The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Read Online Free

fulfill them all, we face the graves, we call upon death, “death,
     which brings help to destinies that have trouble coming true.” But while death may
     exempt us from commitments we have made in regard to life, it cannot exempt us from
     our commitments to ourselves, especially the most important one: namely, the commitment
     to live in order to be worthy and deserving.
    More earnest than the rest of us, you were also the most childlike, not only because
     of your purity of heart, but also because of your unaffected and delightful merriment.
     Charles de Grancy had a gift for which I envy him: by recalling school dayshe could abruptly arouse that laughter, which was never dormant for long and which
     we will never hear again.
    While a few of these pages were written when I was twenty-three, many others (“Violante,”
     nearly all the “Fragments of Commedia dell’Arte,” etc.) go back to my twentieth year.
     They are all nothing but the vain foam of an agitated life that is now calming down.
     May my life someday be so limpid that the Muses will deign to mirror themselves in
     it and that we can see the reflections of their smiles and their dances skimming across
     its surface.
    I give you this book. You are, alas, my only friend whose criticism it need not fear.
     I am at least confident that no freedom of tone would have shocked you anywhere. I
     have never depicted immorality except in people with delicate consciences. Too feeble
     to want good, too noble to fully enjoy evil, they know nothing but suffering; I therefore
     could speak about them only with a pity too sincere not to purify these little texts.
     I hope that the true friend and the illustrious and beloved Master—who gave them,
     respectively, the poetry of his music and the music of his incomparable poetry—and
     also Monsieur Darlu, the great philosopher, whose inspired words, more certain to
     endure than any writings, have stirred my mind and so many other minds—I hope they
     can forgive me for reserving for you this final token of affection and I hope they
     realize that a living man, no matter how great or dear, can be honored only after
     a dead man.
    July 1894

T HE D EATH OF B ALDASSARE S ILVANDE ,
V ISCOUNT OF S YLVANIA

    The poets say that Apollo tended the flocks of Admetus; so too each man is a God in
     disguise who plays the fool.
    —R ALPH W ALDO E MERSON
    “Don’t cry like that, Master Alexis. Monsieur the Viscount of Sylvania may be giving
     you a horse.”
    “A big horse, Beppo, or a pony?”
    “Perhaps a big horse, like Monsieur Cardenio’s. But please don’t cry like that . . . on
     your thirteenth birthday of all days!”
    The hope of getting a horse and the reminder that he was thirteen made Alexis’s eyes
     light up through his tears. Yet he was not consoled since he had to go and visit his
     uncle, Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania. Granted, ever since he had heard
     that his uncle’s disease was incurable, Alexis had been to see him several times.
     But meanwhile everything had changed. Baldassare was now aware of the full scope of
     his disease and he knew he had at most three years to live. Without, incidentally,
     grasping why the anguish had not killed his uncle, the certainty had not driven him
     insane, Alexis felt incapable of enduring the pain of seeing him. Convinced that his
     uncle would be talking to him about his imminent end, Alexis did notthink he had the strength not only to console him, but also to choke back his own
     sobs. He had always adored his uncle, the grandest, handsomest, youngest, liveliest,
     gentlest of his relatives. He loved his gray eyes, his blond moustache, his lap—a
     deep and sweet place of delight and refuge when Alexis had been younger, a place that
     had seemed as unassailable as a citadel, as enjoyable as the wooden horses of a merry-go-round,
     and more inviolable than a temple.
    Alexis, who highly disapproved of his father’s severe and somber wardrobe and