The Guermantes Way: Chapter One (19th post)

 Out of concern for his grandmother's health, Marcel has left Doncières and returned to the family home in Paris. The scene that immediately greets him there is a still life that is both sad and alarming, and the analysis of that fleeting instant is worth quoting in full. 

Painting by M Knoop

“Entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,—there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling upon his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground frozen over. So is it when some casual sport of chance prevents our intelligent and pious affection from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the loved friend who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our affection has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a dear and cheating likeness. And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his own reflection, and has kept his memory of the face that he never sees refreshed from the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of an arid waste of cheek, of the sloping red structure of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt, I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of time, that in which dwell the strangers of whom we say 'He’s begun to age a good deal,' for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know” (pp.186-188 V Scott Moncrieff, pp.141-143 II Kilmartin).

Later, when Marcel returns home from Mme de Villeparisis' salon (which event we will consider in the next post), he goes upstairs and finds his grandmother not so well. She is in pain and has an elevated temperature. She is attended by Dr Cottard (whom we met as a member of Mme Verdurin's little clan – see my 10th post here). He puts her on a milk diet, which does not work. The family call in the great physician Dr du Boulbon, who is more of a specialist in nervous diseases and talks a lot of nonsense, telling his patient that she will be cured as soon as she realises there is nothing wrong with her. He instructs her to spend more time outdoors and, ignoring her temperature, diagnoses neurosis (pp.404-417 V SM, pp.308-315 II TK).

In accordance with the doctor's orders, Marcel takes her to the Champs-Elysées, where he is to meet some friends. It is clear that she is not well, and she has to visit a public convenience in the park. When she emerges, her behaviour is unusual: “I expected her to begin: 'I am afraid I’ve kept you waiting; I hope you’ll still be in time for your friends,' but she did not utter a single word, so much so that, feeling a little hurt, I was disinclined to speak first; until looking up at her I noticed that as she walked beside me she kept her face turned the other way. I was afraid that her heart might be troubling her again. I studied her more carefully and was struck by the disjointedness of her gait. Her hat was crooked, her cloak stained; she had the confused and worried look, the flushed, slightly dazed face of a person who has just been knocked down by a carriage or pulled out of a ditch.” Eventually she speaks, “but I guessed rather than heard what she said, so inaudible was the voice in which she muttered her sentences”. They decide it is for the best if he takes her home. “She smiled at me sorrowfully and gripped my hand. She had realised that there was no need to hide from me what I had at once guessed, that she had had a slight stroke” (pp.427-428 V SM, pp.322-323 II TK). 

Why is this such a moving passage? Perhaps because when Marcel finally reveals his grandmother has had a stroke, it is confirmation of the reader's suspicions and fears that have been building over the past few pages. It is also a scene in serious contrast to the preceding 200 pages of society tattle.

The rest of the story of the decline in health of Marcel's grandmother is depressingly rich in examples of people putting their own interests before those of an elderly ailing lady. 

The first of these self-serving individuals is a doctor whom Marcel runs across just outside the park. Although he is a friend of Marcel's father and grandfather, he refuses to see Marcel's grandmother without an appointment. And he explains that it would be impossible for him to come to see her at home because he has to get ready to go out to dinner with a government minister. He relents, however, and agrees to see her in his surgery for 15 minutes if she comes immediately (pp.1-2 VI SM, pp.323-324 II TK). After examining her, the doctor explains to Marcel that there not the slightest hope and shows them out (pp.7-8 VI SM, p.328 II TK). 

As Marcel's grandmother declines, it is Françoise's turn to act badly. “By dint of repeatedly asking her whether she would not like her hair done, Françoise managed to persuade herself that the request had come from my grandmother. She armed herself with brushes, combs, eau de Cologne, a wrapper. 'It can’t hurt Madame Amédée,' she said to herself, 'if I just comb her; nobody’s ever too ill for a good combing.' In other words, one was never too weak for another person to be able, for her own satisfaction, to comb one. But when I came into the room I saw between the cruel hands of Françoise, as blissfully happy as though she were in the act of restoring my grandmother to health, beneath a thin rain of aged tresses which had not the strength to resist the action of the comb, a head which, incapable of maintaining the position into which it had been forced, was rolling to and fro with a ceaseless swirling motion in which sheer debility alternated with spasms of pain. I felt that the moment at which Françoise would have finished her task was approaching, and I dared not hasten it by suggesting to her: 'That is enough,' for fear of her disobeying me. But I did forcibly intervene when, in order that my grandmother might see whether her hair had been done to her liking, Françoise, with innocent savagery, brought her a glass. I was glad for the moment that I had managed to snatch it from her in time, before my grandmother, whom we had carefully kept without a mirror, could catch even a stray glimpse of a face unlike anything she could have imagined.” Françoise starts addressing the patient as though she had entered her second childhood and keeps disappearing for appointments with her dressmaker to try on the mourning dress she has ordered in anticipation of her death (pp.31-33 VI SM, pp.345-347 II TK). 

Finally, the Duke of Guermantes arrives while Marcel's grandmother lies panting and groaning on her death bed. He insists on seeing Marcel's father so that he can shake hands with him “as a mark of sympathy” even though the timing is greatly inconvenient. “He felt so intensely the importance of the courtesy he was showing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing-room. As a general rule, he made a point of going resolutely through the formalities with which he had decided to honour anyone.” He sees Marcel's mother coming out of her mother's bedroom seeking a cylinder of oxygen and demands to be introduced to her. “Convinced in his own mind that nothing was more essential, could be more gratifying to her or more indispensable to the maintenance of his reputation as a perfect gentleman, he seized me violently by the arm and, although I defended myself as against an assault with repeated protestations of 'Sir, Sir, Sir,' dragged me across to Mamma, saying: 'Will you do me the great honour of presenting me to your mother?' letting go a little as he came to the last word. And it was so plain to him that the honour was hers that he could not help smiling at her even while he was composing a grave face. There was nothing for it but to mention his name, the sound of which at once started him bowing and scraping, and he was just going to begin the complete ritual of salutation. He apparently proposed to enter into conversation, but my mother, overwhelmed by her grief, told me to come at once and did not reply to the speeches of M de Guermantes who, expecting to be received as a visitor and finding himself instead left alone in the hall, would have been obliged to retire had he not at that moment caught sight of Saint-Loup who had arrived in Paris that morning and had come to us in haste to inquire for news. 'I say, this is a piece of luck!' cried the Duke joyfully, catching his nephew by the sleeve, which he nearly tore off, regardless of the presence of my mother who was again crossing the hall” (pp.35-37 VI SM, pp.348-350 II TK).

It is notable that even in such lamentable circumstances, Proust finds something amusing – if not in the doctor's behaviour, certainly in aspects of Françoise's and the Duke's. There is nothing awkward about this juxtaposition of sock and buskin, because it is not infrequently that we find in life the unwelcome encroachment of the absurd or ridiculous on a tragic scene.

The end is soon in coming. His mother makes Marcel dry his eyes before going up to kiss his grandmother. “'But I thought she couldn’t see anything now?' said my father. 'One can never be sure,' replied the doctor. When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered, a long shudder ran through her whole body, reflex perhaps, perhaps because certain affections have their hyperaesthesia which recognises through the veil of unconsciousness what they barely need senses to enable them to love. Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, as though struggling to resist an attempt on her life. Françoise could not endure this sight and burst out sobbing. Remembering what the doctor had just said I tried to make her leave the room. At that moment my grandmother opened her eyes. I thrust myself hurriedly in front of Françoise to hide her tears, while my parents were speaking to the sufferer. The sound of the oxygen had ceased; the doctor moved away from the bedside. My grandmother was dead” (p.47 VI SM, p.357 II TK).

Chapter One ends there and it is a long time before Marcel reacts to his loss – his pain, like his pleasure, is deferred (see my 17th post here). When he does eventually react, we shall see, it is the most emotional scene in the entire novel.