The instinct to imitate others, the desire to shew their own wit and daring added to the party several pretty actresses who had not been forewarned but now threw at the others glances charged with malicious connivance, and sat convulsed with laughter which rang out in such violent peals that at the end of the second song, although there were still five more on the programme, the stage manager rang down the curtain. I tried to make myself pay no more heed to the incident than I had paid to my grandmother’s sufferings when my great-aunt, to tease her, used to give my grandfather brandy, the idea of deliberate wickedness being too painful for me to bear. And yet, just as our pity for misfortune is perhaps not very exact since in our imagination we recreate a whole world of grief by which the unfortunate who has to struggle against it has no time to think of being moved to self-pity, so wickedness has probably not in the mind of the wicked man that pure and voluptuous cruelty which it so pains us to imagine. Hatred inspires him, anger gives him an ardour, an activity in which there is no great joy; he must be a sadist to extract any pleasure from it; ordinarily, the wicked man supposes himself to be punishing the wickedness of his victim; Rachel imagined certainly that the actress whom she was making suffer was far from being of interest to any one, and that anyhow, in having her hissed off the stage, she was herself avenging an outrage on good taste and teaching an unworthy comrade a lesson. Nevertheless, I preferred not to speak of this incident since I had had neither the courage nor the power to prevent it, and it would have been too painful for me, by saying any good of their victim, to approximate to a gratification of the lust for cruelty the sentiments which animated the tormentors who had strangled this career in its infancy.
But the opening scene of this afternoon’s performance interested me in quite another way. It made me realise in part the nature of the illusion of which Saint-Loup was a victim with regard to Rachel, and which had set a gulf between the images that he and I respectively had in mind of his mistress, when we beheld her that morning among the blossoming pear trees. Rachel was playing a part which involved barely more than her walking on in the little play. But seen thus, she was another woman. She had one of those faces to which distance — and not necessarily that between stalls and stage, the world being in this respect only a larger theatre — gives form and outline and which, seen close at hand, dissolve back into dust. Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milky way of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more. At a proper distance, all this ceased to be visible and, from cheeks that withdrew, were reabsorbed into her face, rose like a crescent moon a nose so fine, so pure that one would have liked to be object of Rachel’s attention, to see her again as often as one chose, to her close to one, provided that one had not already seen her differently and at close range. This was not my case but it had been Saint-Loup’s when he first saw her on the stage. Then he had asked himself how he might approach her, how come to know her, there had opened in him a whole fairy realm — that in which she lived — from which emanated an exquisite radiance but into which he might not penetrate. He had left the theatre telling himself that it would be madness to write to her, that she would not answer his letter, quite prepared to give his fortune and his name for the creature who was living in him in a world so vastly superior to those too familiar realities, a world made beautiful by desire and dreams of happiness, when at the back of the theatre, a little old building which had itself the air of being a piece of scenery, from the stage door he saw debouch the gay and daintily hatted band of actresses who had just been playing. Young men who knew them were waiting for them outside. The number of pawns on the human chessboard being less than the number of combinations that they are capable of forming, in a theatre from which are absent all the people we know and might have expected to find, there turns up one whom we never imagined that we should see again and who appears so opportunely that the coincidence seems to us providential, although no doubt some other coincidence would have occurred in its stead had we been not in that place but in some other, where other desires would have been aroused and we should have met some other old acquaintance to help us to satisfy them. The golden portals of the world of dreams had closed again upon Rachel before Saint-Loup saw her emerge from the theatre, so that the freckles and spots were of little importance. They vexed him nevertheless, especially as, being no longer alone, he had not now the same opportunity to dream as in the theatre. But she, for all that he could no longer see her, continued to dictate his actions, like those stars which govern us by their attraction even during the hours in which they are not visible to our eyes. And so his desire for the actress with the fine features which had no place now even in Robert’s memory had the result that, dashing towards the old friend whom chance had brought to the spot, he insisted upon an introduction to the person with no features and with freckles, since she was the same person, telling himself that later on he would take care to find out which of the two this same person really was. She was in a hurry, she did not on this occasion say a single word to Saint-Loup, and it was only some days later that he finally contrived, by inducing her to leave her companions, to escort her home. He loved her already. The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by her of whom one has dreamed, bring it about that not much time is required before one entrusts all one’s chances of happiness to her who a few days since was but a fortuitous apparition, unknown, unmeaning, upon the boards of the theatre.
When, the curtain having fallen, we moved on to the stage, alarmed at finding myself there for the first time, I felt the need to begin a spirited conversation with Saint-Loup. In this way my attitude, as I did not know what one ought to adopt in a setting that was strange to me, would be entirely dominated by our talk, and people would think that I was so absorbed in it, so unobservant of my surroundings, that it was quite natural that I should not shew the facial expressions proper to a place in which, to judge by what I appeared to be saying, I was barely conscious of standing; and seizing, to make a beginning, upon the first topic that came to my mind:
“You know,” I said, “I did come to say good-bye to you the day I left Doncières; I’ve not had an opportunity to mention it. I waved to you in the street.”
“Don’t speak about it,” he replied, “I was so sorry. I passed you just outside the barracks, but I couldn’t stop because I was late already. I assure you, I felt quite wretched about it.”
So he had recognised me! I saw again in my mind the wholly impersonal salute which he had given me, raising his hand to his cap, without a glance to indicate that he knew me, without a gesture to shew that he was sorry he could not stop. Evidently this fiction, which he had adopted at that moment, of not knowing me must have simplified matters for him greatly. But I was amazed to find that he had been able to compose himself to it so swiftly and without any instinctive movement to betray his original impression. I had already observed at Balbec that, side by side with that childlike sincerity of his face, the skin of which by its transparence rendered visible the sudden tide of certain emotions, his body had been admirably trained to perform a certain number of well-bred dissimulations, and that, like a consummate actor, he could, in his regimental and in his social life, play alternately quite different parts. In one of his parts he loved me tenderly, he acted towards me almost as if he had been my brother; my brother he had been, he was now again, but for a moment that day he had been another person who did not know me and who, holding the reins, his glass screwed to his eye, without a look or a smile had lifted his disengaged hand to the peak of his cap to give me correctly the military salute.
The stage scenery, still in its place, among which I was passing, seen thus at close range and without the advantage of any of those effects of lighting and distance on which the eminent artist whose brush had painted it had calculated, was a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I came near her, was subjected to a no less destructive force. The curves of her charming nose had stood out in perspective, between stalls and stage, like the relief of the scenery. It was no longer herself, I recognised her only thanks to her eyes, in which her identity had taken refuge. The form, the radiance of this young star, so brilliant a moment ago, had vanished. On the other hand — as though we came close to the moon and it ceased to present the appearance of a disk of rosy gold — on this face, so smooth a surface until now, I could distinguish only protuberances, discolourations, cavities. Despite the incoherence into which were resolved at close range not only the feminine features but the painted canvas, I was glad to be there to wander among the scenery, all that setting which at one time my love of nature had prompted me to dismiss as tedious and artificial until the description of it by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister had given it a sort of beauty in my eyes; and I had already observed with delight, in the thick of a crowd of journalists or men of friends of the actresses, who were greeting one another, talking, smoking, as though in a public thoroughfare, a young man in a black velvet cap and hortensia-coloured skirt, his cheeks chalked in red like a page from a Watteau album, who with his smiling lips, his eyes raised to the ceiling, as he sprang lightly into the air, seemed so entirely of another species than the rational folk in everyday clothes, in the midst of whom he was pursuing like a madman the course of his ecstatic dream, so alien to the preoccupations of their life, so anterior to the habits of their civilisation, so enfranchised from all the laws of nature, that it was as restful and as fresh a spectacle as watching a butterfly straying along a crowded street to follow with one’s eyes, between the strips of canvas, the natural arabesques traced by his winged capricious painted oscillations. But at that moment Saint-Loup conceived the idea that his mistress was paying undue attention to this dancer, who was engaged now in practising for the last time the figure of fun with which he was going to take the stage, and his face darkened.
“You might look the other way,” he warned her gloomily. “You know that none of those dancer-fellows is worth the rope they can at least fall off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of people who go about afterwards boasting that you’ve taken notice of them. Besides, you know very well you’ve been told to go to your dressing-room and change. You’ll be missing your call again.”
A group of men — journalists — noticing the look of fury on Saint-Loup’s face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what we were saying. And as the stage-hands had just set up some scenery on our other side we were forced into close contact with them.
“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-Loup’s mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how well made he is, do watch those little hands of his dancing away by themselves like his whole body!”
The dancer turned his head towards her, and his human person appeared beneath the sylph that he was endeavouring to be, the clear grey jelly of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelids stiff with paint, and a smile extended the corners of his mouth into cheeks plastered with rouge; then, to amuse the girl, like a singer who hums to oblige us the air of the song in which we have told her that we admired her singing, he began to repeat the movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself with the fineness of a parodist and the good humour of a child.
“Oh, that’s too lovely, the way he copies himself,” she cried, clapping her hands.
“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-Loup broke in, in a tone of utter misery, “do not make a scene here, I can’t stand it; I swear, if you say another word I won’t go with you to your room, I shall walk straight out; come, don’t be so naughty…. You oughtn’t to stand about in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill,” he went on, to me, with the solicitude he had shewn for me in our Balbec days.
“Oh! What a good thing it would be if you did go.”
“I warn you, if I do I shan’t come back.”
“That’s more than I should venture to hope.”
“Listen; you know, I promised you the necklace if you behaved nicely to me, but the moment you treat me like this….”
“Ah! Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me your promise; I ought to have known you’d never keep it. You want the whole world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not a money-grubber like you. You can keep your blasted necklace; I know some one else who’ll give it to me.”
“No one else can possibly give it to you; I’ve told Boucheron he’s to keep it for me, and I have his promise not to let anyone else have it.”
“There you are, trying to blackmail me, you’ve arranged everything, I see. That’s what they mean by Marsantes, Mater Semita, it smells of the race,” retorted Rachel quoting an etymology which was founded on a wild misinterpretation, for Semita means ‘path’ and not ‘Semite,’ but one which the Nationalists applied to Saint-Loup on account of the Dreyfusard views for which, so far as that went, he was indebted to the actress. She was less entitled than anyone to apply the word ‘Jew’ to Mme. de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed in finding no trace of Judaism apart from her connexion with the Lévy-Mirepoix family. “But this isn’t the last of it, I can tell you. An agreement like that isn’t binding. You have acted treacherously towards me. Boucheron shall be told of it and he’ll be paid twice as much for his necklace. You’ll hear from me before long; don’t you worry.”
Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circumstances are always so entangled that the man who is in the right a hundred times may have been once in the wrong. And I could not help recalling that unpleasant and yet quite innocent expression which he had used at Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”
“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made no formal promise: once you start doing everything you possibly can to make me leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I shouldn’t give it to you; I fail to understand what treachery you can see in that, or what my ulterior motive is supposed to be. You can’t seriously maintain that I brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m only a poor devil without a cent to my name. It’s foolish of you take it in that way, my dear. What possible interest can I have in hurting you? You know very well that my one interest in life is yourself.”
“Oh, yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the sweeping gesture of a barber wielding his razor. And turning to watch the dancer:
“Isn’t he too wonderful with his hands. A woman like me couldn’t do the things he’s doing now.” She went closer to him and, pointing to Robert’s furious face: “Look, he’s hurt,” she murmured, in the momentary elation of a sadic impulse to cruelty totally out of keeping with the genuine feelings of affection for Saint-Loup.
“Listen, for the last time, I swear to you it doesn’t matter what you do — in a week you’ll be giving anything to get me back — I shan’t come; it’s a clean cut, do you hear, it’s irrevocable; you will be sorry one day, when it’s too late.”
Perhaps he was sincere in saying this, and the torture of leaving his mistress may have seemed to him less cruel than that of remaining with her in certain circumstances.
“But, my dear boy,” he went on, to me, “you oughtn’t to stand about here, I tell you, it will make you cough.”
I pointed to the scenery which barred my way. He touched his hat and said to one of the journalists:
“Would you mind, sir, throwing away your cigar; the smoke is bad for my friend.”
His mistress had not waited for him to accompany her; on her way to her dressing-room she turned round and:
“Do they do those tricks with women too, those nice little hands?” she flung to the dancer from the back of the stage, in an artificially melodious tone of girlish innocence. “You look just like one yourself, I’m sure I could have a wonderful time with you and a girl I know.”
“There’s no rule against smoking that I know of; if people aren’t well, they have only to stay at home,” said the journalist.
The dancer smiled mysteriously back at the actress.