9ème madeleine: le septuor de Vinteuil: septet by Vinteuil

Le concert commença, je ne connaissais pas ce qu'on jouait, je me trouvais en pays inconnu. Où le situer ? Dans l'oeuvre de quel auteur étais-je ? J'aurais bien voulu le savoir et, n'ayant près de moi personne à qui le demander, j'aurais bien voulu être un personnage de ces Mille et une Nuits que je relisais sans cesse et où, dans les moments d'incertitude, surgit soudain un génie ou une adolescente d'une ravissante beauté, invisible pour les autres, mais non pour le héros embarrassé, à qui elle révèle exactement ce qu'il désire savoir. Or, à ce moment, je fus précisément favorisé d'une telle apparition magique. Comme, dans un pays qu'on ne croit pas connaître et qu'en effet on a abordé par un côté nouveau, lorsque, après avoir tourné un chemin, on se trouve tout d'un coup déboucher dans un autre dont les moindres coins vous sont familiers, mais seulement où on n'avait pas l'habitude d'arriver par là, on se dit : « Mais c'est le petit chemin qui mène à la petite porte du jardin de mes amis X... ; je suis à deux minutes de chez eux », et leur fille est en effet là qui est venue vous dire bonjour au passage ; ainsi, tout d'un coup, je me reconnus, au milieu de cette musique nouvelle pour moi, en pleine sonate de Vinteuil ; ...........

Enfin le motif joyeux resta triomphant ; ce n'était plus un appel presque inquiet lancé derrière un ciel vide, c'était une joie ineffable qui semblait venir du Paradis, une joie aussi différente de celle de la sonate que, d'un ange doux et grave de Bellini, jouant du théorbe, pourrait être, vêtu d'une robe écarlate, quelque archange de Mantegna sonnant dans un buccin. Je savais que cette nuance nouvelle de la joie, cet appel vers une joie supra-terrestre, je ne l'oublierais jamais. Mais serait-elle jamais réalisable pour moi ? Cette question me paraissait d'autant plus importante que cette phrase était ce qui aurait pu le mieux caractériser – comme tranchant avec tout le reste de ma vie, avec le monde visible – ces impressions qu'à des intervalles éloignés je retrouvais dans ma vie comme les points de repère, les amorces, pour la construction d'une vie véritable : l'impression éprouvée devant les clochers de Martinville, devant une rangée d'arbres près de Balbec. En tous cas, pour en revenir à l'accent particulier de cette phrase, comme il était singulier que le pressentiment le plus différent de ce qu'assigne la vie terre à terre, l'approximation la plus hardie des allégresses de l'au-delà se fussent justement matérialisés dans le triste petit bourgeois bienséant que nous rencontrions au mois de Marie à Combray ! Mais, surtout, comment se faisait-il que cette révélation, la plus étrange que j'eusse encore reçue, d'un type inconnu de joie, j'eusse pu la recevoir de lui, puisque, disait-on, quand il était mort il n'avait laissé que sa sonate, que le reste demeurait inexistant en d'indéchiffrables notations ?

La Prisonnière

The concert began, I did not know what they were playing, I found myself in a strange land. Where was I to locate it? Into what composer’s country had I come? I should have been glad to know, and, seeing nobody near me whom I might question, I should have liked to be a character in those Arabian Nights which I never tired of reading and in which, in moments of uncertainty, there arose a genie or a maiden of ravishing beauty, invisible to everyone else but not to the embarrassed hero to whom she reveals exactly what he wishes to learn. Well, at this very moment I was favoured with precisely such a magical apparition. As, in a stretch of country which we suppose to be strange to us and which as a matter of fact we have approached from a new angle, when after turning out of one road we find ourself emerging suddenly upon another every inch of which is familiar only we have not been in the habit of entering it from that end, we say to ourself immediately: “Why, this is the lane that leads to the garden gate of my friends the X—— I shall be there in a minute,” and there, indeed, is their daughter at the gate, come out to greet us as we pass; so, all of a sudden, I found myself, in the midst of this music that was novel to me, right in the heart of Vinteuil’s sonata; and, more marvellous than any maiden, the little phrase, enveloped, harnessed in silver, glittering with brilliant effects of sound, as light and soft as silken scarves, came towards me, recognisable in this new guise. My joy at having found it again was enhanced by the accent, so friendlily familiar, which it adopted in addressing me, so persuasive, so simple, albeit without dimming the shimmering beauty with which it was resplendent. Its intention, however, was, this time, merely to shew me the way, which was not the way of the sonata, for this was an unpublished work of Vinteuil in which he had merely amused himself, by an allusion which was explained at this point by a sentence in the programme which one ought to have been reading simultaneously, in making the little phrase reappear for a moment. No sooner was it thus recalled than it vanished, and I found myself once more in an unknown world, but I knew now, and everything that followed only confirmed my knowledge, that this world was one of those which I had never even been capable of imagining that Vinteuil could have created, ......

In the end the joyous motive was left triumphant; it was no longer an almost anxious appeal addressed to an empty sky, it was an ineffable joy which seemed to come from paradise, a joy as different from that of the sonata as from a grave and gentle angel by Bellini, playing the theorbo, would be some archangel by Mantegna sounding a trump. I might be sure that this new tone of joy, this appeal to a super-terrestrial joy, was a thing that I would never forget. But should I be able, ever, to realise it? This question seemed to me all the more important, inasmuch as this phrase was what might have seemed most definitely to characterise — from its sharp contrast with all the rest of my life, with the visible world — those impressions which at remote intervals I recaptured in my life as starting-points, foundation-stones for the construction of a true life: the impression that I had felt at the sight of the steeples of Martinville, or of a line of trees near Balbec. In any case, to return to the particular accent of this phrase, how strange it was that the presentiment most different from what life assigns to us on earth, the boldest approximation to the bliss of the world beyond should have been materialised precisely in the melancholy, respectable little old man whom we used to meet in the Month of Mary at Combray; but, stranger still, how did it come about that this revelation, the strangest that I had yet received, of an unknown type of joy, should have come to me from him, since, it was understood, when he died he left nothing behind him but his sonata, all the rest being non-existent in indecipherable scribblings.

The Captive