The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust by Joachim Neugroschel Page A

blend.
    B., despairing of outdoing him, and thinking that the surest way to be ahead of fashion
     is to be hopelessly out of fashion, is sniffing some cheap violets and glaring scornfully
     at C.
    As for you yourself, have you not gone on one of those artificial returns to nature?
     Had those details not been too minuscule to remain distinct, I would have depicted,
     in some obscure nook of your music library at that time, your now abandoned Wagner
     operas, your now discarded symphonies by Franck and d’Indy and, on your piano, several
     open scores by Haydn, Handel, or Palestrina.
    I did not shy away from depicting you on the pink sofa. T. is seated next to you.
     He is describing his new bedroom, which he artfully smeared with tar in order to suggest
     the sensations of an ocean voyage, and he is disclosing all the quintessences of his
     wardrobe and his furnishings.
    Your disdainful smile reveals that you set no store by this feeble imagination, for
     which a bare chamber does not suffice for conjuring up all the visions of the universe
     and which conceives of art and beauty in such pitifully material terms.
    Your most delightful friends are present. Would they ever forgive me if you showed
     them the fan? I cannot say. The most unusually beautiful woman, standing out like
     a living Whistler before our enchanted eyes, would recognize and admire herself only
     in a portrait by Bouguereau. Women incarnate beauty without understanding it.
    Your friends may say: “We simply love a beauty that is not yours. Why should it be
     beauty any less than yours?”
    Let them at least allow me to say: “So few women comprehend their own aesthetics.
     There are Botticelli madonnas who, but for fashion, would find this painter clumsy
     and untalented.”
    Please accept this fan with indulgence. If one of the ghosts that have alighted here
     after flitting through my memory made you weep long ago, while it was still partaking
     of life, then recognize that ghost without bitterness and remember that it is a mere
     shadow and that it will never make you suffer again. I could quite innocently capture
     these ghosts on the frail paper to which your hand will lend wings, for those ghosts
     are too unreal and too flimsy to cause any harm. . . .
    No more so, perhaps, than in the days when you invited them to stave off death for
     a few hours and live the vain life of phantoms, in the factitious joy of your salon,
     under the chandeliers, whose branches were covered with large, pallid flowers.
Olivian
    Why do people see you, Olivian, heading to the Commedia every evening? Don’t your
     friends have more acumen than Pantalone, Scaramuccio, or Pasquarello? And would it
     not be more agreeable to have supper with your friends? But you could do even better.
     If the theater is the refuge of the conversationalist whose friend is mute and whose
     mistress is insipid, then conversation, even the most exquisite, is the pleasure of
     men without imagination. It is a waste of time, Olivian, trying to tell you that which
     need not be shown an intelligent man by candlelight, for he sees it while chatting.
     The voice of the soul and of the imagination is the only voice that makes the soul
     and the imagination resonate thoroughly and happily; and had you spent a bit of the
     time you have killed to please others and had you made that bit come alive, had you
     nourished it by reading and reflecting at your hearth during winter and in your park
     during summer, you would be nurturing the rich memory of deeper and fuller hours.
     Have the courage to take up the rake and the pickax. Someday you will delight in smelling
     a sweet fragrance drifting up from your memory as if from a gardener’s brimming wheelbarrow.
    Why do you travel so much? The stagecoaches transport you very slowly to where your
     dreams would carry you so swiftly. To reach the seashore all you need do is close
     your eyes. Let people who have only physical eyes move their entire