The afternoon party
Finally, the time arrives for Marcel to enter and mingle, and he is shocked by the transformation old age has wrought upon his erstwhile acquaintances. Mme Verdurin is now the Princess de Guermantes, having married the Prince after both their spouses died and the Prince was ruined by the War. The narrator sees the opportunity to gather some raw material for his forthcoming book and captures the scene is a series of graphic oral sculptures:[1]
307 My old friend At the party I discovered one of my early friends whom I had formerly seen nearly every day during ten years. Someone reintroduced us to each other. As I went near to him, he said with a voice I well remembered: “What a joy for me after so many years!” but what a surprise for me! His voice seemed to be proceeding from a perfected phonograph for though it was that of my friend, it issued from a great greyish man whom I did not know and the voice of my old comrade seemed to have been housed in this fat old fellow by means of a mechanical trick. 307 Bloch For me, who had known him on the threshold of life and had never ceased to see him thus, he was the friend of my boyhood, an adolescent whose youth I measured by the youth which unconsciously, not believing that I had lived since that time, I attributed to myself. I heard someone say that he quite looked his age, and I was astonished to observe on his face some of those signs which are indeed characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he was in fact old and that adolescents who survive for a sufficient number of years are the material out of which life makes old men. 317 The Prince of Agrigente Others again had preserved their faces intact and seemed merely to walk with difficulty; at first one supposed that they had something wrong with their legs, only later did one realise that age had fastened its soles of lead to their feet... His tall, thin figure, with its lack-lustre eye and hair that seemed to remain a carroty red for all eternity, had turned, through a metamorphosis more appropriate to an insect, into an entirely different old man, whose red hair, too long exposed to view, had been taken out of service like a table-cloth too long in use and replaced by white. His chest had assumed an unheard of and almost warrior-like protuberance which must have necessitated a regular bursting of the frail chrysalis I had known; a self-conscious gravity tinged his eyes which beamed with a newly acquired benevolence towards all and sundry. And as, in spite of the change in him, there was still a certain resemblance between the vigorous prince of now and the portrait my memory preserved, I was filled with admiration of the recreative power of Time which, while respecting the unity of the being and the laws of life, finds means of thus altering appearance and of introducing bold contrasts in two successive aspects of the same individual. 318 "No, not that one!" Many people could be immediately identified but like rather bad portraits of themselves in which an unconscientous and malevolent artist had hardened the features of one, taken away the freshness of complexion or slightness of figure of another and darkened the look of a third. Comparing these images with those retained by my memory, I liked less those displayed to me now, in the same way as we dislike and refuse the photograph of a friend because we don't consider it a pleasant likeness. I should have liked to say to each one of them who showed me his portrait: "No, not that one, it doesn't do you justice, it isn't you." I should not have ventured to add: "Instead of your beautiful straight nose you have now got the hooked nose of your father"; it was, in fact, a new familial nose. In short, the artist Time had produced all these models in such a way as to be recognisable without being likenesses, not because he had flattered but because he had aged them. That particular artist works very slowly. Thus the replica of the face of Odette, a barely outlined sketch of which I perceived in that of Gilberte on the day I first saw Bergotte, had been worked by time into the most perfect resemblance (as will be seen shortly) like painters who keep a work a long time and add to it year by year. |
320 So different was she (Mme de Souvré) from the woman I had known that one was tempted to think of her as a creature condemned, like a character in a pantomine, to appear first as a young girl, then as a stout matron, with no doubt a final appearance to come as a (321) quavering, bent old crone. .. rediscovering something of the face I had known by playing a game of eliminating the squares and the hexagons which age had added to her cheeks.
321 Some men walked with a limp, and one was aware that this was the result not of a motor accident but of a first stroke: they had already, as the saying is, one foot in the grave. There were women too whose graves were waiting open to receive them: half paralysed, they could not quite disentangle their dress from the tomb-stone in which it had got stuck, so that they were unable to stand up straight but remained bent towards the ground, with their head lowered, in a curve which seemed an apt symbol of their own position on the trajectory from life to death, with the final vertical plunge not far away. Nothing could now could check the momentum of this parabola upon which they were launched; they trembled all over if they attempted to straighten themselves, and their fingers let fall whatever they tried to grasp. 329 Time’s special express trains Time has, it seems special express trains which bring their passengers swiftly to a premature old age. 332 But with few exceptions the women strained every nerve against old age and held out the mirror of their features towards beauty, as it receded, as to a setting sun whose last rays they longed passionately to preserve. 404 Berma, the opera singer Her hardened arteries were already almost petrified, so that what appeared to be long sculptural ribbons ran across her cheeks, with the rigidity of a mineral substance. The dying eyes were still relatively alive, by contrast at least with the terrible ossified mask, and glowed feebly like a snake asleep in the midst of a pile of stones. 429 The old Duc de Guermantes He was no more than a ruin now, a magnificent ruin -or perhaps not even a ruin but a beautiful and romantic natural object, a rock in a tempest. Lashed on all sides by the surrounding waves - waves of suffering, of wrath at being made to suffer, of the rising tide of death - his face, like a crumbling block of marble, preserved the style and the poise which I had always admired; it might have been one of those fine antique heads, eaten (430) away and hopelessly damaged, which you are proud nevertheless to have as an ornament for your study. . . (T)o an expression of keen and humorous enjoyment had succeeded one, involuntary and unconscious, built up by illness, by the struggle against death, by passive resistance, by the difficulty of remaining alive. The arteries had lost all suppleness and gave to the once expansive countenance a hard and sculptural quality. .. Aspects of his appearance which suggested to the observer that the vital spirit within, compelled to clutch desperately at every passing minute, was buffeted by a great tragic gale, while the white wisps of his still magnificent but now sparse hair lashed with their foam the half submerged promontory of his face. And just as there are strange and unique reflections which only the approach of a supreme all-foundering storm can impart to rocks that hitherto have been of a different colour, so I realised that the leaden grey of the stiff, worn cheeks, the almost white, fleecy grey of the drifting wisps of hair, the feeble light that still shone from the eyes that scarcely saw, were not unreal hues and glimmers - they were only too real but they were fantastic, they were borrowed from the palette and the illumination, inimitable in their terrifying and prophetic sombreness, of old age and the imminence of death. 450 Time, colourless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see and touch it, had materialised itself in this girl (Gilberte’s daughter), slowly moulding her into a masterpiece, while on me too parallelly, it had done its work, but without, alas! a master's touch. |
[1] Page references throughout are to the Andreas Mayor translation in paperback, Chatto & Windus, 1970.