Within a Budding Grove

Within a Budding Grove

That men in armour may be born With serpents' teeth the field is sown; Rains mould, winds bend, suns gild the corn Too quickly ripe, too early mown. I scan the quivering beads, behold The features, catch the whispered breath Of friends long garnered in the cold Unopening granaries of death, Whose names in solemn cadence ring Across my slow oblivious page. Their friendship was a finer thing Than fame, or wealth, or honoured age. Andwhile you live and Ishall last Its tale of seasons with us yet Who cherish, in the undying The men we never can forget. A break in the narrative: old friends in new aspectsThe Marquis de NorpoisBergotteHow I cease for the time being to see Gilberte: a general outline of the sorrow caused by a parting and of the irregular process of oblivion. My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home, and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the old Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone that he knew, however slightly, was an impossible vulgarian whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss asto use his own epitheta "pestilent" fellow. Now, this attitude on my fathers part may be felt to require a few words of explanation, inasmuch as some of us, no doubt, remember a Cottard of distinct mediocrity and a Swann by whom modesty and discretion, in all his social relations, were carried to the utmost refinement of delicacy. But in his case, what had happened was that, to the original "young Swann" and also to the Swann of the Jockey Club, our old friend had added a fresh personality (which was not to be his last) that of Odette's husband. Adapting to the humble ambitions of that lady the instinct, the desire, the industry which he had always had, he had laboriously constructed for himself, a long way beneath the old, a new position more appropriate to the companion who was to share it with him. In this he shewed himself another man. Since (while he continued to go, by himself, to the houses of his own friends, on whom he did not care to inflict Odette unless they had expressly asked that she should be introduced to them) it was a new life that he had begun to lead, in common with his wife, among a new set of people, it was quite intelligible that, in order to estimate the importance of these new friends and thereby the pleasure, the self-esteem that were to be derived from entertaining them, he should have made use, as a standard of comparison, not of the brilliant society in which he himself had moved before his marriage but of the earlier environment of Odette. And yet, even when one knew that it was with unfashionable officials and their faded wives, the wallflowers of ministerial ball-rooms, that he was now anxious to associate, it was still astonishing to hear him, who in the old days, and even still, would so gracefully refrain from mentioning an invitation to Twickenham or to Marlborough House, proclaim with quite unnecessary emphasis that the wife of some Assistant Under-Secretary for Something had returned Mme. Swann's call. It will perhaps be objected here that what this really implied was that the simplicity of the fashionable Swann had been nothing more than a supreme refinement of vanity, and that, like certain other Israelites, my parents' old friend had contrived to illustrate in turn all the stages through which his race had passed, from the crudest and coarsest form of snobbishness up to the highest pitch of good manners. But the chief reasonand one which is applicable to humanity as a wholewas that our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practise them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play. Swann, in his intense consciousness of his new social surroundings, and in the pride with which he referred to them, was like those great artistsmodest or generous by naturewho, if at the end of their career they take to cooking or to gardening, display a childlike gratification at the compliments that are paid to their dishes or their borders, and will not listen to any of the criticism which they heard unmoved when it was applied to their real achievements; or who, after giving away a canvas, cannot conceal their annoyance if they lose a couple of francs at dominoes. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 63532
Author: Proust, Marcel
Release Date: Oct 23, 2020
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Scott-Moncrieff, C. K. (Charles Kenneth), 1889-1930