The Indifferent Man, Marcel Proust

The Indifferent Man

We heal as we console ourselves; the heart cannot always weep or always love.
—LA BRUYÈRE: CHARACTERS, CHAPTER IV, THE HEART

Madeleine de Gouvres had just arrived in Madame Lawrence’s box. General de Buivres asked:
“Who are your escorts tonight? Avranches, Lepré? . . .”

“Avranches, yes,” replied Madame Lawrence. “As for Lepré, I didn’t dare.”

Nodding toward Madeleine, she added:
“She’s very hard to please, and since it would have practically meant a new acquaintanceship for her . . .”

Madeleine protested. She had met Monsieur Lepré several times and found him charming; once she had even had him over for lunch.

“In any case,” Madame Lawrence concluded, “you have nothing to regret, he is very nice, but there is nothing remarkable about him, and certainly not for the most spoiled woman in Paris. I can quite understand that the close friendships you have make you hard to please.”

Lepré was very nice but very insignificant: that was the general view. Madeleine, feeling that this was not entirely her opinion, was amazed; but then, since Lepré’s absence did not cause her any keen disappointment, she did not like him enough to be perturbed.

In the auditorium, heads had turned in her direction; friends were already coming to greet her and compliment her.

This was nothing new, and yet, with the obscure clear-sightedness of a jockey during a race or of an actor during a performance, she felt that tonight she was triumphing more fully and more easily than usual.

Wearing no jewels, her yellow tulle bodice strewn with cattleyas, she had also pinned a few cattleyas to her black hair, and these blossoms suspended garlands of pale light from that dark turret.

As fresh as her flowers and equally pensive, she evoked, with the Polynesian charm of her coiffure, Mahenu in Pierre Loti’s play The Island of Dreams, for which Reynaldo Hahn had composed the music.

Soon her regret that Lepré had not seen her like this blended with the happy indifference with which she mirrored her charms of this evening in the dazzled eyes that reflected them reliably and faithfully.

“How she loves flowers,” cried Madame Lawrence, gazing at her friend’s bodice.

She did love them, in the ordinary sense that she knew how beautiful they were and how beautiful they made a woman.

She loved their beauty, their gaiety, and their sadness, too, but externally, as one of their ways of expressing their beauty. When they were no longer fresh, she would discard them like a faded gown.

All at once, during the first intermission, several moments after General de Buivres and the Duke and Duchess d’Alériouvres had said good night, leaving her alone with Madame Lawrence, Madeleine spotted Lepré in the orchestra. She saw that he was having the attendant open the box.

“Madame Lawrence,” said Madeleine, “would you permit me to invite Monsieur Lepré to stay here since he is alone in the orchestra?”

“All the more gladly since I’m going to be obliged to leave in an instant, my dear; you know you gave me permission. Robert is a bit under the weather. Would you like me to ask Monsieur Lepré?”

“No, I’d rather do it myself.”
Throughout intermission, Madeleine let Lepré chat with Madame Lawrence. Leaning on the balustrade and gazing into the auditorium, she pretended to ignore them, certain that she would soon enjoy his presence all the more when she was alone with him.

Madame Lawrence went off to put on her coat.
“I would like to invite you to stay with me during the next act,” said Madeleine with an indifferent amiability.
“That’s very kind of you, Madame, but I can’t; I am obliged to leave.”

“Why, I’ll be all alone,” said Madeleine in an urgent tone; then suddenly, wanting almost unconsciously to apply the maxims of coquetry in the famous line from Carmen, “If I don’t love you, you’ll love me,” she went on:
“Oh, you’re quite right, and if you have an appointment, don’t keep them waiting. Good night, Monsieur.”

With a friendly smile she tried to compensate for what struck her as the implicit harshness of her permission. However, that harshness was impelled by her violent desire to keep him here, by the bitterness of her disappointment. Aimed at anyone else, her advice to leave would have been pleasant.

Madame Lawrence came back.
“Well, he’s leaving; I’ll stay with you so you won’t be alone. Did you have a tender farewell?”
“Farewell?”

“I believe that at the end of this week he’s starting his long tour of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor.”

A child who has been breathing since birth without ever noticing it does not know how essential the unheeded air that gently swells his chest is to his life. Does he happen to be suffocating in a convulsion, a bout of fever?

Desperately straining his entire being, he struggles almost for his life, for his lost tranquillity, which he will regain only with the air from which he did not realize his tranquillity was inseparable.

Similarly, the instant Madeleine learned of Lepré’s departure, of which she had been unaware, she understood only what had entered into his leaving as she felt everything that was being torn away from her.

And with a painful and gentle despondency, she gazed at Madame Lawrence without resenting her any more than a poor, suffocating patient resents his asthma while, through eyes filled with tears, he smiles at the people who pity him but cannot help him. All at once Madeleine rose:
“Come, my dear, I don’t want you to get home late on my account.”

While slipping into her coat, she spotted Lepré, and in the anguish of letting him leave without her seeing him again, she hurried down the stairs.

“I’m devastated—especially since Monsieur Lepré is going abroad—to think he could assume he might offend me.”
“Why, he’s never said that,” replied Madame Lawrence.

“He must have: since you assume it, he must assume it as well.”
“Quite the contrary.”
“I tell you it’s true,” Madeleine rejoined harshly. And as they caught up with Lepré, she said:
“Monsieur Lepré, I expect you for dinner on Thursday, at eight P.M.”
“I’m not free on Thursday, Madame.”

“Then how about Friday?”
“I’m not free on Friday either.”
“Saturday?”
“Saturday would be fine.”
“But darling, you’re forgetting that you’re to dine with Princess d’Avranches on Saturday.”

“Too bad, I’ll cancel.”
“Oh! Madame, I wouldn’t want that,” said Lepré.
“I want it,” cried Madeleine, beside herself. “I’m not going to Fanny’s no matter what, I never had any intention of going.”

Once home again, Madeleine, slowly undressing, reviewed the events of the evening. Upon reaching the moment when Lepré had refused to stay with her for the last act, she turned crimson with humiliation. The most elementary coquetry as well as the most stringent dignity commanded her to show him an extreme coldness after that.

Instead, that threefold invitation on the stairway! Indignant, she raised her head proudly and appeared so beautiful to herself in the depth of the mirror that she no longer doubted that he would love her.

Unsettled and disconsolate only because of his imminent departure, she pictured his affection, which he—she did not know why—wanted to conceal from her.

He was going to confess it to her, perhaps in a letter, quite soon, and he would probably put off his departure, he would sail with her. . . . What? . . . She must not think about that. But she could see his handsome, loving face approaching her face, asking her to forgive him. “You naughty boy!” she said.

But then, perhaps he did not love her as yet; he would leave without having time to fall in love with her. . . . Disconsolate, she lowered her head, and her eyes fell upon her bodice, upon the even more languishing eyes of the wilted blossoms, which seemed ready to weep under their withered eyelids.

The thought of the brevity of her unconscious dream about him, of the brevity of their happiness if ever it materialized, was associated for her with the sadness of those flowers, which, before dying, languished on the heart that they had felt beating with her first love, her first humiliation, and her first sorrow.

The next day she wanted no other flowers in her bedroom, which was normally filled and radiant with the glory of fresh roses.

When Madame Lawrence came by, she halted before the vases where the cattleyas were finally dying and, for eyes without love, were stripped of beauty.

“What, darling, you who love flowers so much?”

Madeleine was going to say, “It seems to me that I have only begun loving them today”; she stopped, annoyed at having to explain herself and sensing that there are realities that people cannot be made to grasp if they do not already have them inside themselves.

She contented herself with smiling amiably at the reproach. The feeling that no one, perhaps not even Lepré himself, was aware of her new life gave her a rare and disconsolate pleasure of pride.

The servant brought the mail; finding no letter from Lepré, she was overwhelmed with disappointment.

Upon measuring the gap between the absurdity of her disappointment, when there had not been the slightest chance of hope, and the very real and very cruel intensity of that disappointment, she understood that she had stopped living solely a life of events and facts. The veil of lies had started unrolling before her eyes for a duration that was impossible to predict.

She would now see things only through that veil, and, more than all other things, those she would have wanted to know and experience the most concretely and in the most similar way as Lepré, those that had to do with him.

Still, she had one remaining hope—that he had lied