A BETTER SOLUTION: To spare the messenger, the cook, the footman, the peas.
PATIENT NO 5: Charles Swann, the man invited to lunch with the President, a friend of the Prince of Wales and an habitué of the most elegant salons. He is handsome, wealthy, witty, a little naïve, and very much in love.
PROBLEM: Swann receives an anonymous letter saying that his lover, Odette, has in the past been the mistress of numerous men, and has often frequented brothels. A distraught Swann wonders who could possibly have sent him a letter with such hurtful revelations, and moreover notes that it contains details that only a personal acquaintance of his would know.
RESPONSE TO PROBLEM: Searching for the culprit, Swann considers each of his friends in turn, Monsieur de Charlus, Monsieur des Laumes, Monsieur d’Orsan, but cannot believe any of them capable of sending this letter. Then, having been unable to bring himself to suspect anyone, Swann begins to think more critically, and decides that everyone he knows could in fact have written the letter. What is he to think? How should he evaluate his friends? The cruel letter is an invitation to Swann to pursue a deeper understanding of people.
This anonymous letter proved that he knew a human being capable of the most infamous conduct, but he could see no more reason why that infamy should lurk in the unfathomed depths of the character of the man with the warm heart rather than the cold, the artist rather than the bourgeois, the noble rather than the flunky. What criterion ought one to adopt to judge human beings? After all, there was not a single person he knew who might not, in certain circumstances, prove capable of shameful action. Must he then cease to see them all? His mind grew clouded; he drew his hands two or three times across his brow, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief.… And he continued to shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected, with the purely formal reservation that each one of them had possibly thought to drive him to despair
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A BETTER SOLUTION: Swann has been made to suffer by the letter, but the suffering has led to no greater understanding. He may have shed a layer of sentimental innocence, he now knows that the surface behavior of his friends may belie a darker interior, but he has found no way of identifying its signs or indeed its origins. His mind has grown clouded, he has wiped his glasses, and he has missed out on what, for Proust, is the finest thing about betrayal and jealousy—its ability to generate the intellectual motivation necessary to investigate the hidden sides of others.
Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.
It is one of the powers of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the emotions of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything
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Swann may know as a general truth that life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each person he knows, he trusts that those parts of a life with which he is not familiar must be identical with the parts with which he is. He understands what is hidden from him in the light of what is revealed, and therefore understands nothing of Odette, difficult as it is to accept that a woman who seems so respectable when she is with him could be the same person who once frequented brothels. Similarly, he understands nothing of his friends, for it is hard to accept that someone with whom he entertained an amiable conversation at lunch could by dinnertime have addressed a hurtful letter filled with crude revelations about his lover’s past.
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, “when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.”
Compared to these unfortunate sufferers, Proust’s approach to his own grief now seems rather admirable.
Though asthma made it life-threatening for him to spend time in the countryside, though he turned purple at the sight of a lilac in bloom, he resisted following the example of Madame Verdurin: he did not peevishly claim that flowers were boring or trumpet the advantages of spending the year in a shuttered room.
Though he had spectacular gaps in his knowledge, it was not beyond him to fill them. “Who wrote The Brothers Karamazov?” he was asking Lucien Daudet (at the age of twenty-seven). “Has Boswelle’s [sic] Life of Johnson [sic] been translated? And what’s the best of Dickens (I haven’t read anything)?”
Nor is there evidence that he redirected his disappointments onto his household staff. Having acquired a skill at turning grief into ideas, in spite of the state of his romantic life, when the driver he regularly used, Odilon Albaret, married the woman who would later become his maid, Proust was able to respond with a telegram congratulating the couple on their special day, and did so with only the briefest burst of self-pity and the most modest attempt at guilt-induction, here highlighted in roman type:
Congratulations. I am not writing to you at greater length, because I have caught a flu and I am tired, but I send you all my deepest wishes for your happiness and that of your families
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The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most. Proust got very annoyed by the way some people expressed themselves. Lucien Daudet tells us that Proust had a friend who thought it chic to use English expressions when he was speaking French, and would therefore say “Good-bye” or, more casually, “Bye, bye” whenever he left a room. “It made Proust positively unhappy,” reports Daudet. “He would make the kind of pained, irritated grimace which follows when a stick of chalk has been scraped across a blackboard. ‘It really hurts your teeth, that kind of thing!’ he would exclaim plaintively.” Proust displayed similar frustration with people who referred to the Mediterranean as “the Big Blue,” to England as “Albion,” and to the French army as “our boys.” He was pained by people whose sole response to heavy rain was, “Il pleut des cordes,” to cold weather, “Il fait un froid de canard,” and to another’s deafness, “Il est sourd comme un panier.”